irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 34 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

The Etch-a-Sketch

I am so pleased when I write about a toy from our Boomer childhoods, and don’t have to include it under the “Things that Disappeared When You Weren’t Looking” category! Such is the happy case with the subject of today’s piece, the Etch-a-Sketch, still proudly produced by Ohio Art! I was deeply hoping that they were being made in Ohio, but sadly, that’s not been the case since 2003.

However, let us celebrate the fact that they are still around, exactly like they were during the Decade of Change, when many of us were enjoying wonderful childhoods as Baby Boomers.

It all started in France in the late 1950’s. A gentleman named André Cassagnes (another source credits Arthur Granjean) crafted a drawing device in his basement. He filled a plastic container with aluminum dust. The container had a clear screen, also a stylus mounted to two bars which was moved by small cables attached to knobs. Thus, an adroit artist could make subtle movements to create a single line which could create infinite shapes.

In reality, he created a very cool toy which 98% of us could use to make basic shapes, and cause us to envy true artistes with the talent to create masterpieces.

He took his invention to the International Toy Fair in Nuremburg, Germany, where a US-based company called Ohio Art showed little interest. However, upon seeing “The Magic Screen” a second time, they decided to roll the dice and take a chance on it.

Ohio Art tooled up their factory in Dayton in time to have a boatload of Etch-a-Sketches on store shelves by Christmas, 1960. The result was a smash hit, and a memory for many of us.

The Etch-a-Sketch was a familiar product in dime stores when we were kids, pricey enough to only rate being purchased for a special occasion like a birthday or Christmas. But untold millions were sold during the 60’s and 70’s. And we all learned a few lessons about them as we created our artistic attempts.

1. Not all of us were artists. In fact, most of us were pretty bad, but we still spent hour after hour twisting knobs, then turning the board over and clearing our efforts, and trying again.
2. A mistake meant either starting over, or turning the lemon into lemonade, i.e. integrating the mistake into your creation.
3. The Etch-a-Sketch would eventually crack on the black back side, leaving silvery aluminum dust all over the place.
4. Once that happened, your choice was to (a) talk mom or dad into another one, or (b) move on to something else. In my case, it was the Spirograph.

But it generally took years of being tossed helter-skelter into a toybox to crack the durable plastic. In the meantime, the investment our parents made in the toy had paid off with hundreds or thousands of hours of entertainment, and perhaps inspiration to make a career out of art.

The Etch-a-Sketch continues to be a successful toy, so you can go out and purchase one for your own grandchild. My first is due in three months, I’ll probably hold off for a year or two. 😉 But rest assured, that when little Edie grows up, she’ll have pleasant memories of a plastic device which allowed her to magically create all sorts of black shapes on a silver background.

And odds are she’ll be a lot more talented at it than her grandpa.

The Dippy Bird

Who grew up in the 60’s or 70’s and hasn’t seen one of these? We used to jump in the old Fury III (Dad was partial to Plymouths) and head for Iowa and Texas every year (not at the same time) where my grandparents lived. On the way, we would stop and eat at cafes (no fast food for us!). It seemed like every one of them had a dippy bird doing his thing, many times on a shelf high up enough to be seen throughout the eatery.

I guess they had some horribly toxic substance in them, hence their rarity today. But if you remember JFK, you probably remember the dippy bird being a very common sight.

The Dawn of the Jet Age

I’m just a punk kid Boomer, I’m the first to admit it. After all, JFK’s assassination was my first coherent memory. My oldest brother was already seventeen years old when our President was gunned down.

Today’s piece is aimed at Boomers of his generation. It’s all about when traveling by jet airliner became a commonplace occurrence.

The de Havilland Comet began service in 1952. It was the first jet airliner. Prior to the Comet, and for quite a few years afterwards, piston-engine-driven airliners were the norm. These included venerable classics like the Convair CV-240, The Douglas DC-6 and DC-7, and the sexiest airplane ever built, IMHO, the Lockheed Constellation.

For the average family in the early 50’s, the concept of getting on an airplane and going somewhere was not feasible. A train ticket could be obtained for much less, and a bus could be boarded if one’s budget would not allow for the luxury of a ride on the rails.

But airline travel was expensive! It was a special event indeed to board a plane.

But even if the elder Boomers couldn’t afford to actually fly, they were still inundated by advertising on TV and in print. And that advertising changed as the decade progressed: Airplanes were depicted with jet engines instead of the piston variety.

With federally regulated air travel of the era, flying was a sumptuous experience that would frequently motivate its participants to don their Sunday best. And the addition of jet power made for faster getting-there. Boarding a 50’s era Comet or 707 was indeed cause for celebration.

Speaking of the Comet, it was born in 1949, and by 1952 was approved for usage by any airline that wished to spring for one. However, a basic design flaw nearly put de Havilland and the Comet out of business, thanks to a series of notorious and tragic mishaps.

The Comet sported square window openings. The sharp corners that were thereby cut into the frame proved to be a source of strain for the structure’s integrity, and in 1954, two disastrous crashes resulted from the flaw. Comets were grounded for years, and it was 1958 before they flew again. By that year, Boeing had introduced the 707, and Douglas had launched the DC-8.

That was good news for consumers, but bad news for de Havilland as well as the remaining piston-powered aircraft. The piston planes were much more economical to operate, as their engines could go much farther on a tank of fuel. But consumers wanted speed, and their voice ultimately doomed classic rides like the sinuously curved Constellation.

By the way, if you’d like to see a Connie up close and personal, visit the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Florida. Admission is whatever you would like to pay, and you can spend a week savoring every piece of aviation history.

The Comet never did recover from its bad luck and bad press. Production ceased in 1964, although individual examples continued to fly commercially until 1981.

Boeing and Douglas took over the jet airliner business, and continue to dominate into the 21st century.

Occasionally, we might have to take a ride on a turboprop-powered plane for a connecting flight. The vibration and slower speed may prove to be a source of annoyance, especially since we are crammed like sardines into a cabin which must carry as many passengers as physically possible in order for the airline to turn a few cents of profit.

But those of us who can remember the decade of the 50’s might possibly be taken back to a simpler time when even slower turning propellers powered the aircraft that one felt very privileged to board. And climbing onto a jet-powered plane of the era was a treat beyond description.

The Bulova Accutron

On October 26, 1866, a Frenchman named Louis F. Breguet received a patent for a watch that ran on a tuning fork. He was, shall we say, just a bit ahead of his time, although he did manage to produce a prototype.

94 years later, another inventor named Max Hetzel saw his own version of the tuning fork watch see public release as the Bulova Accutron.

Hetzel, raised in Switzerland under very modest circumstances, used to comb the city dump for parts to make things. Early in life, he realized that engineering was his calling. His inventive mind earned him over 100 patents.

Switzerland was renowned for producing the world’s most accurate watches. But mechanical works powered by a balance wheel had a ceiling on accuracy. The most expensive watches in the world could guarantee an accuracy of perhaps five minutes per month. And while that was very good, it still meant that watches were off by a number of seconds no matter how often they were synchronized.

It took the recent invention of transistors to make an electronic watch feasible. In 1953, Hetzel created a handmade prototype watch using the transistors and a tuning fork. Its accuracy was far better than anything devised to that point. But they required further innovation: a battery small enough and powerful enough to make the watch commercially successful.

Mallory obliged with miniaturized batteries in 1954. By 1955, eight prototype electronic watches were created. Arde Bulova, president of the company, became enthused over the possibility of leapfrogging the competition for the title of producer of the world’s most accurate watch. He directed funding to get all the bugs worked out and to get such a remarkable device on the market.

Hetzel received a promotion and moved to the United States in 1959, spending all of his time on the new watch concept. On October 10th, 1960, Bulova’s new president, none other than former general Omar Bradley, announced the Bulova Accutron Caliber 214, the first electronic watch ever offered for sale to the public.

The watch was a trailblazer. It only had twelve moving parts, and its accuracy blew away the finest mechanical watches in the world. And its cost was not beyond the reach of the middle class.

It was an instant hit, and Bulova advertised it as an Accutron, which is a device more sophisticated than a mere wristwatch. It came with an elaborately printed guarantee that it would be accurate to within a minute per month.

The space age contributed to its success. Bulova was proud to advertise the fact that NASA relied upon its superhuman accuracy for its missions. In fact, Buzz Aldrin had an Accutron on his wrist when he set foot on the moon in 1969. One of the reasons it was selected for use in space was because effects on traditional mainspring-driven watches from zero gravity were unknown. A nice, electrically-powered tuning fork was much more predictable.

The Accutron sold over four million units before it was discontinued in the year I graduated high school, 1977. By then, quartz digital watches were making a minute a month look amateurish. And their prices were nosediving, as well.

But the Bulova Accutron stands today as an innovation that provided the most accurate wristwatches in the world for over fifteen years. Pretty remarkable stuff from a brilliant man who used to scrounge through the city dump for his raw materials.

The BUFF: a Timeless Design

The year was 1945. The United States had just won World War II, but had already seen the writing on the wall for the next potential conflict. The Russians had proven to be valuable allies during war against the Axis powers, but now that it was over, the basic philosophical differences between the two nations were standing out more and more. Russia was now considered the Next Big Threat.

The B-29 had won the war with Japan, both figuratively and literally. Besides carpeting Japan and Japanese-held islands with conventional ordinance, B-29’s also dropped the two atomic bombs which caused the Japanese, for whom surrender was not an option, to give up.

But the Powers that Be were looking ahead. They had already commissioned a replacement for the B-29, the B-50. But they wanted a bomber with enough range to reach anywhere in the world from United States bases. They wanted the Russians to be afraid, VERY afraid, of what might rain down from above should they cause any threat to democracy.

Thus began a competition among aircraft manufacturers in 1945. They were to produce plans for a long-range bomber that would fill the bill.

Boeing won the contest, and was commissioned to begin producing a bomber with piston-driven engines. But it wasn’t long before everyone concerned realized that such an aircraft would prove unsatisfactory.

Jet engines were improving in power and efficiency very rapidly. So Boeing was told to create a prototype that was jet-powered.

On April 15, 1952, the YB-52 flew for the first time. It was a swept-wing design with eight jet engines hung beneath its massive wings. The Air Force liked what they saw.

After a few more revisions, the B-52 was introduced to the general public on March 18, 1954. Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan Twining said: “The long rifle was the great weapon of its day. …Today this B-52 is the long rifle of the air age.” The words proved to be more prophetic that Twining would ever dream.

Pilots and crewmembers soon dubbed the plane “Buff.” The milatarese nickname was short for Big Ugly Fat “Fellow.” Use your imagination about that last word. But the term was affectionate, as the airplane was recognized as a quantum leap in design and functionality.

Just how great was this airplane? Well, longevity is the ultimate test of quality.

Major “King” Kong on a mission in his B-52

Imagine taking a 1955 Oldsmobile, considered a classic by automobile aficionados. Now, let’s install a GPS, night vision (no more pesky headlights), the most advanced and powerful engine that 2008 has to offer, and replace all of the analog instruments with state-of-the-art electronics. While we’re at it, let’s streamline the design a bit, but not so much that the car can’t be instantly recognized as being a design that is fifty years old. Now, imagine if this car could hold its own with the hottest BMW’s, Mercedes’, and Jaguars.

NOW you can begin to appreciate the timelessness of the B-52’s design.

In fact, the airplane, which has not been manufactured since October, 1962, is slated to remain in service until 2040. A total of 744 were manufactured, and today less than 100 continue to fly. But the small fleet provides unparalleled long-range service that the young whippersnapper designs can’t come close to. A large number of the grounded planes exist to provide replacement parts for those still flying.

The airplane also became a part of popular culture with many appearances in movies and television shows, perhaps the most memorable in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove.

The next time you look up and spot contrails high in the sky that are in formation, get out your binoculars. You may well spot some of the remaining B-52’s, unassumingly doing their job, as they have since Howdy Doody was on television.

Remote Controls for our TV Sets

We Boomers are buried in gadgets, as are all other generations running around in the early 21st century. In ten years, I’ve gone from reluctantly carrying a (heavy brick) cell phone to proudly sporting an Android phone that is more of a computer/multimedia center than anything else. We’ve seen TV’s go from huge boxes with tiny black and white picture tubes that cost a month’s worth of wages to inexpensive lightweight flat-panel screens with enough resolution to allow us to count every nose hair on our favorite actors’ visages. Our fathers would rejoice if they could cajole 100,000 miles out of a car without major engine and/or transmission work, my wife’s Camry is about to cross that hurdle and my only concern is whether it springs any microscopic oil leaks over the next few years.

Last night, while switching channels on my nice new 32″ high-def I have in my bedroom, it occurred to me what a sweet little device the TV remote has become, and how important it now is for our day-to-day activities.

The inventor of the device that would ultimately allow us to switch from USA to ESPN was, as you might have guessed (not!), the great Nikola Tesla.

The much-maligned inventor, who was always getting upstaged by more ruthless rivals, in 1898 demonstrated a device which would remotely control a powered model boat.

The remote that Tesla demonstrated used radio waves, and its principle would go on to power other models, particularly airplanes and cars.

In 1950, Zenith began selling TV’s that came with “Lazy Bones” controllers, which allowed fathers to switch channels with lots of clicks and gear noises, as the big dial on the TV would rotate its way to the requested spot. The remote itself quickly became known as the “clicker” due to its own loud action.

The Lazy Bones was connected to the TV via a wire. it wasn’t until 1955 that wireless remotes became available. The “Flashmatic” used simple light to trigger a photocell on the idiot box, which unfortunately could be triggered by any other visible light that was shined directly at it.

In 1956, the “Zenith Space Command” was invented, using high-frequency sound to do the job. One downside was that all sorts of ultrahigh frequency sounds were present in the world, and they could switch your channels without your input. Another was that the remote would drive your dogs crazy!

Remote-controlled TV’s were a very pricey item. It took the addition of six vacuum tubes to allow the fancy wireless remotes to do their thing. It wasn’t until 1960 that TV remotes became much more affordable. That was because transistors became popular in replacing the expensive, short-lived tubes. But amazingly, the ultrasonic remote control would continue to dominate until the early 80’s.

In 1980, a Canadian company was formed called Viewstar, Inc. They began marketing a cable TV box that came with a revolutionary remote control which operated on infrared light rather than super-high sound frequencies.

It was an instant hit, and there must be a special shrine in doggy heaven for engineer Paul Hrivnak, the mastermind behind the new device, which would allow TV channels to be changed without filling the ether with noise pollution.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to picture a world where the TV, the cable box, the DVD player, etc. would have to be manually operated. Many of us use a single remote which performs a variety of functions and which controls a plethora of devices.

In our childhoods, however, it was a rare and amazing sight to see an individual, a “Lazy Bones” if you will, operate a television with a clicker.

The Advantages of Low-Tech

As I attempt to put this column together, I’m struggling with a number of technological issues. First of all my rather expensive Cox internet connection has been up and down all morning. It wouldn’t do any good to call tech support because I’m just not in the mood to try to convince whatever third-worlder that answers the phone that I’m an experienced geek armed with a CCNA, and have already tried turning the modem off and on.

Additionally, the mailing process stopped on my leased server on which resides this site and a few others that belong to me. I must time the release of this piece to coincide with my (knowledgeable and competent, thank heavens) jtlnet.com tech support getting things straightened out there, in order for my new column notification to make it out to my subscribers.

In short, despite me getting up at 5:30 in order to get some serious internet work done, here it is two hours later and I’m just getting started.

With that, I thought an apt subject for today’s column would be to reminisce on how little tech support issues were a pain back when we were kids.

The first, and foremost, electronic item that sadly was prone to downtime was the one-eyed-monster, aka the TV set.

The TV sets of the 60’s were more reliable than the original models of the early 50’s.

That’s not saying a whole lot.

The state of electronics in the Decade of Change was pretty much not solid, so to speak. Nowadays, the thousands, millions, or even, in the case of computers, billions of tiny connections that are required in order for magical things to take place on the gadgets we use are created on infinitesimal pieces of silicon. The miniaturization of the CPU has been one of mankind’s proudest accomplishments. My Android phone has more processing power than a 1960’s mainframe computer that filled a room and cost a quarter of a million 1960’s dollars.

But back to my non-solid remark, I’m referring to the physical makeup of electronic parts themselves. Solid-state means that there are no moving parts. Everything is done via silicon chips. Back in the day, it was electronic tubes that determined whether or not Leave It to Beaver would be paying our living room an afterschool visit.

And if a tube in the mix failed somewhere (there were a bunch of them, I remember popping off the fiberboard back of the TV and having a look a few times), that TV would sit idle, or perhaps have sound but no picture, or maybe the image on the screen was distorted into nothing but unwatchable video gibberish.

The repairman was busy, we weren’t the only one in town with a TV full of hot glass tubes, so it usually meant a few days with nothing to do but go outside and play, or stay inside and do the same thing, or read, or listen to the radio.

Poor us.

The only other high-tech device in the house was one which my grandparents, born in central Texas prior to 1890, likely didn’t see until they were old enough to be filled with wonder by its sight: the telephone.

Telephone service in Miami, Oklahoma was quite reliable, as I recall. It wasn’t until our 1968 move to the wilds of southwest Missouri that the rigors of spotty phone service made themselves manifest. We didn’t even get a phone until many months after we moved into our converted barn-farmhouse. It took that long for service to reach our rural area. And once we finally got it, all it took for it to disappear was a strong wind blowing a branch across that tiny aerial wire somewhere between us and the main switch, several miles away.

Phone outages really weren’t that big a deal for me, our service only covered the Missouri side, any calls to Arkansas (where most of our friends and acquaintances lived) were long-distance, and believe you me, back in 1969, you were careful about how many long distance calls you made, especially if you were a nine-year-old kid with a Norwegian father.

But the frequent outages did cause mom a lot of anguish, maybe she watched too many Hitchcock films where bad things happened after the phone went dead.

The point is that life very much went on if the TV or phone went on the fritz back then. Dad could still earn a living at his truck garage. Mom could still go visit a neighbor. And I could always read a book or play.

Flash forward to the high-tech world which were were promised was coming in grade school (and they hit it on the nose, although the flying car is still MIA): something we couldn’t even envision in our wildest imaginations back then, an internet outage, can wreak havoc.

I sure hope you get to read this column. And I also hope you get an emailed notification of it, assuming you signed up for it.

The 7up Flickering Can Light

Hey there cola hearted woman
Come and drink from my loving cup
It will melt your cola heart babe,
Cause it is filled with 7up

7up embarked on the Uncola approach with its ads starting about 1970. They went straight for the youth (that would be US!) with its commercials featuring bright lights, rock and roll, and promises of romance.

The one featuring the can light stuck vividly in my mind.

My oldest brother’s wife actually bought me one of the dancing filament 7up lights. I was mesmerized by its rapid flickering, particularly in a dark bedroom with WLS on the radio.

The flickering filament wouldn’t last very long before burning out. And, they were expensive to replace. So most 7up can lights, mine included, ended up with regular bulbs in them.

I was recently delighted to find under my house (built in 1972) a 7up can that looks exactly like the one in the illustration. Perhaps I’ll turn it into a lamp someday.

The Dripping-Oil-Venus Lamp

Ah, the avocado-green-era we all knew and loved, aka the 70’s. The turbulent 60’s were still fresh in our collective memories. But in 1975, the Vietnam War was officially over. Protests were a thing of the past. Nobody had been assassinated in a long time. It was a time of peace and love like we had wished for in the Woodstock era.

So what did we do? We grew our polyester carpets long, We quit turning on, and instead, the country’s youth turned to much more mild-tempered grass as the illegal drug of choice. And the keyword of the laid-back years following the breakup of the Beatles was MELLOW.

So what did we buy with our extra bucks during the mid-to-late-70’s?

Oil-dripping rain lamps.

These bronze-tinted plastic liquid-pumping sources of illumination were sold by the droves in the era that immediately preceded disco music. When you think of a fondue party, you think of a Venus rain lamp providing subtle illumination on the goings-on.

Besides, the illicit effects of inhaling smoke produced by the dried leaves of plants of the cannibas family were significantly enhanced by visual stimuli like drops of oil slowly spiraling down plastic tendrils, or so I am told.

Anyhow, the dripping rain lamps experienced a rather short lifespan, especially when compared to the ever-popular Lava Lamp. The Seven-Up flicker light would be more of an apt comparison, as their reign was only about a year or so.

But they had a quirky appeal all their own. Even though the pump that sent the oily rain to the virtual heavens of the lamp’s lid was prone to breaking down and needing replacement, the lamps’ owners loved them.

Here’s to a short-lived period of time when gas prices were falling, when war was not a regular subject of the nightly news, and when we had some free time and bucks to spend on watching little droplets of oil surrounding a plastic statue.

Stretched Pop Bottles

Stretched pop bottle (Like, very obscure!)

Thanks to Awkward Family Photos for reminding me of this one. Remember walking into the houses of friends and seeing these stretched pop bottles? They definitely had a youthful appeal, so it may have been in the bedroom of a teenager where they might be most readily spotted.

I couldn’t find any history on who first heated up a 7Up bottle and stretched the neck (it was usually 7Up, as I recall). But I know that you couldn’t attend a county fair or carnival in the early 70’s without seeing them offered as prizes at game booths. Stephen C Jackson invented and sold a machine that would make the process easier (and apparently made a mint doing so!).

They might be twisted into spirals, or they might simply be elongated. The straight ones were perfect as vases for long-stemmed flowers made of paper or plastic.

Many had lids, and what was apparently the original contents inside. No doubt they were uncapped, emptied, altered, and refilled and carefully recapped.

The pop bottles stood up well to such abuse, because they were built to be refilled literally hundreds of times. The glass was thick and of high quality.

Looking back, pop bottles were a pain. They cost an extra two cents (unless you brought one to trade in), and needed to be saved afterwards, unless one was so wealthy that he or she didn’t mind squandering enough money to buy two pieces of Dubble Bubble.

But oh, what wonderful artistic statements could be made with them!

Speaking of the fairs, that was actually the ONLY place you could find these puppies “new,” as I recall, but a ready supply of them could be found at neighborhood garage sales. In appreciation of the artistic factor, they would generally be sold at more than face value. Of course, you’d be hard pressed to find a grocery store that would take such a bottle in and pay you two cents for it.

The stretched bottles can still be found, but the problem is not just that they are scarce, it’s that pop bottles in general are now rarities. Sure, you can pay a premium price at the grocery store and get a six-pack of 6 oz. Cokes in a carton, but check out the thin glass they are made of. Nope, that’s not the Real thing.

So the next time you’re out yard-saling, keep an eye out for these vintage pieces of Americana. You might get lucky and grab yourself a piece of history that once resided in a youthful bedroom circa 1971.