irememberjfk_l6fq3c – Page 39 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

How Did Our Dads Play Golf With That Equipment?

One of my dad’s spare time passions, and, by extension, one of mine, was golf.

His preferred course was the Miami Country Club (not a member, BTW). It was a nine hole layout that I never played. However, I did earn many a quarter (worth approximately $200 in kid bucks of the 60’s) for dutifully pulling his clubs around and staying (mostly) quiet.

I was too short to effectively take a real swing. However, he did allow me to take putts when there was nobody behind us to get irritated at a kid messing around on the green ahead of them.

Dad had an Acushnet Bull’s Eye putter, a classic design that is still manufactured and still popular. He also had a McGregor Tommy Armour Ironmaster, nowadays a valued collectible which I am proud to still own.

He was a bogey golfer who once shot a nine hole round at even par. What makes that feat all the more remarkable is that he did it with 60’s vintage equipment.

Golf equipment evolution had remained pretty stagnant since the quantum leap of replacing the old torque-plagued hickory shafts of the Bobby Jones era with steel versions that didn’t force you to close the club face at setup in order to achieve squareness at impact.

By the time our fathers went to war, the golf clubs they left in their garages back home had the newfangled steel shafts.

60’s era golf ball, out of round out of the box, and prone to getting cut by a topped swing

So when dad headed for Baxter Springs, KS to play the course there (another favorite haunt of his), he took along his trusty state-of-the-art Wilson Staff blades and laminated woods. He also had a bunch of Titleists in the bag, which set him back about a dollar apiece at the pro shop.

I would head for the rough and pick up lost golf balls at every opportunity. Dad would pay me a dime apiece for mint-condition examples of top-end brands like Spalding Dots, MaxFlis, or Tourneys. And a primo still-shiny Titleist might fetch as much as a quarter! That bought a lot of candy.

However, most of the orphaned balls I located had big “smiles” on them. Those were nasty cuts that were caused by “cold-topping”, i.e. swinging too high and striking the ball with the sharp lower edge of the iron.

Those laminated woods would make the ball fly, but they had the same basic flaw as did the blade irons: a sweet spot approximately half the size of a gnat’s wazoo.

Dad had sprung for a Kenneth Smith customized driver made of a block of pure persimmon. That was the same material that Arnold Palmer used in his woods. Of course, Arnie could also afford his own jet.

Persimmon woods, with a sweet spot the size of a gnat’s rear end

The persimmon was inherently harder than the cheaper laminated wood, and theoretically made the ball fly farther. It definitely had a different feel that was worth the extra bucks, in the opinion of 60’s golfers.

Dad had a pretty pure swing for a weekend golfer. He played a natural draw, an accomplishment in itself. When he connected, he could send the ball out as far as 240 yards.

Nowadays, we Boomers play with cavity backed irons that allow badly mis-hit shots to still travel a respectable distance and fly pretty straight. We swing feather-light metallic woods the size of travel trailers that routinely allow us to pop cut-proof balls with scientifically-enhanced spin 270 yards with ease. Steel shafts? How passe. We use graphite models that have various inherent properties that cause them to flex exactly the right amount at exactly the proper locations to cause the ball to fly as far and as straight as possible.

If you’re lucky enough to still be able to enjoy a round of golf with your old man, ask him if he misses the equipment he played with back when LBJ was in the White House.

Hot Lather Machines

What a happy coincidence. The younger members of the Boomer generation began shaving at roughly the same time that a formerly familiar device began appearing in our bathrooms: the hot lather machine.

Shaving is a rite which few of us guys enjoy. I’m sure you ladies enjoy it even less. But if you could replace that ice-cold lather with deliciously warm stuff, that would certainly make things more bearable, right?

Well, for a stretch in the 70’s, much of the world thought so. Thus, millions of hot lather machines, the most famous a model by Shick, were sold in drug stores and the like to those of us looking to make the daily shaving rite a bit less dreary.

My own first experience with hot lather started at the barber shop. The barber I used would finish up my haircut by getting hot lather from a big chrome machine and spreading it just over my ears, then taking a straight razor to remove all traces of hair about a quarter inch above them. That hot lather felt wonderful, but only for a moment. It quickly reached room temperature, but not before filling me with a feeling of temporary delight.

There were a variety of hot lather machines available during the Decade of Polyester, but Shick was by far the most popular and familiar to us. It used a lather manufactured especially to be heated up. It reached a higher temperature than the generic models which would accept almost any can of shaving cream. And it certainly received more advertising time than its competitors. I remember many a TV commercial extolling the benefits of using the Shick Hot Lather Machine.

But there certainly were others. One was a little ball that snapped on top of a standard can. I believe it was called the Shick Hot Top. There really isn’t a whole lot of info out there about hot lather machines sold in the 70’s.

GE made a machine that let you put almost any brand you preferred into it to be heated up for your pleasure. I believe that it was the machine that I once owned.

I enjoyed my hot lather machine, to be sure. But one day, I stopped using it. I’m really not sure why. Perhaps I had grown impatient with waiting for it to warm up. Eventually, it was relegated to the garage shelf, where it sat until sold at a yard sale, as were most of the other machines that were eagerly snatched up by us in the 70’s.

A hot shave is still a delightful experience, well, it’s better than a cold shave, let’s put it that way. But the days of fierce competition among manufacturers of hot lather machines are definitely over.

One thing I DID discover in researching this piece is that some men are quite passionate about the shaving experience. One blog went into a lot of detail as to the proper technique to get a perfect shave, including using a genuine Badger brush to apply the hot lather and letting it set for a while before actually shaving.

Yes, you can still obtain a Conair hot lather machine. They make models that range from a spiffy chrome model that eats up the better part of a c-note to a more basic black version that goes for less than twenty bucks.

Hmm, I’m tempted. But then again, that would mean that this wired type A would have to wait around for that lather to get hot, all over again.

Maybe I need to cut back a bit on the coffee? 😉

Stereos of the 70’s!

The 70’s was a decade known for lots of wild and crazy stuff that came and went in a flurry. I mean, what was hotter, then colder, than disco music? Other uniquely 70’s crazes that appeared for a bit, shined brightly, than vanished included fondue pots, macrame, and CB radios.

Another 70’s debut, but one that didn’t vanish as much as it evolved into smaller, lighter incarnations, was hi-fi stereo systems.

When we were kids of the 50’s and 60’s, we got along fine listening to transistor radios and portable record players. But as we became teenagers and young adults in the 70’s, why, it was time for some serious musical upgrading to take place! And manufacturers of huge wooden-encased components were more than happy to help us out.

One of the first things that I became aware of early in the 70’s was that sound could be heard in absolutely amazing stereo. My mom had a venerable record player console that sounded pretty darned good, with its 12″ woofer providing bass thump that was very impressive despite its its 50’s vintage. But even though it had the word “stereo” on a plastic label on its front panel, it was most assuredly a monophonic system.

I listened to Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run (still one of my favorite albums) on my oldest brother’s headphones about 1972. The stereo sound made me determined that I would have my own sweet sound system as soon as possible.

I began with a Radio Shack FM/cassette deck with satellite speakers in 1975, shortly after I landed my first job sacking groceries. It set me back $199, and a component turntable was another 50 or so bucks.

It sounded great, but lacked deep bass. So two years later, having graduated high school and begun working full time, I sent a check for $1200 to an outfit called Illinois Audio for a Pioneer system.

My dad thought I was nuts. He figured that check would be cashed and I would be ripped off. But within two weeks, a semi-trailer was in Bentonville, Arkansas with a bunch of big boxes inside that belonged to ME!

I’ll never forget the thrill I felt as I unpacked my 40 watt receiver, my Dolby cassette deck, my direct-drive turntable, my gorgeous HPM-40 speakers, and my high-end Koss Pro 4-AAA headphones that I had splurged for.

That stereo turned out to be a whale of an investment. It provided me with an amazing amount of pleasure and entertainment over the years, and a few years later, my brand-new wife was pleased that I had a decent sound system. Lord knows I didn’t have much else in the way of material things!

Nowadays, I do most of my listening to music in the car or on the computer (Carly Simon’s Spy sounds good through my Creative subwoofer system as I pen this piece). But I still have a bonzer home system, too. The last of my original Pioneer components to go were my HPM-40 speakers. They sold in a yard sale five years ago. My kids had managed to push both woofer cones in as they struggled to master the fine art of walking, but they still sounded good.

But as long as I live, I’ll never forget the ecstasy I felt as I unpacked my heavy, wooden-clad Pioneer stereo components and hooked them all together, then listening to that first rush of high-fidelity sound.

Hearing Your Own Voice for the First Time

One of the biggest shocks to hit us Boomer kids was hearing our voices recorded for the first time.

In the 50’s and 60’s, tape recorders were far from common. The devices were costly, and our fathers were too busy spring for pricey essentials like color televisions to consider spending as much as fifty hard-earned dollars on such a useless gadget.

But about 1968, a house guest brought over a gadget that would for the first time reveal to me what I would consider to be my high, pipsqueak voice: a portable tape recorder.

The human skull causes one’s own voice to reverberate and deepen before it reaches the ears of the speaker. Therefore, the untainted product as captured straight form its source invariably sounds higher than what one is used to.

Of course, nowadays, kids are used to hearing their own voices at a very young age. The debut of the camcorder in the early 1980’s saw to that. Plus, cassette decks became cheap and available during the decade previous to that, so that most households had a means to record to tape. And in this day and age of digital video and audio reproduction, it’s difficult to image a kid at the ripe old age of eight being shocked by the sound of his own voice.

But times were slower, simpler, and less technical when the Boomer generation was roaming the planet as children.

I remember that I was very curious as to what my recorded voice sounded like. So when the opportunity finally presented itself, I eagerly grabbed the microphone and started speaking.

I was quite distraught to hear a voice come out of the speakers that sounded like it was coming from a girl!

My fascination with my own voice continued as I grew older. I got my hands on a cassette deck when I was thirteen, and enjoyed reading the dialog from comic books into it, to be followed along later with the comic book in hand.

Yeah, I was a weird kid.

Speaking of recording one’s own voice, I haven’t forgotten about podcasts. I have turned into a Linux user and advocate, but unfortunately i have not yet found a solution to high-quality recordings with my current setup.

So here’s to a simpler day when things that we take for granted now, like cheap digital recording technology, were far off into the future.

Gumball/Novelty Machines

Some things never change. A tried and true idea that works will be recycled from generation to generation.

Thus is the case with the machine that dispenses small items for a price. Ancient Greek engineer and mathematician Hero of Alexandria devised a machine around 215 BC that would dispense holy water in temples for a coin. The concept was such a hit that it appeared again and again throughout human history.

And one such vending machine in particular has proven its historical mettle, so that it exists in essentially the same form today as it did in the 50’s and 60’s, when we saw it as children: the gumball/novelty machine.

Thus, when we take our grandchildren to the grocery store with us, we are likely to be asked for a quarter or two at the entrance, because the store manager has seen fit to plant a toy dispensing machine or two right where the little tykes can spot it as we walk in.

The strategy works. It always has, always will. Thus, each generation grows up with happy memories of feeding coins into a slot and twisting a handle to receive a prize.

We Boomers had a wide variety of machines at our disposal, which accepted amounts from a penny to a quarter.

The machines didn’t just use the idea of getting a prize for a nickel or so to attract our business. No, they would employ slightly nefarious means to get us to part with our precious coinage.

For instance, there was the classic bait-and-switch. A quarter machine was the high end device of the 60’s, so that’s where you would see the most outrageous examples of luring in the customer with one item, then having them depart with another entirely.

Typical gumball machine as seen everywhere in the 60’s

Take the capsule vending machine at the Miami, Oklahoma Bowling Alley, for instance. Inside its glass front was a piece of cardboard festooned with examples of, presumably, the toys that were contained within the translucent capsules, each available for a quarter. In the upper left corner was attached a real derringer! At least it looked real. It was a tiny firearm, small enough to fit nicely in a six-year-old’s hand. There was nothing about it that implied it was a toy, so naturally the word spread around town that you could obtain a genuine pistol for a quarter!

Of course, it wasn’t a real gun. In fact, it was highly unlikely that the toy, which would have retailed for a dollar or more, was ever found in the machine. Instead, taking a chance with a hard-begged quarter, I breathlessly open a plastic capsule to find a rubber monster’s face, animated by my thumb and index finger which fit into two little tubes in the back.

I remember that incident very clearly. I’m not sure why I recall that one occasion, out of hundreds of experiences with capsule machines, but I do.

Another form of temptation for kids was in putting penny gumballs into a machine that accepted nickels. A kid would willingly buy a penny piece of gum for five times the amount IF there were a few capsules inside with dime-sized items contained therein.

Presumably, truth-in-advertising laws have forced purveyors of machine-dispensed novelties to be more honest about what prizes a child might obtain with his coins. But even if they haven’t, kids can get the opportunity to learn the same lessons that we did at their age:

If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Grandma’s Wringer Washer

Today’s column will probably wake up a few long-dormant memory cells. In my case, it was my grandmother who had a wringer washer. But for many of you, it might have been dear old mom herself.

Keeping one’s clothes clean has been a challenge since clothing itself began being worn. The wealthy would have servants do their laundry, or perhaps would take it to a laundry business to be picked up later. The rest of society used rocks at the creek, or perhaps a tub and a washboard.

But in 1907, Maytag began marketing the Pastime. It was a hand-cranked washer, equipped with a flywheel to aid in the agitation of the clothes, which featured a wringer at the top so that the wash water could be extracted before the clothes were fed into a rinsing tub.

The wringer washer was high-tech stuff. No more endless hand-wringing of clothes! How much easier could life get?

Today, of course, wringer washers are largely unseen outside of antique shops. But it turns out that our grandmothers were actually green advocates before there even was such a movement. That’s because wringer washers use a fraction of the water and electricity (or gasoline, in some cases) that modern multi-cycle washers do.

You see, grandma would fill the washer with water and finely-shaved Fels Naphtha soap, them agitate the mixture so the soap would dissolve. Then, she would put the whites in and agitate for ten minutes or so. If the home had electricity, the more well-to-do would have an electric motor to do the job. Out in the country, a gasoline motor did the work. Of course, the less affluent turned a crank on the side.

Once the whites were done, they were wrung out and dropped into the bluing tub. The bluing made them look whiter. Then, another wringing and into the rinse tub.

In the meantime, the lighter colored clothes were being agitated in the same water the whites used! And when they were done, the darker colors went in. That’s three loads of clothing for the price of one load of soap and water!

The rinse water too was reused. So a family’s entire week’s worth of clothes could be laundered with the amount of water used to handle a single load in a modern washer.

No wonder some of our thrifty parents and grandparents were reluctant to give up their wringer washers.

By the 1960’s, few homemakers still used wringers. But it seemed that many of them couldn’t bear to throw away the reliable, economical devices either. Hence, the one I played with at my grandmother’s house in Mason, Texas. And many of my friends had wringer washers stashed in outbuildings, garages, and sometimes sitting outside.

They were fun for a kid to play with, too, although you didn’t want to get an arm caught in the rollers or you would get one ugly blister.

In researching this piece, I found a website (lehmans.com) that will sell you a Saudi Arabian made brand new wringer washer for about 900 bucks. It’s an exact remake of the classic Speed Queen. They also sell reconditioned Maytags with electric or gasoline engines!

So Boomers, if you really want to go green, follow the example of your grandmother. And you’ll have it much easier, too. Just pour in some liquid detergent. You won’t have to shave that Fels Naphtha soap anymore!

Giant Rockets and Subs in Comic Book Ads

How cynical we Baby Boomers are. And for good reason, too. After all, we devoured comic books like they were cotton candy. And the comics’ ten or twelve cent price was subsidized by advertising. But it wasn’t just advertising. It was huge, colorful, lavishly illustrated ads for things that, if we could persuade our parents to part with their hard-earned dollars so that we could obtain them, turned out to look nothing like the ads promised.

Take, for example, the six-foot Polaris submarines and rocket ships. My beloved Archie and Superman comics were profusely populated by half-page blurbs showing unbelievably real looking submarines and rocket ships available for a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars their real-life counterparts would cost.

What a bargain! What kid should be denied their very own submarine for a paltry $6.98? Just think how much fun it will be when we take that bad boy down to the lake and surface in the middle of startled swimmers!

Well, as we learned from any monkeys or dogs in teacups that we might have tried to obtain, the truth is often different from what the ads promised.

I never knew any kids who actually obtained the sub or rocket ship. But stories spread throughout Nichols Elementary School about a kid that someone else might have known who ordered one, only to have a big, flat package delivered to their home. The package was full of pre-cut cardboard and assembly instructions.

No rivets, no titanium, no nuclear powered propulsion. Just a big cardboard thing that, if left out in the rain, would quickly biodegrade into dirt.

I wouldn’t try surfacing under any surprised swimmers at the lake in that puppy if I were you.

Thus, the rest of us decided that hounding our parents for such a disappointment simply wasn’t worth it. Instead, we concentrated in sales pitches for more substantial items like, say, G.I. Joe’s.

However, that didn’t keep me from reading the ads over and over again. Part of me wanted to believe that the other kids had lied, that you really could receive a space-worthy vehicle for what you dad would spend to fill up the car two or three times. No wonder we didn’t trust The Man. We couldn’t even trust Superman.

But you know what? This amazing photo of a kid in an actual Polaris sub, taken in July, 1967 shows that the cardboard Polaris sub was a pretty stinking cool looking item. Check out how that conning tower raises and lowers!

So why did the sellers of rocket ships and submarines not just come clean with us and let us know what exactly it was that we were buying? Their sales might have been even more brisk, since the derisive talk at school about what you REALLY got for your $6.98 wouldn’t have been around to cause them (and, by association, all other advertisers) to be mistrusted.

Oh well. At least we Boomer kids got a dose of how the world really operates at a good young age.

Getting the Picture Perfect

One of the most familiar suburban sights used to be television antennae on the rooftops. You saw so many of them that they became invisible. In the town where I grew up, we had TV stations from 30 to 60 miles away that we watched. Two (later three, when a UHF station went on line in 1968) were north of us, about twenty degrees apart. The other three were in Tulsa, about 150 degrees to the left.

That meant our antenna had to be turned to get the best pictures. Those rooftop antennas were quite directional. They needed to be pointed directly at the transmission tower to get an optimal signal.

Channel seven in Pittsburg, Kansas, and channel twelve in Joplin, Missouri were close enough aligned that splitting the difference between them gave an acceptably sharp picture.

But if we wanted to watch Red Skelton, Ed Sullivan, or any other CBS offerings, we had to tune in channel six from Tulsa. That meant the antenna needed to be rotated.

My normally acute memory escapes me when I try to remember what dad did before we purchased a rotor. I know he did SOMETHING, because we watched the Tulsa stations frequently. Perhaps we just lived with snowy pictures. We had a black-and-white TV at the time, and the bicolor medium was much more forgiving of weak signals than its color counterpart.

But I do remember dad getting that rotor. It was immediately after purchasing our first color TV.

The problem with color TV and a misaligned antenna wasn’t the snow. It’s amazing how poor a picture we were willing to accept back then, in this day of 48″ plasma hi-def’s. No, the problem was that the color ITSELF would come and go with a less-than-optimal signal. And having the picture go from b&w to color and back in the course of a few seconds was simply too much to bear.

So, my thrifty father saw fit to invest a few bucks into having an installer come out and put a rotor on our antenna. It was powered by a controller with the Tulsa, Pittsburg, and Joplin alignments preset. You just turned a pointer to the desired location, and the rotor would obey with a “cachunk . . . cachunk” repeated until the light that marked the antenna’s actual direction would meet the pointer’s location. Presto! KVOO in perfect glory!

Rotors worked well for a while. Then, the quality of the rotor determining how long it would take, it would begin freezing up along its path of rotation. You could frequently get past the bad points by backing it up a bit and trying again. But eventually, it would freeze solid. Then, you had a perfect picture from somewhere (if you were lucky) and poor pictures from everywhere else.

Now, you were sunk. You weren’t about to go back to b&w, and you also weren’t going to tolerate color that came and went. So you had to spring for a new unit.

When the above scenario took place later at our home outside Pea Ridge, Arkansas, dad refused to give in. Our antenna pole went down alongside the house, so it was possible to rotate it manually. However, the antenna’s guy wires didn’t allow a full 360 degree turn. So we were still stuck watching Fort Smith’s channel five. But channel five showed all three networks in those days in an arrangement that seems strange today. Its audience decided through letters and phone calls what shows should be shown when. So one station showed shows from the Big Three, frequently switching from CBS top ABC to NBC during the course of a single evening!

But I missed the familiar faces for channel seven’s newscasts. I grew up listening to Vic Cox giving sports reports about the Oklahoma Sooners as well as Kansas and Kansas State. KFSM was OBSESSED with one team, the Razorbacks of Arkansas. And there was NO other team worth reporting on, in their opinion (and that of its audience, myself excepted).

So, I kept turning that antenna hard against those guys until one of them finally snapped off! FINALLY, I was able to get that blasted antenna pointed towards Pittsburg again. Vic Cox’s bald head was a welcome sight, and so was news about OTHER college teams.

Of course, that weakened antenna probably fell over soon after we moved away from that place.

Recently, I installed a small amplified multi-directional antenna in my attic which enables me to watch our local networks in hi-def, something that Dish Network unfortunately does not yet offer in my area. As I tuned into my local station and was now able to see every blade of grass on Augusta National’s fairways, I reflected on how I had ditched my antenna circa 1984, and had returned to it twenty-three years later.

However, I’m stopping short of installing a rotor.

Fun With Records

I had a close relationship with our phonograph records when I was a kid. Playing them on the portable player (it had a beautiful red plaid pattern on the outside) made me feel very grown up. It meant my parents and older brothers trusted me to listen to their records without damaging them. And as far as I know, I held up my end of the bargain.

There was a lot of fun to be had with records. Sure, you could listen to them at their intended speed. But things really rocked when you played them at different speeds.

We had no shortage of records at my house. I had a few kid records that had been handed down, Pinocchio and the like. My older brother had some 45’s. Mom had some 78’s from the 40’s. And we also had a few 33 1/3 albums.

I developed an appreciation for some music at an early age thanks to those old disks. It was really pretty eclectic. For instance, mom had an Ink Spots album that I loved because the cover had fake spots of ink superimposed over photos of the group. It was funky stuff, and I have a copy of the Best of the Ink Spots (in digital format) to this very day.

My older brother loved 60’s rock and roll, and thanks to his records, so did I. In fact, I fell in love with an old blues song circa 1967 that caused my parents much distress. It was House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals. Dad wasn’t crazy about his seven-year-old kid belting out a tune about a New Orleans bordello. BTW, that is still one of my favorite tunes.

I also recall Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter (Herman’s Hermits), I’m Telling You Now (Freddie and the Dreamers) and one of the more obscure Beatles tunes, Do You Want to Know a Secret.

I REALLY listened to those records. I mean both sides. A seven-year-old kid has no concept of an A and B side. I loved the flip sides, and remember many of them. For instance, Thank You Girl was the reverse of the Beatles 45.

But the fun really started when you got a few friends together in a room and played a 45 at 78. We all danced as fast as we could! Then we might play a 78 at 33 1/3. We would drag ourselves around the room in slow motion to the molasses-like songs.

Sometimes we couldn’t find any of those 45 inserts. But you could still carefully place a 45 in the exact center of the platter. But it was more fun to offset it deliberately. It made some pretty weird effects on the music.

My kids grew up listening to CD’s. Our grandkids probably know music as something you copy to and from flash drives and iPods. But we Boomers recall when you could have lots of fun with records. Or, you could just listen to them. Either way, both activities were pretty cool.

Fun with Cardboard Boxes

Parents have long been baffled by the strange phenomenon of giving their kids nice gifts, only to see them playing with the box the prize came in rather than the toy itself.

Well, I still have enough kid in me that I can remember what was so cool about playing with big cardboard boxes. You could make absolutely anything out of them! Your imagination was the limit. And they didn’t require assembly! Perhaps a bit of cutting here and there was needed to create just the right structures.

What a kid would do with a box depended largely on its size. A box just big enough to sit in would be, of course, sat in. But that was only the beginning. Sitting in a box might mean driving a race car, or flying a jet, or motoring a tank over the hills. Or, it might just be a good place to crash while watching TV.

Bigger boxes would make good forts. Perhaps a door would be cut in in one side so you could crawl in, and maybe a smaller slit carved for firing one’s weapons at the enemy.

And smaller boxes were also quite desirable to youngsters. G.I. Joe could sit in a miniature box in the same manner that his owner would do so. In fact, I remember my own G.I. Joe using the very box he came in for various wartime exploits.

Bot a box just a bit bigger could be made into Joe’s own fort. What was bonzer about that was that a passing airplane could drop a bomb on the structure and blow the hapless soldier to kingdom come.

Indeed, we kids could be quite sadistic with the plastic warrior. Sometimes the aftermath of such an explosion would involve removing a limb or two for effect as we recreated the horrors of war in our bedrooms. The arms would pop right back on, of course.

Then there were the garage-sized boxes. You would cut windows and a door big enough for a Tonka vehicle to pull inside. Fun stuff.

Playing with boxes is one of those memories we Boomer kids share with all other generations. Medieval children probably had their own version of boxes to have imaginative fun with.

It was fun watching my own kids play with the boxes that their toys came in, and I look forward to watching my grandkids do the same.

Fortunately, some things never change.