irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 36 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Pong Comes to Town

I vividly remember when I first saw the marvel of the 1970’s that was called Pong. I walked into the Rogers, Arkansas bowling alley in 1974, shortly after I got my motorcycle license and was enjoying the freedom of getting around on my own for the first time. There, among the pinball machines and pool tables, sat a table with a clear glass top. Under the glass was a TV screen showing a dot of light being hit back and forth between two flat bars of light. It was obvious that it was an electronic clone of ping-pong.

This was pretty amazing stuff. Arcade games all had one thing in common: they were machines. They consisted of plastic and metal parts that worked via gears, belts, and the like. A car driving game consisted of a little car on a stick that moved back and forth as you “steered” it through obstacles that were attached to a moving belt. Baseball was a game where a ball came rolling at the home plate, and you swung by operating a plastic bat that sent the ball back onto the field.

Suddenly, before me sat a game that was completely electronic! The quarters were practically jumping out of my pocket.

Pong first appeared as a release of arcade games by Atari in 1972. Tennis was a natural first choice for digitization. After all, way back in 1958, a tennis game similar to Pong was created by Willy Higganbottham, only viewed like you were sitting at half court at ground level.

By 1976, Pong games were everywhere. And there were generally people playing on every one you saw. You could also buy home versions that turned many a TV set into a tennis court.

About this time, more sophisticated games started coming out, and Pong began fading away. But its very simplicity ensured that it would always be around in the form of computer games.

For everything you would ever want to know about Pong and its history, check out http://www.pong-story.com/

Pointy Glasses

In my photo albums from the 60’s, every woman over the age of thirty is wearing a pair of these pointy glasses.

These were quite the craze among the WWII generation, that is, our mothers and aunts. My mom had at least three pairs of them, which she was always losing and imploring me to help her find.

However, the glasses were also a hit with many of the younger generation as well. Pointy glasses and stirrup pants adorned at least a few nubile figures in advertisements of the day.

All of my grade school teachers wore them, too. In fact, Mrs. Finley looked pretty hot in them!

Then, I would see a picture of my sweet Aunt Leah, and I would be brought back to earth.

Most of my aunts (and my mom) moved on to big plastic in the 70’s. But many who have reached their golden years continue to wear the 1960’s-signature pointy glasses. Here’s to all of them.

Plastic Pink Flamingos

Sometimes, our childhood Boomer memories are of things that never went out of style, that continue to exist in an unchanged state today.

That is the fortunate case with plastic pink flamingos that our mothers would plant around the big concrete birdbaths in the back yards that we had. Odds are that you, or your kids, have a set of them that are pretty much identical to their 1950’s ancestors.

That’s because pink plastic flamingos have a staying power that transcends faddishness. Over their lifetimes, they have been gone from status symbols to tasteless icons of White Trash, and everywhere in between. But despite whatever social status they may have presented, they have always stubbornly existed in large numbers.

It all began with the building boom that existed with the pre-Depression economy of the 1920’s. Tens of thousands of real estate speculators and tourists headed to our “tropical” state: Florida. They spent their money on lots and beachfront property. Many brought home souvenirs bearing pictures of a bizarre pink bird that lived there – the flamingo.

Displaying flamingos implied that you, too, were a Florida investor. Everyone wanted flamingo decorations, and the American business machine was more than happy to provide them.

Wallpaper, gift wrapping paper, fabrics, product packaging, and much more began being decorated with images of pink flamingos.

But it wasn’t until 1952 that pink flamingos first ventured out into midwestern lawns. The Union Plastics Company of Massachusetts introduced a pink flamingo lawn ornament. The first ones were simply flat representations on a stick leg. Nothing too intriguing about that. They tried making three-dimensional styrofoam models the next year that sold better. However, if the yard in which they resided contained a dog or two, many of them were quickly shredded to bits by the playful canines.

Like the helpful uncle in The Graduate, a magic word popped up in Product Development: plastics.

The first atomic-pink molded plastic lawn flamingo went on sale in 1957. The brightly-colored durable birds were a smash hit, and millions of American housewives, including my own dear mother, went out and bought them. Many a 1960’s era photo of the back yard included the ubiquitous flamingos dutifully standing tall in the grass.

But as we drew into the 1970’s, the pink plastic flamingo began to take on an air of disgrace, not unlike the stereotypical black jockey ornaments also seen across white America. Indeed, pink flamingos were as White Trash as abandoned cars in the side yard.

That tone was picked up on by people who like to do what I do: stir the pot. If snooty neighbors looked down on pink plastic flamingos, there was only one thing to do: Go buy some!

Flamingos were back on the must-have list by the mid 80’s (with lots of help from the mega-popular Miami Vice), and have pretty much stayed there. Indeed, their trashy reputation they gained in the 70’s makes them more appealing than ever now. In fact, one of urban America’s most loved practical jokes is to “flock” your neighbor, i.e. put dozens of plastic pink flamingos in their front yard during the night. It’s a good-natured shock to their system when they step out in a bathrobe to get the morning paper and are confronted with a sea of pink birds.

Many towns have a business or two that specializes in the undercover planting of flocks of flamingos.

So here’s to a bit of Americana that has survived trendiness, the judgments of the self-righteous, and the test of time.

Phone Booths

Ah, the services that we grew up with we took for granted would always exist. The guy at the gas station would always be willing to throw in some nice freebie just so we would continue to buy his fuel. Your favorite AM station would continue to blast great rock and roll music across the country after dark. And you could always duck into a phone booth to make a call insulated from the elements and noise of the street.

Individual telephone booths still exist, but the ones that do have been in place for many years. As they decay, they are being removed, to be replaced by small standalone kiosk phones, or perhaps not being replaced at all.

After all, we all carry cell phones nowadays, don’t we?

Telephone booths first began showing up in American city street corners late in the 19th century. Besides providing a nice shelter for making a call, they also isolated the user and the outside world from each other, necessary for the welfare of both. The noise outside was a distraction for the caller, but he/she also had to practically shout into the phone to get their lossy signal to the other end at a volume discernible to the callee.

Phone companies were making good money from phone booth customers, so they began proliferating all over the country. By the 60’s, a phone booth could be seen at practically any corner grocery, gas station, or supermarket, as well as many busy street intersections. It seemed that you were never more than a few hundred feet away from a phone booth.

It became a part of American culture. We all know where Superman preferred to change his wardrobe. Phone booths became familiar places for plot twists and high drama in movies and television shows. And of course, the opening scene of Get Smart would feature Don Adams disappearing in a phone booth in order to get into CONTROL headquarters. Plus, college students of the 50’s delighted in seeing just how many individuals that could be stuffed into them at one time.

But we Boomers used them for their actual purpose, as well. I made hundreds of phone calls from booths. Many times, it was for the purpose of getting a little privacy (as in a homebound teenager calling a young lady ;-). But when you were away from home in the 60’s and 70’s, making a phone call meant finding a phone booth. You simply didn’t have any other options.

The numbers of phone booths in the US peaked in the late 60’s. They were expensive, and also not very accessible to the handicapped. Their days were clearly numbered. Free-standing telephone pedestals would usually replace phone booths that had become decrepit, as they were wont to do. Indeed, phone booths were often pretty disgusting places to be. Grime and trash would build up in their confines, and who had the job of keeping them clean? Nobody, that I can recall, except perhaps nearby business owners.

A few phone booths persist. Perhaps you have one somewhere close to where you live.

If so, slip inside, drop a quarter into the slot, and make a call for old time’s sake. Who knows, for just a moment, you might be able to take a little trip in time back to when gas was cheap, Sullivan was on Sunday nights, and JFK’s death was still recent enough to hurt. Pretty good investment of 25 cents, wouldn’t you say?

The Penny Scale at the Drug Store

There weren’t many things that a Boomer kid could spring for without bugging mom or dad for a nickel. Basically, such an item had to cost a penny. While nickels were hard for a kid to come by, pennies could be found in all sorts of places. You might spot one or two in the kitchen junk drawer. Digging in the dirt could possibly uncover one. It wasn’t unusual to spot a cent lying on the sidewalk.

So what could a kid do with a single penny, besides springing for a miniature Tootsie Roll?

He could take advantage of a finely-tuned scientific instrument that could be found in many small-town locations, drug stores in particular. He could spring for getting weighed.

The penny scale was a wonderfully massive thing to a kid. It was big, heavy, and stable. And it was just tall enough that it made a kid feel big to be able to see the weight window. Plus, a child with a penny could become a paying customer with no help from a parent, something that would make him feel grown up.

The penny scales were produced by the hundreds of thousands during the Great Depression, mainly (in the US) by rivals Peerless Scale Company and National Scale Company.

If a guy could scrape fifty bucks together during the 1930’s, he could make some serious money. That was the price of a brand new penny scale. Placing it in a well-traveled location could result in a cool 50-100 bucks a month. That was a pretty amazing turnaround on a modest investment! It’s hard to imagine that anyone ever got rich through penny scales, but they made for many a wealthy Depression-era entrepreneur.

After all, even in the economic darkness, EVERYBODY had a spare penny!

By 1950, inexpensive bathroom scales were readily available to consumers. Thus began the gradual disappearance of the ubiquitous street-corner scale.

But many businesses still had 40+ year-old scales in use in the 60’s. And hey, if they were bought and paid for, why not let them earn a few dollars per month?

Sadly, in the years since, they have pretty much vanished. So have the friendly corner drugstores that were the last havens of the massive weight-measuring machines. I defy you to spot a penny scale at Walgreen’s.

I recall that the scales would typically have a metal shade that would block the weight reading. Dropping a penny in the slot would cause it to move aside. If you really strained, you might be able to see your weight through a small crack that wasn’t covered by the shade.

The fancier models that would give you your fortune would have two movable shades, the second one being dislodged by a considerably more dear nickel. I’m not sure I ever wanted to know my fortune that badly, when I could get a Payday to munch on for the same price.

Other scales that I remember had trivia questions or horoscopes available in addition to your weight.

You can still find antique penny scales for sale. They have become hot collectibles, though, so don’t expect to obtain one for the original 50-dollar price tag.

For me, I’ll just have to close my eyes and take a virtual trip back to the Rexall Drug on Miami’s Main Street circa 1967. It feels good to drop my own penny in and become a paying customer.

Party Lines

If you grew up in a city, the subject of today’s column may not ring any bells, so to speak. But if you grew up in small town America, or perhaps grew up in the country, you no doubt remember the concept of a party line.

As America was wired for telephone service, it was impossible to give everyone their own private line. So neighbors would share a single connection, each having their own phone number. Strange stuff, but it made sense to Ma Bell.

Now consider what was required to complete a phone call in Centerton, Arkansas circa 1971: A line, shared by ten or so households, would have to be unoccupied. Otherwise, the caller would get a busy signal.

That meant that if you had a neighbor who liked to yak, you would miss lots of calls. Not good.

Of course, we had a neighbor lady who loved talking on the phone. And, more than once, she had to be tactfully told that an important call was expected, and could she please hang up for a while. And no, she didn’t like being asked AT ALL.

I don’t know why. She would enjoy listening in on the conversations of others almost as much as she loved having her own.

Party line users soon became adept at knowing the telltale signs that another neighbor was listening in. The call, particularly if long distance, would have line noise mixed in with the other person’s voice. However, a nosy neighbor’s breathing, etc. would come in crystal clear.

I grew up with three different party lines. The first one was when we moved to southwest Missouri, three miles up a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. We lived there for nearly a year before we even GOT a phone! It took that long for the phone company to run new wires. Important calls would be made from a pay phone at a store on the main highway. So the nuisance of other neighbors using the same line was welcome, after being cut off from the world!

At least our phone rang independently, on all of the party lines we had. We visited a friend once whose phone rang several times an hour. I asked her why she didn’t answer it, and she told me that her ring was “two shorts and a long.” That’s when I noticed that the rings were in different patterns, sort of like Morse code.

Imagine getting used to constantly ringing phone in your house, to be ignored 90% of the time!

Nowadays everybody has their own connection. By 2004, there were about 5000 homes hooked up to party lines, but 90% of THOSE had only one party. Weird, I know, but that’s how the phone companies classify them. So in reality, about 500 families still have to wait for the line to clear before they can talk.

My problem is the opposite one: I have TOO STINKING MANY phone lines! I still have a land line, because it comes with the DSL. But I also have that lovely little cell phone that always seems to go off at bad times.

However, we children of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s can recall a time when making a call sometimes meant politely asking a neighbor to hang up, and then making sure she STAYED hung up!

Keeping the Grass Mowed

One of the things I remember about Leave It to Beaver was the fact that Wally (and later, the Beav) had to push one of those rotary mowers like the one to the left. That was a relic that I don’t remember, myself. My older brothers no doubt had to drive the gear-driven workout machine through our grass, but later faced a different challenge: trying to get a beat-up old machine to start.

I remember that every mower we had throughout the 60’s was old, and tough to get going. While I didn’t start mowing the lawn until I was about eleven (the summer of 1971 was my first one to do the weekly chore), I remember my brother Bill struggling to get our mower running. It had a Briggs and Stratton motor with what the manufacturer called a coffee grinder starter.

What you did was lift the handle on the top up and lay it open 180 degrees. This produced a crank which you turned like a coffee grinder, tightening a spring. When the spring was sufficiently compressed (i.e. when it got hard to crank the handle), you folded it back down and turned a cylinder-shaped release on the side of the mower. The spring would release, turning the engine a few revolutions and, in theory, starting it.

In fact, though, that mower, five or more years old, would NEVER start with the first crank. It usually required at least ten tries, with the air being filled with salty language in between each cranking session.

That mower was so unreliable that I could have fun endlessly cranking and releasing the starter spring with absolutely no danger of the mower actually coming to life. I have fond memories of that coffee grinder starter, although I’m sure my older brother doesn’t.

Fortunately, dad tired of mowers that wouldn’t start by the time I started mowing. We got mowers at estate auctions and from the want ads every time the current one would start acting up. Once, dad found a behemoth of a Yazoo high-wheel push mower. It must have weighed 150 lbs. It was ten years old, but Yazoos were built out of heavy duty materials ands would run a long time. The Aussies have a mower down under called the Victa that shares the same tough reputation. It was rough pushing that monster up our hilly yard’s slopes, though.

Dad never bought a new mower, to my knowledge. He got his first new one when the three of his sons went together and got him a nice Snapper in his golden years.

Of course, mowing wasn’t all there was to an immaculate lawn, circa 1967. There was also grass to trim around trees, bird baths, and such. If you were lucky, you had a little electric hand-held trimmer with oscillating blades. If not, you had a hand-powered clipper. Either way, you were down on your knees sweating profusely.

The first string trimmer was invented in 1971. It was electrical, which required a long extension cord. By the next year, both trimmers and extension cords sold briskly as we said goodbye forever to hand trimmers.

Nowadays, many of us Boomers take advantage of the plethora of lawn maintenance businesses with nicely competitive rates to let someone else do the work. Many of us have also reverted back to quiet rotary mowers, for our health’s sake and to keep the neighborhood tranquil. But most of us still fire up the power mower and do it ourselves. Me, I have a nineteen-year-old still in the nest who will do the job if I remind him regularly.

Hey, he’s lucky, too. His mower starts with the first pull.

Mood Rings

Technology was a fast-moving thing for us Boomers.

True, the quantum leaps in miniaturized electronics that take place every other day today are far greater than innovations were for us, but still, many completely new concepts were hatched during our heyday.

For example, during the late 1960’s, thermotropic thermometers became popular as hassle-free instruments to take nervous kids’ temperatures.

All you did was lay the little plastic strip on the sick child’s forehead, and the temperature would be magically displayed by a number that would show up against a dark background.

The technology used liquid crystals, which would align their molecules at various temperature ranges, thereby changing their colors.

A jewelry designer named Marvin Wernick observed a doctor using one of the magic thermometers in the late 60’s and envisioned a gold mine.

Wernick obtained some of the thermotropic material and placed a thin layer of it under a rounded glass face. Once the assembly was mounted on a ring base, the mood ring was born.

Wernick also penned a little blurb that was included with the ring, and the foundation was laid for a brand new craze.

The ring’s colors were to be interpreted thusly:

* Dark blue: Happy, romantic or passionate
* Blue: Calm or relaxed
* Blue-green: Somewhat relaxed
* Green: Normal or average
* Amber: A little nervous or anxious
* Gray: Very nervous or anxious
* Black: Stressed, tense or feeling harried

The whole thing was based on the temperature changes of human skin. Many of us fervently believed in the power of mood rings to display our emotional state to the world. Many of us figured out that the odds of taking an accurate temperature on a digit exposed to the environment were slim, and besides, our skin temperature really didn’t have a whole lot to do with our state of mind.

Oh well, they were fun, they were cool, and they were cheap.

As the 70’s progressed, mood rings spread all over the nation, and much of the rest of the world.

Then, as all fads do, one day they began to be seen as passe. Sales slumped, they vanished.

Then, as many of those passe fads do, they began to be seen as retro and cool. They reappeared. Sales picked back up, although nowhere near the numbers during the 70’s.

Nowadays, a Google search for mood rings turns up all sorts of them offered for sale online cheap. For that matter, a trip to your local convenience store will likely reveal a display box full of them next to the cheap sunglasses and the faux-stimulants.

Boomer reader, why not grab yourself a mood ring for a couple of bucks? There aren’t too many fad items from our younger years so easily available. And you will be seen by the young kids currently running this world as being strangely retro-cool.

Mimeograph Machines

The Xerox copier made its debut in 1959, with the 914 model. It was a technological marvel that would scan a document, then spit out a nearly flawless copy.

It was also very expensive, and school budgets being what they were (and still are), that meant that teachers who wanted duplicate test papers or any other types of duplicated handouts needed to be adept at running something called a mimeograph machine. Generally, there would be one to share among several teachers.

I make lots of typos as I write these columns. I recognize most of them because Firefox underlines suspected goofs in red. All I have to do is right-click on the questioned word and I am offered suggested fixes, one of which is usually correct.

But teachers in the 60’s had to be PERFECT typists. That’s because there was no room for error, the first step in creating a mimeograph was to insert a waxed stencil into the typewriter, set it to punch letters directly onto the stencil, bypassing the ribbon, and DON’T make a mistake! If the teacher was writing up exams or graduation announcements the stencil could not be corrected. The expensive sheets had to be used very carefully so that the exams or announcements would be perfect on the first attempt.

Once the test was painstakingly typed out, the sheet was attached to a drum inside a hand-cranked mimeograph machine. Each turn of the crank drew a sheet of paper inside, where it was pressed against the stencil and ink would be printed matching the punched letters. The result was a duplicate of the original, albeit with extra lines caused by wrinkles and such on the stencil.

One of the delightful smells we enjoyed in the schoolroom was fresh mimeograph ink. I remember being handed a freshly printed test on a piece of paper that was slightly damp that smelled heavenly.

If you ever smelled a mimeographed page, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the smell, slightly chemical, is difficult to describe. But it delighted the entire class to receive the fragrant sheets.

Teachers, on the other hand, weren’t so crazy about the devices that produced them. Mimeograph machines were prone to various malfunctions. You could get ink on your hands or clothing. A rookie might put the stencil on the drum backwards, making a perfect copy of a test printed in mirror image. And the stencil could simply wear out, making the last tests unreadable.

But mimeograph machines were a part of our growing up, and if you could ever get your hands on one of those freshly printed sheets and smell its reassuring aroma, you would instantly be transported back to being eight years old again.

Making Ice in Metal Trays

What would a hot summer day be without a tall glass of iced tea? Or what would a bourbon on the rocks be without the rocks?

In the scheme of things that are essential to life, ice cubes probably rate quite a ways down the list. But as far as the enjoyment of life is concerned, ice cubes are as essential as fuzzy slippers, the love of the right person, or your team winning the World Series.

We Boomer kids can recall when ice cubes were strictly a hit-or-miss proposition. Theoretically, we had plenty of them in the freezer. But in practice, getting cubes out of those infernally buggy aluminum ice cube trays was an act of skill, blind luck, and the grace of the freezer gods.

Oh, and don’t forget the wrath that would come down from mom and dad when a tray was left with one or two cubes of ice in it, instead of being refilled as we knew we should have done.

The ice cube tray’s invention is shrouded in a bit of mystery. According to one online source (about.com),

In 1914, Fred Wolf invented a refrigerating machine called the DOMELRE or DOMestic ELectric REfrigerator. The DOMELRE was not successful in the marketplace, however, it did have a simple ice cube tray and inspired later refrigerator manufacturers to include ice cube trays in their appliances as well.

No images of that original ice cube tray exist, nor even any detailed descriptions, as far as I can tell. But it wasn’t made of plastic, that much we know for sure.

As the twentieth century wore on, ice cube trays were made from lightweight, plentiful aluminum. A mechanized contraption was devised which would either expel the cubes when a lever was lifted, or when each individual divider was forced ahead by a fraction of an inch, releasing a single pair of cubes.

That last model was nearly impossible for a seven-year-old kid to operate, by the way.

And of course, the aluminum was pretty fragile. Many an ice cube tray divider was tossed in the trash after losing its ability to expel cubes due to stretching or breaking of the metal.

And that meant that the actual tray, which was still intact and %100 operational, would gain a second life as a catch-all in dad’s garage.

Somewhere along the line, plastics took over, even as Mr. McGuire predicted to Benjamin in The Graduate. The first plastic ice cube trays would get brittle after just a few uses, but by the time they broke, better ones were already on the market.

And as aggravating as the ever-snapping-plastic trays were, they still weren’t as annoying as an aluminum ejecting mechanism that broke in your hands as you were eagerly anticipating big ice cubes in your drink.

Nowadays, most of us get ice automatically made for us in our high-tech freezers. How sweet it is.

But let’s face it. As nice as our automatic ice makers are, they make for really lousy catch-all trays in the garage when they finally break down.