You can do the tricks the surfers do,
just try a “Quasimodo” or “The Coffin” too
(why don’t you) Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin’ with me…
Jan and Dean summed up a late 50’s-mid 60’s craze with their 1964 classic Sidewalk Surfin’. Skateboards were big in those times, even though wipeouts were a frequent occurrence. Those steel wheels just didn’t have a whole lot of grab. Later boards in the 60’s featured clay wheels, which gripped the concrete just a bit better.
Skateboards have had an up, a down, and another long lasting up. They first started showing up in large numbers in the late 50’s. There had been some sorts of boards on wheels since the early part of the century, but trucks which allowed maneuvering were invented which caused their sales to soar.
By the early 60’s, they were a true phenomenon. I remember riding one when I was about six years old, around 1965. It was amazing that you could lean and make the board turn.
However, those problematic slick wheels made them dangerous. Cities started banning their usage. After three years of soaring sales, they practically disappeared from store shelves in 1965.
Few boards were spotted from ’65 to ’73. But that year, a sweeping revolution took place that would make the boards familiar sights for the next thirty years.
That revolution was the urethane wheel. FINALLY, skateboards had gripping ability that greatly improved their safety. Sales exploded that year, and every year, a new incarnation of teenagers grabbed them up. Cities that had once banned their use now build public skateboard parks.
But it all started with our generation, ending up with lots of bruises and broken bones on those old slick wheels.
I grew up with an aroma that used to be a regular part of the ambiance in my house. It was hot Plastigoop.
Like most kids on my block, I had a Mattel Thingmaker. And, like many of my toys, it would never be sold in today’s litigious society. It had an oven that got STINKIN’ HOT! And another familiar sight was burns on the hands and arms of my friends and myself. We didn’t care. We were making some incredibly cool flexible rubbery toys.
Mattel Creepy Crawlers
Thingmakers produced many flavors of toys. I owned a Fright Factory. It made third eyes, scars (to add to the real ones caused by oven burns ;-), skeletons, bones that clipped to your nose, and the ultimate: shrunken heads. The shrunken head even had hair you could attach to it!
But what made it megecool was the fact that you could swap molds with your friends and make other stuff, like Creepy Crawlers (snakes, lizards, newts, bugs), Creeple People (ugly little dudes that lived on your pencils), and Fighting Men (soldiers). The Fighting Men would let you stick little wires inside, so you could bend them into fighting poses! But you would always run out of wire, so you ended up with fighting men who just stood there like scarecrows.
My subjects for columns are frequently decided upon by pure gut feeling. If it feels right, write about it!
I’m a subscriber to Charles Phoenix’s Slide of the Week, and I recommend you do so too. Last week, I received a slide that featured a TV that I’d known about, but didn’t know too much about. It’s called the Philco Predicta, and it had the picture tube on a yoke in a wonderful expression of modern design. Charles had located a slide that featured a Predicta “in real life,” as he excitedly put it.
The next thing you know, I’m watching Revenge of the Nerds on TNT, and lo and behold: a Predicta! It was being used to play 80’s Atari games.
OK, two Predicta sightings in one week. Time to write a column!
Philco began in in 1892 as the Helios Electric Company. They manufactured batteries at first, but as electricity caught on, they diversified. In 1927, they began manufacturing radios, and soon became one of the Big Three in the business, along with RCA and Zenith. When televisions began appearing after WWII, Philco jumped on board.
A working Predicta
By 1957, Philco’s sales were flat. That year, the Russians electrified the world by launching Sputnik. Suddenly, the modern look was red-hot.
Philco looked at redesigning the traditional cabinet-mounted picture tube in TV’s to something radically different and uber-modern. The first Predicta, with a yoke-mounted shortened picture tube, thus appeared in 1958.
One of Philco’ biggest customers for the futuristic TV was none other than Holiday Inn. They bought thousands of the sadly unreliable television sets, probably to their regret.
You see, the Predicta was more gorgeous than gorgeous. But Philco never created a color Predicta, and there was a growing demand for color by the dawn of the 60’s. More significantly, it wasn’t well-engineered. The shortened picture tube ran very hot, bad for electronics. The circuit board for the tube was also extremely difficult to access, and the combination of the two made certain that Predictas were in the shop on a sadly regular basis, perhaps three or four times a year.
I think we Boomers remember how depressing it was to have the TV off at the shop in the 60’s.
Thus, ultimately, the Predicta was a failure. Many sat unsold in TV dealerships. Customers preferred reliability over drop-dead coolness. And Philco went under in 1961. It survived as a purchased product of the Ford Motor Company until the 70’s. Nowadays, what remains of it is in South America.
But you have to admit that it was absolutely the coolest TV ever built. And guess what! You Boomers with a little money to burn can get Predictas from the Telstar Company, which now owns the name and produces new models faithful to the original design!
In the 1940’s Mary Carter lived in Cincinnati, making a lucrative living holding fake seances.
Mary was also inventive. She created a slate that would appear to be sealed inside a box, inside which she was able to write messages “from the spirit world.” When she opened the box, her customers were amazed to see messages scrawled on the slate.
Her son Alfred admired the invention, but he realized that it took real skill and dexterity, which his mother possessed in droves, to operate the magic slate. So he set about inventing a device that would “tell the future” in a manner that required no input from the user.
In 1944, Carter created a tube divided in two by a wall that ran throughout its length. The tube had a die in each half, with a windows on each end allowing only one die to be seen. The dice floated, and the tube was filled with a dark, thick liquid. Answers were printed on each die. So the tube would reveal one answer, then it could be turned over and it would reveal another one.
Syco Slate
The tube was called the Syco-Seer, also the Syco-Slate, in honor of his mother’s creation. Carter took prototypes to a local retailer, and he expressed interest in selling them in his store, and also wholesaling to other establishments.
So Carter turned to his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, who is credited with the invention of the Magic Eight-Ball. Carter obtained patents for his tubes, then assigned them to Bookman.
At this point, Carter became so enslaved to alcohol that he left all for Bookman to handle, as he descended into a life of sleeping in flophouses.
Bookman surged ahead, marketing the Syco-Seer to as many stores as he could. Alabe Crafts, the company he formed with Carter, was producing the devices in steady numbers. Stores would hire women to dress in Gypsy clothing to demonstrate the “amazing” fortune telling tubes.
In 1950, Brunswick, manufacturers of billiard equipment and other sporting goods, commissioned Alabe to make Syco-Seers shaped as eight-balls. The promotion was modestly successful for Brunswick, but Bookman thought the tube reworked into an eight-ball would be a much greater hit among the masses.
He was right. After his commitment to Brunswick ran its course, he began cranking out Magic Eight-Balls for his own company to sell. And sell they did!
At first, it was marketed as a paperweight. But as time went by, it was aimed at kids as a toy, and that’s when things really took off. Sales went up and stayed up.
Nowadays, the Magic Eight-Ball is sold by Mattel at about a million units a year. It has become part of human culture. They are found in kids’ bedrooms, executives’ desks, and everywhere in between. It’s been seen or mentioned in movies, television shows, and novels. It even had homage paid to it in the form of a Microsoft Word “easter egg,” or hidden trick in a program. On an early version of Word, you could create a blank macro called “Magic Eight-Ball” and it would place an eight-ball icon on your toolbar.
Minor, I know, but it shows you that Redmond programmers dig Al Carter’s creation too.
Perhaps the name of the gadget featured in today’s I Remember JFK memory will ring a bell, perhaps not. But I’ll bet that one glance at the graphic will make you go “Oh, yeah!”
I wish I had my usual researched piece to offer you as far as where the Magic Brain Calculator came from, and its manufacturer, Chadwick. But there just wasn’t a whole lot I could find out. But what little I did glean, I hereby share with you.
A Boomer kid’s options for help in making mathematical calculations on the go in the 50’s and 60’s were pretty few. There were slide rules, which were only for the geeky. My oldest brother, who was in college, had one, but I had no idea how it operated.
Then there was the Addiator, manufactured by Addiator Gesellschaft in Berlin, beginning in 1920. They were sophisticated little hand-held mechanical calculators, but not terribly cheap, and once that nasty Nazi uprising took place, not freely available. But by the time WWII was over, they were back on the market, but still not real cheap.
But in the 1950’s, the Japanese factories began cranking out a low-priced version of the mechanical adding machine. Chadwick was the name of the enigmatic company that manufactured them, and they appear to have slid out of sight without leaving a trace behind.
But they did leave a legacy of thousands of Magic Brain Calculators. Durably made from high-impact plastic and aluminum, probably every one of them still exist in their original form, although many are now buried in landfills, awaiting future archaeological discovery.
Addiator calculator
The little calculators sold for a couple of bucks in dime stores, and were found in many a Boomer home in the 50’s and 60’s. For that matter, many are still buried in various present-day junk drawers, as they were virtually indestructible, and flat enough to live quietly buried by pens, pencils, and paper clips.
I know that we had one in our house. Seven-year-old I was baffled by its actual usage. Did I mention that math is NOT my strong suit? But that didn’t stop me from enjoying playing with the gizmo for hours nonetheless, inserting numerical values, running mysterious calculations, and pulling the wire handle up to clear everything.
The sheer indestructibleness of the Magic Brain Calculator, combined with its inobtrusive nature, ensures that many thousands still exist. At presstime, there were several on eBay with $9.95 opening bids, and one particularly nice model, with stylus intact, was going for $4.99 with just over a day left.
So if you Boomers still employed in an office want to impress the young punks you work with, pick up a Magic Brain Calculator from eBay, or possibly just dig your own out of the junk drawer. Read the linked instructions and practice making actual calculations, Then, at the next staff meeting, whip out a few figure faster than the youth can get their calculator-equipped cell phones to wake up!
The year was 1959. A machinist/inventor/tinkerer named Ernie Fraze couldn’t sleep. A few weeks previously, he had gone on a picnic and realized that nobody brought a can opener to open the sodas, a common situation of the time. So, to tire himself out, he thought he would ponder for a while on how a self-opening drink can could be devised.
Ernie envisioned a pull tab anchored securely to a strengthened rivet at the center of the can, which, when lifted, would perforate the can’s top and allow a tab to be removed along scored lines.
With that bout of insomnia, the canned drink industry was revolutionized overnight.
Beer and soda pop drinkers were heavily dependent on can openers before then. For a time, cans were produced with a conical neck that ended in an opening to be sealed with a bottle cap, but they were expensive to produce, and consumers preferred cheapness over convenience.
Much loved by the American public, the rings later came to be most reviled. The reasons are manifold.
One was images of fish who had unfortunately gotten pull tab rings stuck around their bodies as youngsters and who had become deformed adults, with that ring horribly constricting their body girth. I’m not sure how many fish this ACTUALLY happened to, but the image was very distasteful to the public, and gave pull tabs a bad name with the environmentally-conscious.
Various pull tabs
Another downside to the removable pull tabs was nicely summed up by one Jimmy Buffett:
I blew out my flip-flop
Stepped on a pop-top
Cut my heel had to cruise on back home
And while booze in the blender assuaged his pain, the fact is that it was darned annoying to cut one’s foot on a discarded pull-tab.
The third factor in their being banned involved a bizarre action taken by some in the hopes of keeping the tab from getting loose from the can: the habit of dropping the removed ring INSIDE your can, before the contents were consumed.
That was begging for trouble. But, as is the Great American Tradition, many who ended up with a pull-tab in the throat called a lawyer first, the hospital next. Soft drink makers and soda can manufacturers were sued for what amounted to irresponsible behavior on the part of the litigants, but still lost many cases.
The combination of these factors spelled the end of pop tabs in the US and many other places by the mid 1970’s. Alternatives needed to be found ASAP, before we were back to carrying can openers! One silly method was on Coors beer cans of the era, among other brands. It consisted of two holes in the top, one larger than the bother, which were intended to be pushed in with a finger or thumb! And they thought pull tabs were dangerous?
In 1975, Daniel F. Cudzik of Reynolds Metals invented the pop-top as we know it. Nothing was discarded as the mechanism would easily open a can of pop and stay put on the can.
So today, we are safe from deformed fish, cut up heels, and swallowing tabs we’ve put in the cans ourselves. Why don’t I feel safe?
The year was 1970. Cigarette prices had been steadily climbing throughout the 60’s. Why, they had just hit an obscene 40 cents a pack! Something had to be done.
Thus, the Laredo cigarette rolling machine was released. The plastic device would compress tobacco into a tube of cigarette paper to make a more or less professional smoke. You could add a filter if you like. Laredo sold the machine and the supplies. Killing yourself just became cheaper.
Unfortunately, the history of the Laredo machine is shrouded in mystery. I did find out that it was roughly 1970 when it first appeared, and by the mid 70’s it remained modestly popular. The tobacco section of the drug store featured the machines and the Laredo branded tobacco, as well as complete kits that would produce a carton of smokes.
Laredo tobacco
Personally speaking, I remember seeing one up close in 1972. That was the year that we purchased a farm near Pea Ridge, Arkansas The wife of the owner was a chain smoker, and I recall a Laredo machine sitting on the kitchen table the first time we looked at the house. My mom had quit smoking the year before, and I also noticed a strong tobacco stench in the house that I had once been oblivious to.
I’ve always been fascinated by gadgets, and I stared at that plastic wonder for quite some time.
As sin taxes rose throughout the 70’s, Laredo machine sales remained steady. Technique was everything, though, and an incompetent roller could create “sticks,” as one board commenter I found in my research described them. Cramming too much tobacco into the paper tube would cause the cig to be nearly impossible to draw a breath through.
You could buy a kit to roll a carton of cigarettes for half the price of Marlboros. Thus, the inventive smoker had a way to cut the costs of his/her habit.
Like me, most kids love gadgets, and no doubt a significant number of them were delighted to create smokes for their parents with Laredo machines. One board commenter stated that he would roll out twenty every morning for his father before he went to work.
Laredo owners remained faithful to their brand, and thus the product survived. It never really tore the roof off of the market, neither did it pose any real threat to cigarette manufacturers. Eventually, it disappeared, the process no doubt aided by its original 1970 customers stopping smoking. This choice was either voluntary or not. But the Laredo cigarette machine did provide yet another contribution to the memory banks of those of us who remember JFK, and who were around smoking households in the 70’s.
We have always needed help in adding up numbers. Even if a businessman was a mathematical savant, his customers would still want to see proof that the prices they were being charged were absolutely correct. Thus, businesses like my father’s truck garage had an adding machine that would print up a paper record of calculated figures.
But as electronics got more sophisticated and less bulky, pulling a handle on a noisy machine to calculate a value gave way to simply punching buttons on a wonderful new device known as a calculator. And if you remember JFK, you likely also have vivid memories of seeing one of them for the first time.
I had hours of fun playing with that adding machine that used to sit on dad’s office desk in that truck garage. you punched in the numeric keys, selected an add or subtract function, pulled the handle, and the sum would magically be printed out on a paper roll.
I also remember electric adding machines that would handle more complex operations like multiplication and division. You punched in the numbers and function the same way, then pushed a total key that might make the machine churn for as long as a half a minute before spitting out your answer.
But in 1971, I walked into the office of Fitz Freight in Miami, Oklahoma, and caught my first glimpse of a truly revolutionary device that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The most amazing thing about was the fact that it produced your total instantly. The second most amazing thing about it was the fact that the total was displayed in the form of blue illuminated numerals.
Vintage calculators
Joe Fitzgibbon was an old friend of my father’s. We had moved out of Miami three years earlier, but dad liked to revisit the town once every few months and keep in touch with his cronies. It was on one of these periodic visits that my eleven-year-old eyes first saw an electronic calculator.
I spent hours punching in long strings of numbers and being amazed that their impossibly complex values were instantly and silently calculated. And those blue LED’s were so space age to look at. It was easy to transform myself into Captain Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise, punching commands into the ship’s computer.
That calculator probably cost Fitz Freight at least $400. But as their components became more readily available, their price began dropping.
My oldest brother obtained one two or three years later for around a hundred bucks. In 1978, I finally sprang for one of my own from Sears that was loaded with functions and cost around fifty dollars.
Eventually, LCD’s replaced the power-hungry (but beautiful) LED’s. And as electronics got tinier and cheaper, calculators became business giveaways.
Nowadays, calculators are included as throw-ins on cell phones, watches, and even Google. But once upon a time, they were futuristic, pricey, amazing wonders that thoroughly entranced eleven-year-olds.
Basic Pan pipes, like I received from Commander Whitehall
I’m always hesitant to write about more obscure memories. After all, just three months after putting this site up for the first time, we already have a nice amount of traffic in the form of reminiscing Baby Boomers. I don’t want to discuss things they don’t remember, but on the other hand, maybe they’ve been looking for info about the same obscure factoid. So here goes.
I was unable to find ANYTHING on the web about Commander Whitehall’s Explorer’s Club. So I’m operating on memory alone. Fortunately, my memory is pretty good.
Mrs. Cox, my third grade teacher, introduced the class to the Explorer’s Club. It cost about $5.00 a month, and a child would receive a box in the mail filled with genuine treasures from all over the world.
When your eagerly anticipated package would arrive, you would rip it open to discover a flexi-disc record, a brochure with pictures of the featured land, and, best of all, a trinket from that country!
I was in the club for six or seven months before dad decided that $5.00 a month was too much to spend. But during those months, I learned a tremendous amount about other nations.
Commander Whitehall would narrate the record, filled with sounds of the land he was in at the time in the background. It was killer stuff, and it wasn’t unusual to listen to the recording ten of fifteen times while playing with my monthly treasure.
I can recall three of the items I received. Apparently, Commander Whitehall was actually touring these countries, because all of the ones mentioned during my too-short membership were in South America. I got a set of pan pipes from Peru that looked just like the pictured ones. I also got a “pipette” as he called it, a miniature non-functioning pipe with a person’s face carved in the bowl. And I got a little drum-on-a-stick that you operated by twirling between your hands. Sadly, I don’t remember what countries the latter two delights came from.
I also recall that dad got into a fight with the Explorer’s Club when he tried to quit. They sent a final package that he didn’t want to pay for. All he got was letters demanding payment, because we were living in rural Missouri at the time, and didn’t have a phone yet!
But despite dad’s bad experience with Commander Whitehall’s Explorer’s Club, it is still a precious memory for me, and it made me curious enough about geography that I grew up to be one of those exceptional adults who can pick out South America on a world map ;-).
This last week, your humble webmaster purchased a piece of cutting-edge technology, a rare occasion for the hardware Luddite. I scored a Samsung Epic computer/phone which is approximately three times as smart as I am.
In mulling over subjects for today’s piece, I couldn’t get that amazing gadget out of my mind. Ergo, I decided that covering the evolution of the telephone would be an appropriate subject for nostalgic waxing.
Most of us grew up with a sound that’s practically extinct in the 21st century: the ringing of a bell every time a call came in. Almost without exception, we all had basic, durable telephones that were manufactured by the Western Electric Corporation. That particular entity came into being in 1882, just in time to forge a relationship with Alexander Graham Bell that would last 100 years. Western Electric was given the exclusive right to manufacture consumer telephones that would attach to The Bell System. Any other phones would be subject to immediate disconnection.
To their credit, they were much more friendly monopolists than, say, Microsoft. They manufactured a rock-solid, if not especially pretty, product that had a lifespan measured in decades.
Microsoft, of course, makes a pretty product that is as reliable as a car made from macaroni. 😉
But all of that officially came to a halt in 1984, when Bell broke up, and Western Electric lost its exclusive right to make Bell-approved phones. I actually remember purchasing a cheap flip phone in 1983, so Western lost its grip sometime prior to that.
One of the first quantum leaps in telephone evolution was the introduction of push buttons as a replacement for the rotary dial. As I mentioned in the linked article, the 1963 innovation took about ten years to show up as an option in little Bentonville, Arkansas. It was great for wired Type A’s like myself, you could punch in a number in 1/3 the time it took for that slow dial to return to rest. Plus, you got to talk to lots of nice strangers as you mis-punched the numbers.
1940’s era phone
Telephones first being available in a color besides black was an innovation that many of us recall, circa the early 50’s. Another 50’s innovation was the Princess phone (1959). I remember my best friend in Miami, Oklahoma had an older sister who had one. I was intrigued by its dainty pink appearance for short periods of time, before I was angrily chased out of her bedroom by its owner.
The Trimline phone was introduced in 1965. It allowed an amazing trick: you could make multiple calls without touching the receiver. The hang-up switch was contained in the headset.
By the end of the 60’s, party lines were fast growing extinct. Once a staple even in the big cities, by 1969 they were mostly a rural phenomenon. We lived on a farm in the late 70’s, and I remember what a big deal it was when we finally had a dedicated phone line, about 1976. No more listening for conversation before dialing! No more being asked what your phone number was by by an operator before being connected on a direct-dialed call!
Speaking of that, our kids and grandkids, who now call anywhere in the world for free on Skype or on generous phone plans offered through cable companies, would be amazed if they had to make a call 60’s style to a grandparent two states away. You began by dialing O, then told the operator what type of call you were willing to shell out for: station-to-station, which meant the billing began when the destination phone was answered, or person-to-person, which was pricier, but ensured that you wouldn’t be charged unless a specific person was available at the other end.
Direct dialing began in the big east coast cities in 1951. By the early 70’s, it was pretty much universally available, and AT&T was running lots of 1+ commercials on TV to educate us in how to save money by connecting ourselves to long distance parties.
“Freedom Phone”
The next big innovation in telephone evolution was the elimination of the cord altogether. In 1980, the FCC assigned a radio band for the purpose of cordless phone usage. The problem was that it was crap. The band was was very noisy. Thus the earliest cordless phones, besides being huge and expensive, were also nearly unusable. Oh, they were allowed to operate with lots of power, which made making long distance calls on your neighbor’s dime a real possibility.
In 1986, the band was changed and the power was limited, making quieter calls possible, albeit at a shorter range. Prices were dropping for the units, too. By the 90’s, many or most of us Boomers were making cordless calls on the new 900MHz range, which was whisper-quiet and stretched farther than the 1986 band.
It was during that final decade of the 20th century that many of us took the cellular plunge. It began with car phones, contained in a brown bag. Car phones were expensive to buy, and expensive to use. But their coolness factor was unassailable.
By the time the century turned, many of us carried cell phones on our belts or in our purses. It was a real paradigm shift, as we were now available 24/7, for better or worse.
That leads us to today’s smart phones. The iPhone led the way, with Android phones running about six months behind. We are now used to carrying a device which allows instant access to banking, shopping, entertainment, our regular jobs, live-video conversations with people half a world away, and I’m not sure what else. I’m still in the process of learning what all mine does.
Our grandparents saw the first cars, the first airplanes, and the first space shots, perhaps even living long enough to see man walk on the moon. Our own lives haven’t been quite so history-encompassing, but you know what? I still think being a Boomer is the best possible generation in which to live one’s life.
