It amazes me how many of our toys involved endless repetitive motion. Take the Whee-Lo, for instance.
The Whee-Lo was a wire loop which held a rotating wheel that was magnetically attached at its axle. It would traverse its metallic circuit endlessly, powered by gentle motions of a child’s wrist. That yellow plastic hoogus could be slid up and down the handle to vary the speed of the wheel.
The toy was introduced way back in 1953 when a company called Maggi Magnetics began selling them. This was a surprise for me in doing my research, because I remember the toys appearing in stores in Miami, Oklahoma in 1968. Soon, every kid in town was sending the spinning wheel around its course as they walked to school in the mornings.
The endless looping of the wheel was a natural accompaniment to sitting in the back seat during long automobile trips. We made annual sojourns of 500 miles to my grandparents’ homes in Iowa and Texas. I remember nearly wearing out that Whee-Lo on one of those trips.
The toy came with cardboard disks that you could stick on the wheel to provide some variety. But it really wasn’t necessary. The toy provided a Zen soothing effect as you watched it repeatedly traverse its steel route.
In fact, I could use some of that today. I may just have to buy one to add to my cubicle toys collection. A Whee-Lo in hand during a long, mindless conference call should provide me the same therapeutic benefit that it did in the back seat of that Plymouth on the road to Iowa in 1968.
You can still buy Whee-Lo’s at this site, as well as several others. Try a Google search.
Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far, far away, we didn’t have computers at home. How did we cope?
If a Butlerian Jihad should occur (if you don’t grasp that term, either read Frank Herbert’s Dune or simply look it up in Google), we would be lost, at least for a while. But in the old days, when you had to be a serious geek to own a computer, we managed just fine.
For example, take balancing check books. In 1994, I installed Quicken on my computer for the first time. I’ve used it ever since, although I will probably be switching to a Linux-based alternative soon. That means I have 13 years of financial records archived. That’s pretty amazing. So is the fact that balancing my bank accounts takes minutes, instead of the laborious process that I engaged in long ago when the bank statement came in the mail.
Solitaire, with real cards!
I discovered in high school a love of writing. Who knows, if I had pursued a career in it, I might have done well.But circumstances were such that such a scenario never played out. However, my love of the art persists.
In 1994, I browsed into AOL’s Writer’s Forum and discovered that there was a demand for writers. There weren’t any gigs that you would get rich on, but you could get paid for writing. So I responded to a few ads.
Within a year, I was producing a self-syndicated column on billiards that was published in three different magazines, one of them in Australia! Cool stuff.
The dot com crash put all three of them out of business, but I am proud of the fact that there have been quite a few magazines that have found my writing worthy of modest pay.
Today, many of us affected by the writing muse are blogging. And we’re not doing it for free, either. If you have a website that gets good traffic, there are many ways to earn steady income from it. When Kim Komando made I Remember JFK a daily pick last March, I received over 17,000 visits in one day. I also made nearly 500 bucks. While traffic has stabilized at a level far below that, I still get a nice daily paycheck from the modest (I hope you agree) advertising I do here.
And finally, reader and friend David Paleg reminds me of something else we did before we had computers: We PLAYED SOLITAIRE WITH REAL CARDS!
We Boomers have proven to one of the most adaptive of generations, haven’t we? For instance, my eldest brother, who can remember baking powder submarines and Howdy Doody, just succeeded in installing Ubuntu on two different laptop computers. And he’s not NEARLY as geeky as I am. Even though the Linux users among us are still in the minority, most Baby Boomers have a personal computer in the house that they use for everything from writing letters to running businesses.
So it makes you wonder, what the heck did we do before we became enslaved to the smart boxes that now live in our homes?
Well, we used to write letters. On paper. Or maybe we didn’t.
My eldest brother left home when I was five years old. His career as an air force pilot, later as a FedEx flyer, put him all over the world. I may have written three letters to him in my entire life. Yet, we email daily, sometimes several times a day.
I’m not sure why emailing is so stinking much easier than writing a letter. But it’s not unusual for me, between my job and being home, to write 20 or 30 emails a day. I guess it’s because a letter requires lots of commitment. First, you have to find paper, an envelope, and a stamp. Then, you have to FILL UP that piece of paper. Imagine sending someone a letter that simply said “ROTFLMAO!!!!!” Nope, a letter is definitely a more scholarly project.
World Book encyclopedias
Another thing we parents and grandparents would be doing if we didn’t have computers would be buying sets of encyclopedias. I have to do lots of research for many of my columns, and Wikipedia is my favorite source of information. But when we were younger, research involved learning how to use the library’s Dewey Decimal System. Or it involved our parents’ shelling out of hundreds of dollars for the latest Encyclopedia Britannica.
And of course, the information would quickly begin to show its age as governmental regimes toppled, natural disasters occurred, and records were broken.
And I’m reasonably sure about one factoid: I’ll bet you don’t watch as much television as you did when you were younger.
When I was 25 years old, I bought my first VCR. WGN was showing Hill Street Blues every night at 10:30, and I would record them all and watch them in a Saturday marathon. EVERY WEEKEND. Where did I find the time?
Today, in the world of DVR’s, television is much more easily recorded than ever. But I don’t watch as much as I did then. Instead, I spend lots of time staring at my computer monitor.
Now, to be honest, I’m not usually playing. I manage a handful of websites, provide editorial content for a few more, and generally stay busy working. But many more of you use the computer for entertainment, whether surfing the net or playing games. And the television isn’t being watched as much by the average Boomer, seeing how that PC needs attention.
One thing virtually every Baby boomer who grew up in the US has in common is a shared recollection of having various Wham-O toys out in the yard.
Wham-O produced the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, and the SuperBall, of course, but they also made a whole slew of other toys that were very popular, though not the sensations that the previously mentioned trio were.
Wham-O was founded in 1948. Its first product was a slingshot. The founders, Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, were into falconry. They would hurl meat up into the air to train the birds. The idea of a forked stick with flexible straps to propel small objects just occurred to them. Thus was born the little window-breaker that would soon be in the hands of kids all over the country.
Of course, Wham-O hit it big with the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee. But they also made numerous other products that would populate the memories of Baby Boomers.
For instance, there was the Wheelie Bar for banana-seat bicycles. I never had a Wheelie Bar myself.
Other Wham-O creations include Super Elastic Bubble Plastic and The Bubble Thing, which made HUGE bubbles.
Perhaps you weren’t aware that Wham-O dabbled in the firearms business. But sometime in the late 50’s or early 60’s, they manufactured a single-shot .22 pistol! I was surprised to hear that, but guns really didn’t carry as much of a negative stigma back in those days as they seem to now. I grew up with a house full of guns for hunting, as did many other Boomers in rural and small-town areas.
Wham-O Air Blaster
But Wham-O made lots of play guns, too. One of the most amazing was the Air Blaster that could blow out a candle twenty feet away. To be shot with an air blaster would be to experience getting smacked with a ball of compressed air. Weird and fun.
Wham-O is also responsible for the Water Wiggle, the Slip and Slide, the Hacky Sack, and Silly String, all of which appeared during our lifetimes. They also sold (I believe) a rubber ring with a ball attached at the end of a stalk. You would slip a foot through the ring and twirl it, jumping over the swinging stalk. Perhaps a reader could enlighten us as to what it was called, as I couldn’t find anything.
Wham-O Instant Fish
But not everything Wham-O sold was a raging success. One of the founders took an African safari in the early 60’s and was amazed to see a species of fish that laid its eggs in mud which would become completely dry. The next rainfall would see the eggs hatch.
Thinking he had his next big product, Melin brought a bunch of egg-laden mud back to the States. His idea was that he would sell a little mud with instructions for an instant aquarium. In fact, according to Wham-O’s website, millions of orders were taken for Melin’s latest product.
Alas, the fish, as temperamental as panda bears, wouldn’t reproduce well in captivity. So that’s why you don’t remember Mudfish, or whatever they would have been called.
So here’s to Wham-O, a wonderful toy and gadget company that is still alive and doing quite well. Our childhoods just wouldn’t have been the same without Frisbees, Hula Hoops, Slip and Slides and the like.
As regular visitors to this site already know, I grew up in Miami, Oklahoma, not in the heart of tornado alley, but certainly within spleen distance ;-). I remember being terrified with break-ins on TV shows from the likes of KOAM and KODE with reports of tornadoes in the area, complete with scary, indecipherable radar screens that showed ominous big white images against a black background.
What I was looking at was state-of-the-art of its time. Our parents grew up with absolutely no way to know bad weather was on the way except to look for signs like all of the cattle gathered up in one area facing the same direction. Perhaps they would look for a red sky at morning. Radio stations would help, but weather forecasting was still more art than science.
In 1957, a quantum leap was taken in the forecasting and tracking of bad weather. The first WSR-57 was commissioned at the Miami Hurricane Forecast Center. WSR stood for weather surveillance radar, and 57 stood for 1957, duh!
The radar unit was basically a WWII vintage piece of equipment, domesticized to look for cloud masses instead of enemy bombers. While a large advance in the science of meteorology, it didn’t show windspeed. It also only showed the thickest cloud masses, making subtleties like rotation difficult or impossible to discern. The parts were 40’s vintage, and repairs often consisted of scrounging through old boxes of stuff to find the right tube.
The WSR-57 radar units began spreading across the United States. One went up in downtown Kansas City in 1959. Key West, Wichita, Cincinnati, Galveston, and St. Louis all received units in 1960. The next year, Amarillo, Detroit, and Fort Worth got theirs. Weather hotspots were beginning to receive an additional tool to forecast bad conditions, and the hope was that local residents would be given opportunity to prepare for any onslaughts.
The WSR-57’s served our country well. Many of them were still functioning as good as new thirty or more years after deployment. The last of them was taken offline on December 2, 1996, at Charleston, SC, after an amazing 37-year run. Not bad for something that was essentially pieced together from parts that were manufactured to see action in WWII.
Hurricane caught on radar, 1961
What ultimately replaced the original radar units was a new technology called 88-D. This stands for Doppler 1988. That was the year that the smart technology of measuring approaching and receding wind speeds to determine rotation was launched.
Of course, there were many other hi-tech features of Doppler radar. For one, computers were extensively used in the background, making for better alerting, compiling of data over time, and preservation of historical records.
The WSR-57 would flash blips on the screen, which would disappear with each rotation of the antenna. Operators made grease pencil markings on the screen to track the movements of cloud masses. Doppler would actually display a map, showing precise locations of cloud formations, which did NOT disappear with each pass.
Radar usage involves varying power output, adjusting antenna rotation speed, and also antenna pitch. It wasn’t unusual in the early days for operators to make these tweaks via cranks that turned huge rheostats. It took good physical stamina to be a meteorologist back then.
It also took serious training to make sense of the high-contrast white blips on the black screen. Thus, a kid already deathly afraid or tornadoes was further terrified by the ominous images that would be flashed up on TV by local weathermen Earl Ludlum or Lee George during the interminable breaks in network programming while we were experiencing bad weather.
But it was certainly an advancement, one our Depression-raised parents appreciated. My father had no problems understanding the weatherman and the radar display, thus, he never ordered us to take cover during the years that I have memories of Miami, Oklahoma, from 1963 to 1968. We had tornadoes hit close, I remember one tearing up some trees north of town, but our little tract home remained safe.
Nowadays, a colorful live radar display is depicted in the lower right corner of our high-def television, and the fine detail lets us see exactly where the squall line is while we’re enjoying a rerun of Andy Griffith on a weekday evening.
But those of us old enough to remember JFK can also recall when radar weather tracking was very much an art, subject to the interpretation of an educated user.
I certainly didn’t hurt for toys when I was a kid. However, I didn’t have EVERY toy.
Witness the Texaco Fire Truck. Another cool toy that sadly never made it into my toybox was the water rocket.
I saw hundreds of ads for water rockets in various comic book ads.
One day at junior high school, for a science demonstration, I finally got to witness a water rocket in action.
Pretty cool stuff! So cool, that nowadays there is a passionate online following of homegrown water rockets. Read on.
The water rocket was allegedly created in 1930 by future professor Jean LeBot in Rennes, France. While still a student at school, he experimented with a champagne bottle (designed to hold high pressure) filled partially with water and pressurized by compressed air from a bicycle pump fed through a cork with an inner tube valve at its center. The rocket was launched from an inclined plank forming a ramp.
It flew well, but the bottle would smash on impact.
Vintage water rockets
At some point after that (the details are very sketchy), toy manufacturers began marketing water rockets made from high-impact plastic. The rocket would sit on a plastic hand pump and launch with a trigger pull.
I found photos of some rockets that were manufactured in Germany in the early 50’s and that looked just like the V-2 models that rained down on Great Britain.
Later models included curved fins that would put a spin on the rocket, causing it to fly higher and straighter.
Once you pumped the launcher enough times to achieve optimal pressure, you pulled the trigger and were rewarded by a rocket shooting skyward, accompanied by a satisfying hissing sound and a jet trail of water and water vapor.
Then, the device would plummet to earth (the nicer models included a rubber padded nose cone to absorb the impact).
The comic book ads we grew up with are long gone, but water rockets continue to exist today, looking very much like we remember them.
However, there is a passionate following of home-built water rockets out there on the web. Most of the rockets are made out of plastic two-liter soda bottles. The lightweight cylinders can withstand high pressure, and are thus ideal for aeronautical flight. Not only that, they don’t shatter like glass champagne bottles when they land.
A friend of mine gave me a real treasure: a November 1970 copy of House Beautiful magazine. The articles themselves are a treat to read, but the advertisements in the back are wonderful in themselves. You may see quite a few future columns based on the contents of that magazine.
There were no less than THREE ads for the subject of today’s column: wrist watch clip-on calendars.
Let’s face it. Nowadays, we’re spoiled, wristwatch-wise. For less than fifty bucks, you can get yourself a name-brand quartz timepiece that will be accurate to within a few seconds a month. It will have the day, date, and possibly the moon phase emblazoned on its face.
But go back to 1970, and your options on an affordable watch were much more limited.
Both of my brothers were in the military, and while stationed in southeast Asia, had access to Seiko chronographs at much lower cost than in the States. So they and my father always had big self-winding watches that featured all kinds of nifty extras. My father was a private pilot, and he showed me how to use the tachymeter to time how fast we were traveling as we passed section roads exactly a mile apart.
But I was just a kid. So my watches were much more humble Timex wind-up versions. You were expected to pop off the back cover and adjust them to be as accurate as possible. The best you could hope for was perhaps three minutes variation in a day.
And of course, such an inexpensive timekeeper would not have a calendar. So if you wanted to know what day it was, your options were to either send $1.79 (plus 15 cents postage) to Anthony Enterprises in San Francisco, or, more likely, to accept a free set from an advertiser.
After that, a quick sideways look at your wristband would reveal the date. And all you had to do was remember to put a new one on each month. And also score a fresh set for the upcoming year. And they drove women wild.
Rumors of only one nostalgic journey this week are greatly exaggerated. My internet connection is doing much better, thank you.
The living room of the 1960’s was a warm, friendly place. True, times had changed since our parents might have first purchased our modest homes fifteen of twenty years prior. Most living rooms in the US had a new center of attention: the television set. That one-eyed monster changed the purpose of the home’s central location from a place of casual conversation, or possibly listening to the radio, to the spot where our parents unwound after a long day at work, accompanied by a cocktail, Walter Cronkite, a cigarette, and a TV dinner.
That piping hot little aluminum dish required special accommodation. It was certainly too hot to sit on one’s lap.
Enter the aluminum folding TV tray.
Evidence exists that the TV tray actually preceded the TV dinner by a year. I traced the much-maligned meal back to possibly 1953. But In her book As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, author Karal Ann Marling states that national advertising for TV tray tables first appeared in 1952.
By 1967, there was scarcely a home in the suburbs that didn’t have a stash of neatly folded TV trays placed inobtrusively away in a corner somewhere, ready for instant deployment at around 5:30 in the evening.
The earliest examples of TV trays have legs that are constructed lengthwise in the shape of an X that prevented you from placing your human legs comfortably under the tiny table surface. Manufacturers soon reworked the design so that the tubular legs folded along the shorter axes, with the tray top itself dropping down to create a tiny little piece of furniture that fit perfectly out of sight into a space of just a few inches.
Sheer engineering genius!
TV trays and stacking rack
Thus did millions of the diminutive home accessories change hands at various stores and find themselves in our childhood homes.
The flimsy trays were just sturdy enough to support a TV dinner and a drink. and possibly an ash tray. Add anything else to the load, and you did so at your own risk.
Thus did I learn a valuable life lesson at the age of thirteen: Don’t attempt to assemble a model sailing ship on a TV tray that might possibly collapse, taking paint, glue, rigging string, and various plastic parts with it to the floor.
TV trays sold moderately well in the early 50’s, but as TV dinners themselves began to be marketed, and more and more US homes began sporting shiny new television sets, their sales went through the roof.
And the best thing about them is their sheer indestructible nature.
Thus, fifty-year-old trays may well be in service, having been passed down from parents and grandparents, and now holding a nouveau chic status in this world gone retro-crazy.
The legs might become bent, plastic clips may break, but the metal itself is impervious to rust. Thus, even badly scratched up examples that saw action when Bonanza was on Sunday nights are likely still serving, possibly holding small pots populated by African violets on a screened-in porch somewhere.
And someday, hundreds or thousands of years hence, perfectly functional examples will likely be recovered from landfills by future archaeologists.
Overall, a pretty cool legacy for a cheap, yet brilliant invention.
Picture the concept: You put eleven players into position. Your opponent does the same. You flip an inline-cord switch. The field begins vibrating. After the players move a bit on their tremor-plagued gridiron, you stop the game. You then place a felt “ball” on the base of a player, and turn the game back on. Your player has an opening! He rumbles through . . . wait! He’s turning around! He’s running the wrong way!
Hit the switch. You have just witnessed a very common scene in 1960’s electric football. Your player turned the wrong way.
Anticipating this, the rule book mercifully calls the play dead, rather than have your running back relive Jim Marshall’s 1964 run against San Francisco.
Despite its unpredictability and potential for electric shock, Tudor electric football games were a thrill to kids everywhere.
I remember getting mine in 1971, with the players painted like Kansas City and Minnesota. It was such a trip taking the game out of the box, setting up the goalposts and surrounding crowded stands, and organizing your teams.
There was, of course, a player who stood head and shoulders above the rest: the ubiquitous quarterback-kicker.
This player was able to heave long bombs of six inches or more. And there was a chance, albeit a microscopic one, of a player actually being hit by the felt projectile, thereby making the pass complete! Of course, if it hit a defender, bad news.
Field goals were much more common. You could put one through the uprights 80 yards away. No word on whether there were steroids tests done on the limber-legged kickers.
And the game was great training for life. When we became parents, and did our best to raise our kids the right way, it wasn’t uncommon to see them, against all common sense, turn around and run the wrong way.
Unfortunately, they didn’t always stop when we went for the off switch.
It was a blast growing up in the Jet Age. Sure, our parents saw rapid progress in their own lifetimes. They may have recalled a day when horse-drawn wagons were common on Main Street. They probably took rides on steam trains. And they could likely remember losing childhood friends to diseases that were quite curable or preventable by the time we came along.
But we had ELECTRONICS! Yes, electronics ran a tremendous percentage of the world that we grew up in.
And the electronics that our day-to-day life depended on so much were prone to frequent failure, thanks to components with very finite lifespans known as vacuum tubes.
Who knows, maybe embattled senator Ted Stevens, born in 1923, may have had the electronic versions somewhat in mind when he made his infamous “series of tubes” statement. Nah, probably not.
The transistor was perfected in 1947 by William Shockley. But it would be many years before it would completely replace the ubiquitous vacuum tube. In the meantime, radios, televisions, and stereo consoles were sold by the millions powered by electronic tubes.
Those tubes would act as sophisticated switches that would close when the current reached a certain voltage. When they worked their magic, it was possible to produce sound from electrical impulses. They generated heat, necessitating lots of ventilation holes on the devices in which they were installed. And they would glow in eerie shades of orange when they did their thing, as observed by myself peering through the small ventilation openings.
The light show would be accompanied by a peculiar aroma, caused by a combination of heat, ozone, and dust. It’s impossible to describe, yet, if you smelled it, you would never forget it.
I found the combination of sensory stimulations very fascinating, so much so that I sought careers in the electrical and electronics fields before settling in as a computer geek almost ten years ago.
RCA consumer tube tester
Dad wasn’t nearly so taken by the show, of course. All he knew about an electronics-powered device was that when it quit, it QUIT. It was time to take the radio in, or call a repairman to the home in the case of a massive TV or stereo console.Theoretically, it was possible to yank all of the tubes from the sick gadget and haul them down to Farrier’s IGA, which had a tube tester.
The tube tester had a whole bunch of sockets, designed for every conceivable tube that could be found in the average consumer device. It had a dial that would pop into the green zone if the tube was okay, or stay in the dreaded yellow or red ranges if it was time to replace it.
The business hoped that you would purchase replacements for faulty tubes from them, of course, which is how they justified paying hundreds of dollars for a sophisticated tester that was free for public use.
If you found a bad tube, and the store had a replacement, you were back in business. That’s assuming that you could match all of the tubes you yanked back with their original sockets and got them all seated correctly.
A kid would also offer silent prayers that the TV repairman would be able to diagnose the problem tube while he had the TV back removed in the house. If he did, another plea to God would be made that he would have the replacement tube in the truck.
If not, the household would have to do without TV for a week or a month, which, you’ll recall, was several lifetimes for us when we were seven years old. It was even worse if he had to load the TV up and take it to the shop. We would stare mournfully at the empty spot in the living room, awaiting the interminable return of the one-eyed monster that we had grown to love so much.
Nowadays, the equivalent of the 1960’s burnt-out-tube might be the occasional interruption in internet access. A recent ice storm isolated me from the rest of the world for a day or so, and it felt pretty lonely.
But one sad fact makes any modern-day outages more bearable than the ones we experienced in childhood. Time passes much, much faster now than it used to.
