Gadgets – Page 11 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

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.

Flash Bulbs

If you were to time-travel back to the mid 60’s, you would find that photography was a pretty technically challenging affair. I mean, nowadays, we shoot auto-focused, auto-exposed, auto-flashed shots with our $100 digital cameras and see the results as soon as we plug the memory chip into our computers.

But our fathers went through a more arduous experience. Open the camera, wind in the film, then, if the pictures were indoors, insert a flash bulb and instruct the camera to take a flash exposure. Then, of course, the exposed film had to be removed and sent in for processing.

It’s the flash bulbs that we’ll be concentrating on today.

Perhaps our fathers felt like they had it easy. They might have been old enough to remember when using flash involved igniting a pile of magnesium powder on a tray! But sometime in the thirties, the magnesium powder was changed to thin pieces of foil, and was contained within a glass bulb that was ignited electrically. It was truly a quantum leap in photography.

By the time we Boomers came along, the bulbs had been coated with blue plastic which provided the perfect color balance for use with outdoor color film. Thus, the same color pictures looked right whether shot inside or out. That plastic coating also kept the bulb from shattering from the sudden influx of heat, a common occurrence with earlier models. The foil had also been replaced with very thin wire strands.

By the 60’s, another leap in technology was made. Four flashbulbs were included in an ingenious device known as the flashcube. My father’s Kodak Instamatic used flashcubes, and my dad must have thought they were the greatest thing ever!

Flashcubes got even smarter. The earliest ones relied on the camera’s battery for power, but by the early 70’s, the Magicube was produced. It had primers similar to those used in ammunition which ignited the fine wires inside each bulb. Now, many cameras didn’t even need batteries!

How could things possibly get any better? Enter the Flipflash.

The Flipflash showed up in 1975. It had eight bulbs that would fire off consecutively. Once half of them were used, you flipped it over to use the rest.

How much better could flashbulbs get? The answer was none.

Electronic flash showed up shortly afterwards. I bought an affordable Kodak 110 in 1977 which had it. The end was in sight for the flashbulb industry.

But flashbulbs really don’t cause me to look back longingly on their former presence. Let’s face it. They were a pain. However, many a kid learned to listen to their fathers thanks to them. After ejecting a spent bulb, he would say “Don’t touch that, it’s hot!” Yet, how many of us just HAD to learn for ourselves?

A flash bulb also made a convincing space craft, flying alongside the electronic tubes I also used for the purpose.

Taking photos has gotten very easy. I just fired up my photo manager and found that I have 1,814 of them on my computer. And I really don’t consider myself an avid photographer. Historians will likely view the arrival of the cheap digital camera as a turning point in the number of photographs taken by the average Joe.

The same could certainly be said for the invention of the flash bulb.

Firecrackers

Ah, summertime. No school. Swimming. Playing all day long. And, as July 4 neared, FIRECRACKERS!

Fireworks greatly entranced me when I was a kid. When those booths would start opening up in Miami, Oklahoma in late June, I would hound my parents mercilessly to give me some money to go buy fireworks. I would come home with bottle rockets, smoke bombs, and long rows of my favorite: firecrackers.

Really, the concept of selling flammable, explosive items to minors is against everything our sadly litigious society stands for. But somehow, fireworks have survived, albeit in wimpier format than when we were kids.

I loved firecrackers. There were so many things you could do with them! My plastic army men, had they any consciousness at all, would have dreaded my coming home with a bag full of Black Cats. That’s because, in short order, they would be hurled skyward by hidden explosive charges. I would take the prone riflemen and lay them on top of firecrackers and blast them off the ground, with my screaming accompaniment. Sadistic to describe, but lots of fun. The army men didn’t seem to mind either.

Firecrackers were fun to stuff in holes in rocks, like they were sticks of dynamite. Or you could blow bark off a tree. Another fun pastime was taking empty cicada shells and attaching them to a Black Cat. The explosion would literally disintegrate them.

Of course, you also had duds. There were fun things you could do with THEM, too. You could break them in half, light the powder inside, and they would turn into sparklers. Another neat trick I learned was to stomp on the fizzing firecracker and it would explode. Or, you could painstakingly shake the silver powder out of them and make your own bomb.

I once collected the powder from a hundred or so firecrackers, bound it tightly in aluminum foil wrapped in black tape with a fuse stolen from a smoke bomb, and lit it. It blew a fist-sized hole in the dirt!

While M-80’s were available in those days, I never saw them. I think Oklahoma had banned them, but you could still find them in bordering states. I saw my first one when I was 24 years old in California, having been obtained in Tijuana. As reckless a kid as I was, it’s no doubt best that I stayed away from them.

Nowadays, they barely put any powder at all into firecrackers. If you break one open, the powder doesn’t even shake out, it’s more of a thin film painted onto its paper container. But when we were kids, firecrackers had POWER! And we loved blowing things up with them.

Filmstrips in School

How did kids in school see the world in the 1960’s? Frequently by means of film strips.

Film strips were strips of 35 mm film that had positive images on them, much like movie film. However, it wasn’t designed to be quickly run through the projector like a movie. No, each slide was a scene in itself.

Many film strips were silent. Words at the bottom of the image described whatever was portrayed. But it was also common to see film strips that were synchronized to records. The teacher would play the record, and a beep would indicate it was time to move on to the next slide.

Of course, it was easy to get lost. When that happened, the class would loudly offer the teacher their assistance in locating the correct slide for the dialog.

We loved film strips. It meant a break from the tedium of regular classwork.

The sound film strips would be shown at my school through an ancient projector, much like the one illustrated above. It had a noisy fan that kept that great big light cool, and presumably the film as well.

But in the school libraries, there were more personal versions of film strip viewers. I remember we had models designed for single use and text-only filmstrips. There was no provision for sound, like the students from 1972 had in the illustration to the left. We had little separated cubbies on a long table so we could view our film strips side by side.

We would be shown pictures from other countries, photomicrographs of cells and protozoa, health/hygiene stuff, and occasionally, fun stuff like cartoons.

I remember one teacher with a two-pack-a-day habit who would appoint a kid to be the film strip advancer and would slip off to the Teacher’s Lounge for a smoke. Don’t worry, Mrs. Finley, your secret is safe with me. 😉

Today, of course, our grandkids in school are treated to live videos streamed over the internet, or perhaps DVD’s viewed on plasma TV’s. But if you’re old enough to remember JFK, you can recall when multimedia in class meant the teacher wheeling in the 1950’s model film strip projector, and playing a scratchy record. It was great stuff.

Essential 60’s Accessories: Ashtrays and Lighters

Let’s step back in time and step inside a typical home of the 1960’s.

We’ll use my modest Miami, Oklahoma dwelling, of course. It was a 1950’s era tract home sitting on a modestly traveled street. Very typical of what WWII veterans were raising families in.

If you have time-traveled from the 21st century, the first thing you will notice when you step through my front door (three small staggered vertical windows placed at adult-viewing level) is a pervading odor of stale cigarette smoke.

If you see me sitting on the carpet, playing with a pile of toys, please note that I am completely oblivious to the odor. Second-hand smoke was a fact of life for a kid of the 60’s, completely unnoticed. There are many different accessories for the home that we all use everyday ranging from toiletries and kitchen ware, to coffee table books and coasters for your drinks. In the 1960’s coasters and kitchenware were both essential things to have to furnish your modern office or home, but ashtrays and desktop lighters were must a have. They were used by most people whereas today’s home furnishings and modern office furniture will usually only have them as nostalgic decorations, if at all.

You will also spot a variety of smoker’s accessories. These include ash trays of various shapes and sizes, as well as desktop cigarette lighters. No properly-furnished 1960’s dwelling would be complete without them. Even if it turned out that the owners didn’t smoke, odds are that any guests who came over would. It would be an ungracious host indeed who didn’t provide an ashtray for a visitor.

Ashtrays and desktop lighters were ubiquitous home furnishings that could be found in an amazing variety of shapes and sizes. Some gadgets, such as the depicted hand grenade model, consisted of both a lighter and ashtray when separated. The image of the brass, hand-decorated Indian ashtrays seen to the right spurred childhood memories for me. We had one of the “sultan’s shoes” sitting on the coffee table, and it was transformed into a speedboat when pushed across the carpeted floor. I must have spent hours sliding that little shoe around making appropriate motorboat noises.

Mom tolerated me playing with ornamental ashtrays, but desktop lighters were strictly hands-off, of course.

Naturally, that didn’t stop me from playing with them when mom wasn’t around.

It’s difficult to effectively stress to today’s younger generations just how deeply smoking was embedded into 1960’s society. Every restaurant had an ashtray at every table. Hotel and motel rooms featured cheap ones, the assumption being that guests would likely make off with them. Grocery stores would feature a free-standing ashtray at each front door, placed there in the hope that you would finish your cigarette before grabbing a cart.

Cars had ashtrays on back seat armrests, and perhaps another one that pulled out of the back of the front bench seat.

Floor-standing ashtrays were found in banks, hospitals, churches, school gymnasiums, stores, and office buildings. Sitting before the desk of a doctor, lawyer, or insurance salesman would mean that there was an ashtray or ashtray/lighter combo within your reach.

Mom’s weekly visit to the beauty shop would mean that she would grab a small ashtray from a collection on a desk and carry it with her as she went from shampooing to sitting under a huge hair dryer. My own visits to the barber shop would be accompanied by the patrons in line using a couple of community trays, and the barber having his own personal model, right next to the jar full of blue Barbacide.

Mom gave up the habit about 1970, and got rid of all of the smoking paraphernalia around the house. That meant that Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Russell would have to use a small saucer during their visits.

Nowadays, of course, smoking is looked upon as a vice. No self-respecting smoker would dream of lighting up in someone’s home without express permission from the host. Isn’t it interesting that forty years ago, the shoe was on the other foot? It would have been considered the height of ill-mannerliness to fail to provide the smoking guest with all of the appropriate accessories for his/her use.

Erector Sets

Late in the year 1969, I got a Gilbert erector set. I even know the model that it was, but not from memory. Gilbert, who by then had been purchased by the Gabriel Co., only had a few different sets on the market.

I had a Senior Powerline set. It had a battery-powered motor so you could make amazing creations like rotating ferris wheels, a lift drawbridge, a crane, and many more acts of engineering.

The concept of the erector set sprang into the mind of A.C. Gilbert as he watched a skyscraper being built in 1911. He pictured a simple toy, a collection of miniature girders, beams, wheels, gears, and metal plates, all designed to be held together with small nuts and bolts.

Gilbert had the money to create and produce the toy, and also launched a national advertising campaign in 1913. Interestingly, that decade would also see the introduction of two other construction toys, Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys.

The erector set was a wonderfully heavy gift for a child to unwrap. It was full of real metal parts, and you knew that this toy would last considerably longer than your plastic ones.

And what you built was up to you! The bigger projects took more time and work, so if your time was limited, you might make something small. The included manual contained a massive collection of projects running the gamut form the simple to the complex.

However, one thing I could not do was freelance.

If I tried to make something up out of my imagination, it would never work. I would end with a collection of metal parts bolted together that looked like a random collection of metal parts bolted together. I guess that proves I don’t have the mind of an architect or engineer. I was certainly never tempted to pursue either career path.

However, when I followed the plans, I was capable of making extraordinary creations. I beamed with pride as I would carry in things like wreckers, windmills, and hoists and show them to my parents. I don’t know if they were really impressed or not, but they sure made me think so.

An erector set taught a kid the importance of committing to a cause. It might take hours to make something really big and elaborate. It wasn’t like playing with your other toys. Commencing to build a motor-powered crane didn’t allow walking away from the project before completion, at least not if your mom insisted on you keeping your room clean and picked up. So you stuck with it until it was finished.

Ah, but the reward! When you’re ten years old, and frustrated because your artistic endeavors look like they were created by a ten-year-old, it filled you with pride to look at your erector set creation that looked just like the plans!

The nature of a toy consisting of lots of little parts meant that some of them would inevitably get lost. And when enough parts vanished, the set itself became a lot less fun to play with. So eventually, it would be discarded.

But the memories live on forever of how satisfying it was to build impressive structures. And so does the idea of making a solid commitment to a cause that requires time and effort to see through to completion.

Electronic Handheld Games

We Boomers had great imaginations. How great? Well, in the mid-to-late 70’s, we would get extremely excited over little red LED’s flashing on a tiny screen. These LED’s, as they lit and darkened to the motions of our thumbs on buttons, would cause cheering, cursing, and occasionally even the tossing of the game that provided all of this “action” (hopefully against a shock-absorbing surface).

Electronic games began with Mattel’s Auto Race in 1974. It was the first handheld game to contain no gears, relays, or any other moving parts. Everything ran with diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, and of course a tiny screen with “cars” represented by tiny red LED’s. And believe you me, any kid whose parents shelled out the big bucks for it was popular, at least while he had fresh batteries.

Football seemed to be a natural fit for handhelds, and accounted for many of their incarnations. The pictured game was Mattel Electronics Football, circa 1977.

But memory tests soon got red hot a little later in the decade. In 1978, Merlin and Simon appeared, both challenging you to repeat patterns of lights by punching the appropriate buttons. And as some of us enter the twilight years, take it from me: you NEED to have your memory challenged on a daily basis! Use it or lose it.

The games quickly got more sophisticated. By 1980, you could get bowling, hockey, baseball, chess (THAT was cool!), and Missile Attack. I was always vaguely disturbed by playing Missile Attack, as the cities full of innocent people that you were striving so hard to protect were ultimately doomed, it was just a matter of when.

In the early 80’s, LCD screens began to appear, and realism took a quantum leap. After all, those tiny LED’s required a lot of help from your imagination to become basketball players, bowling balls, or nuclear ICBM’s.

In 2000, Mattel re-released their original 1977 football game. It was a hit, in large part from younger Boomers trying to recapture the excitement of seeing those little LED’s light up and being transformed them into hulking football players.