A friend of mine gave me a real treasure: a November 1970 copy of House Beautiful magazine. The articles themselves are a treat to read, but the advertisements in the back are wonderful in themselves. You may see quite a few future columns based on the contents of that magazine.
There were no less than THREE ads for the subject of today’s column: wrist watch clip-on calendars.
Let’s face it. Nowadays, we’re spoiled, wristwatch-wise. For less than fifty bucks, you can get yourself a name-brand quartz timepiece that will be accurate to within a few seconds a month. It will have the day, date, and possibly the moon phase emblazoned on its face.
But go back to 1970, and your options on an affordable watch were much more limited.
Both of my brothers were in the military, and while stationed in southeast Asia, had access to Seiko chronographs at much lower cost than in the States. So they and my father always had big self-winding watches that featured all kinds of nifty extras. My father was a private pilot, and he showed me how to use the tachymeter to time how fast we were traveling as we passed section roads exactly a mile apart.
But I was just a kid. So my watches were much more humble Timex wind-up versions. You were expected to pop off the back cover and adjust them to be as accurate as possible. The best you could hope for was perhaps three minutes variation in a day.
And of course, such an inexpensive timekeeper would not have a calendar. So if you wanted to know what day it was, your options were to either send $1.79 (plus 15 cents postage) to Anthony Enterprises in San Francisco, or, more likely, to accept a free set from an advertiser.
After that, a quick sideways look at your wristband would reveal the date. And all you had to do was remember to put a new one on each month. And also score a fresh set for the upcoming year. And they drove women wild.
Rumors of only one nostalgic journey this week are greatly exaggerated. My internet connection is doing much better, thank you.
The living room of the 1960’s was a warm, friendly place. True, times had changed since our parents might have first purchased our modest homes fifteen of twenty years prior. Most living rooms in the US had a new center of attention: the television set. That one-eyed monster changed the purpose of the home’s central location from a place of casual conversation, or possibly listening to the radio, to the spot where our parents unwound after a long day at work, accompanied by a cocktail, Walter Cronkite, a cigarette, and a TV dinner.
That piping hot little aluminum dish required special accommodation. It was certainly too hot to sit on one’s lap.
Enter the aluminum folding TV tray.
Evidence exists that the TV tray actually preceded the TV dinner by a year. I traced the much-maligned meal back to possibly 1953. But In her book As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s, author Karal Ann Marling states that national advertising for TV tray tables first appeared in 1952.
By 1967, there was scarcely a home in the suburbs that didn’t have a stash of neatly folded TV trays placed inobtrusively away in a corner somewhere, ready for instant deployment at around 5:30 in the evening.
The earliest examples of TV trays have legs that are constructed lengthwise in the shape of an X that prevented you from placing your human legs comfortably under the tiny table surface. Manufacturers soon reworked the design so that the tubular legs folded along the shorter axes, with the tray top itself dropping down to create a tiny little piece of furniture that fit perfectly out of sight into a space of just a few inches.
Sheer engineering genius!
TV trays and stacking rack
Thus did millions of the diminutive home accessories change hands at various stores and find themselves in our childhood homes.
The flimsy trays were just sturdy enough to support a TV dinner and a drink. and possibly an ash tray. Add anything else to the load, and you did so at your own risk.
Thus did I learn a valuable life lesson at the age of thirteen: Don’t attempt to assemble a model sailing ship on a TV tray that might possibly collapse, taking paint, glue, rigging string, and various plastic parts with it to the floor.
TV trays sold moderately well in the early 50’s, but as TV dinners themselves began to be marketed, and more and more US homes began sporting shiny new television sets, their sales went through the roof.
And the best thing about them is their sheer indestructible nature.
Thus, fifty-year-old trays may well be in service, having been passed down from parents and grandparents, and now holding a nouveau chic status in this world gone retro-crazy.
The legs might become bent, plastic clips may break, but the metal itself is impervious to rust. Thus, even badly scratched up examples that saw action when Bonanza was on Sunday nights are likely still serving, possibly holding small pots populated by African violets on a screened-in porch somewhere.
And someday, hundreds or thousands of years hence, perfectly functional examples will likely be recovered from landfills by future archaeologists.
Overall, a pretty cool legacy for a cheap, yet brilliant invention.
Picture the concept: You put eleven players into position. Your opponent does the same. You flip an inline-cord switch. The field begins vibrating. After the players move a bit on their tremor-plagued gridiron, you stop the game. You then place a felt “ball” on the base of a player, and turn the game back on. Your player has an opening! He rumbles through . . . wait! He’s turning around! He’s running the wrong way!
Hit the switch. You have just witnessed a very common scene in 1960’s electric football. Your player turned the wrong way.
Anticipating this, the rule book mercifully calls the play dead, rather than have your running back relive Jim Marshall’s 1964 run against San Francisco.
Despite its unpredictability and potential for electric shock, Tudor electric football games were a thrill to kids everywhere.
I remember getting mine in 1971, with the players painted like Kansas City and Minnesota. It was such a trip taking the game out of the box, setting up the goalposts and surrounding crowded stands, and organizing your teams.
There was, of course, a player who stood head and shoulders above the rest: the ubiquitous quarterback-kicker.
This player was able to heave long bombs of six inches or more. And there was a chance, albeit a microscopic one, of a player actually being hit by the felt projectile, thereby making the pass complete! Of course, if it hit a defender, bad news.
Field goals were much more common. You could put one through the uprights 80 yards away. No word on whether there were steroids tests done on the limber-legged kickers.
And the game was great training for life. When we became parents, and did our best to raise our kids the right way, it wasn’t uncommon to see them, against all common sense, turn around and run the wrong way.
Unfortunately, they didn’t always stop when we went for the off switch.
It was a blast growing up in the Jet Age. Sure, our parents saw rapid progress in their own lifetimes. They may have recalled a day when horse-drawn wagons were common on Main Street. They probably took rides on steam trains. And they could likely remember losing childhood friends to diseases that were quite curable or preventable by the time we came along.
But we had ELECTRONICS! Yes, electronics ran a tremendous percentage of the world that we grew up in.
And the electronics that our day-to-day life depended on so much were prone to frequent failure, thanks to components with very finite lifespans known as vacuum tubes.
Who knows, maybe embattled senator Ted Stevens, born in 1923, may have had the electronic versions somewhat in mind when he made his infamous “series of tubes” statement. Nah, probably not.
The transistor was perfected in 1947 by William Shockley. But it would be many years before it would completely replace the ubiquitous vacuum tube. In the meantime, radios, televisions, and stereo consoles were sold by the millions powered by electronic tubes.
Those tubes would act as sophisticated switches that would close when the current reached a certain voltage. When they worked their magic, it was possible to produce sound from electrical impulses. They generated heat, necessitating lots of ventilation holes on the devices in which they were installed. And they would glow in eerie shades of orange when they did their thing, as observed by myself peering through the small ventilation openings.
The light show would be accompanied by a peculiar aroma, caused by a combination of heat, ozone, and dust. It’s impossible to describe, yet, if you smelled it, you would never forget it.
I found the combination of sensory stimulations very fascinating, so much so that I sought careers in the electrical and electronics fields before settling in as a computer geek almost ten years ago.
RCA consumer tube tester
Dad wasn’t nearly so taken by the show, of course. All he knew about an electronics-powered device was that when it quit, it QUIT. It was time to take the radio in, or call a repairman to the home in the case of a massive TV or stereo console.Theoretically, it was possible to yank all of the tubes from the sick gadget and haul them down to Farrier’s IGA, which had a tube tester.
The tube tester had a whole bunch of sockets, designed for every conceivable tube that could be found in the average consumer device. It had a dial that would pop into the green zone if the tube was okay, or stay in the dreaded yellow or red ranges if it was time to replace it.
The business hoped that you would purchase replacements for faulty tubes from them, of course, which is how they justified paying hundreds of dollars for a sophisticated tester that was free for public use.
If you found a bad tube, and the store had a replacement, you were back in business. That’s assuming that you could match all of the tubes you yanked back with their original sockets and got them all seated correctly.
A kid would also offer silent prayers that the TV repairman would be able to diagnose the problem tube while he had the TV back removed in the house. If he did, another plea to God would be made that he would have the replacement tube in the truck.
If not, the household would have to do without TV for a week or a month, which, you’ll recall, was several lifetimes for us when we were seven years old. It was even worse if he had to load the TV up and take it to the shop. We would stare mournfully at the empty spot in the living room, awaiting the interminable return of the one-eyed monster that we had grown to love so much.
Nowadays, the equivalent of the 1960’s burnt-out-tube might be the occasional interruption in internet access. A recent ice storm isolated me from the rest of the world for a day or so, and it felt pretty lonely.
But one sad fact makes any modern-day outages more bearable than the ones we experienced in childhood. Time passes much, much faster now than it used to.
In the 60’s and 70’s, if you weren’t old enough to drive, or if you were, but didn’t have a car, odds are you got around on a bike. And if you had a bike, the odds were also great that you had customized it in some fashion.
The coolest bike I ever had was a Stingray knockoff (I think mom got it at Sears) in 1971, when I was 11 years old. This bad boy was green, my favorite color. It had a 36″ sissy bar with a top cover, high-rise handlebars, and a cheater slick. I could do some monumental jumps on that bike. But that long sissy bar discouraged riding wheelies.
I remember my earliest bike customizations. They involved clothespins and baseball cards, some of which could have been very valuable had I squirreled them away somewhere. Clipping the card with the clothespin to the frame so the spokes would whack against it made your bike sound like a motorcycle.
There was a bewildering array of accessories you could put on your bike to pimp it. I always liked the klaxon-styled horns with the twist in them. That made for a deeper honk. Bikes on Leave It to Beaver always had bells instead of horns. That must have been a 50’s thing. No self-respecting kid on my block circa 1966 would have been caught dead with a bell on his bike.
Then there were the streamers. The streamers would look best dangling from a set of high-rise bars. The idea was to make them go perfectly parallel to the ground as you zipped along as fast as you could go.
Schwinn bike speedometer
You could also put a speedometer on your bike. They used a little rubber wheel to rub against your wheel rim to calculate your speed. I’m not sure how accurate they were. Going as fast as I could generally peaked my speed out at about 30 miles per hour.
A headlight might be affixed to your trusty banana-seater. It would either be powered by a couple of d-cell batteries, or by a generator turned by your wheel. The power unit would goof itself up in short order, by the rubber stripping off the wheel that contacted your rim, or by simply locking up. Even if you managed to get a better-quality unit that would last longer, it still added a noticeable drag to your bike, very bad when there was a need for speed.
One of the funkiest customizations you could perform on your bike was installing a steering wheel. These were pretty popular in the 70’s, although I was unable to locate an image of one. The wheel was smaller than a car’s steering wheel and lightweight. They were adept for spinning your front wheel around rapidly while riding a wheelie, very impressive. The less talented could hold their front wheel up while standing stationary and do the same thing.
You could also wrap metallic tape around your frame, put reflectors on your spokes, or attach a basket (yeah, right! Only if you wanted to get beaten up). Customizing your bike could take many forms indeed. The important thing was that you do SOMETHING to distinguish it from the rest of the bikes with their front wheel stuck in the stand in front of the school.
What better device could a 1960’s guy have in his shirt pocket than a transistor radio blasting out tunes that sounded absolutely great on a two-inch speaker?
Radio earpieces
Pocket-sized transistor radios started getting affordable and common in the early 1960’s. Prior to that, they were bigger, many 1950’s vintage radios being about the size of a portable eight-track player (more on those to come!). But they were tiny compared to the tube-driven models of a few years before.
Transistors, invented in 1947, revolutionized the world as much as any other twentieth-century invention. When they started being utilized in electronic devices, radios and the like began shrinking!
It wasn’t long before transistor radios, powered by the ubiquitous nine-volt battery, were a common sight in shirt pockets and sitting on desks all over America. And they would be tuned to rock and roll stations, of course.
And you also used the monophonic earpiece. It provided as high-quality a sound as the built-in speaker ;-).
The music that came in over the AM stations back then simply didn’t need a better speaker than what came with the transistor radio, or its earbud. Sure, you could listen to records on a hi-fi, but just try lugging one to the beach.
The transistor radio was a familiar sight in the 60’s to those of us old enough to remember bell-bottoms, paisley shirts, and, of course, JFK.
Boomer kids grew up on two wheels. From the time the training wheels came off, we were spotted buzzing around town on our Sting-Rays, or on less expensive banana-seated clones.
However, many of us had more technologically sophisticated rides. Perhaps we inherited them from our parents or older siblings, or perhaps the non-conformists among us showed our rebellious traits at an early age by opting for them over the high-handlebarred models that everyone else preferred.
The result was the fairly common sight of three-speed bikes on the 1960’s streets where we lived.
The three-speed bike has a venerable history. Before the invention of the automobile, bicycles were seen as an alternative method to getting around town for those without a horse. And let’s face it: it was difficult for a city dweller to own a horse, so the bicycle may well have been an essential part of his or her life.
Huffy Seapines three-speed bike
Thus, around the turn of the century, technological developments were taking place very rapidly on bicycles. In 1909, the British Raleigh bicycle, equipped with a Sturmey Archer 3-Speed hub, started production. Thus began the three-speed revolution.
The three-speed hub allows for variable gear ratios. This makes for easier hill climbing as well as greater speed on level areas.
Comfort was the priority of the three-speeds. Most of them had a spring-loaded cushioned seat. They also had upright handlebars that your hands found naturally comfortable to grasp. The shifter might have been found on the bike frame in the form of a “stickshift,” but was more likely found near the right handgrip.
Front and rear brake levers were also found attached to the handlebars. The three-speed hub made it impossible for the bike to use the coaster brake that most single-speed models used.
The bikes were designed for a leisurely trip through town. Many were equipped with front or rear baskets. All of them came with fenders, to prevent that nasty road grime from covering your back while pedaling in wet conditions.
What they weren’t was cool. Riding around on a three-speed meant that you were not:
A sports jock
A babe magnet
Likely to be voted Most Popular in school
More concerned with image than functionality
Afraid to be seen riding a contraption more suited for your Uncle Joe
At the time, non-conformity was a course taken by a courageous few. The rest of us were slaves to image, and were sadly likely to poke fun at those who weren’t.
The three-speed bike was a classic design that had the further advantage of being extremely durable. Bike frames were generally made of good old heavy steel. The gear mechanism was sealed against the elements. The tires were massive rubber monstrosities, with thick treads, designed to go thousands of miles. Try THAT on those skinny 27″ tires that came on the later ten-speeds.
Thus, many a three-speed pedaled by a Boomer kid was a hand-me-down. Those bikes could last for decades with just a bit of care and the provision of a dry place of storage.
Nowadays, three-speeds have their fan clubs. For instance, take a look at the 3-Speed Adventure Society, who enjoy dressing up in tweed and hitting the road like it was 1920.
It was the ten-speed that caused an explosion in bicycling in the 1970’s, and a future article will cover that in full. But here’s a doff of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap to the three-speed: the triumph of function over form.
Ah, the rivalry between Ivy League schools. Who invented the ubiquitous flying disk known as the Frisbee? The consensus agrees that the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, made pies that were sold to many New England colleges. Students soon discovered that the empty pie tins could be tossed and caught, providing a fun way to work off the calories just consumed. But who did it first?
Yale claims that a student named Elihu Frisbie grabbed a collection plate from the chapel and flung it across the schoolyard in 1820.
Even very few Yalies believe that.
The identity of the first pie-pan throwing student, or what school he/she attended, will forever be a mystery. But Frisbie pies, while gone since 1958, have their name live on in (at least in homonym form) the Wham-O Frisbee,
The plastic disk can trace its origin back to one Walter Morrison, who was enjoying tossing a popcorn can lid back and forth with his girlfriend in 1937. Morrison conceived of an aerodynamic toy that would likely be popular.
Frisbie pie tin
In the meantime, World War II intervened. Morrison found himself a prisoner in Stalag 13, along with another soldier named Warren Franscioni. They discussed going into business together if they could survive the grueling prison camp.
Survive they did, and in 1946, Morrison patented a flying disk. His first model was the Whirlo-Way, which didn’t make a whole lot of noise, sales-wise. Franscioni and Morrison parted ways in 1950.
By 1955, the public began to be captivated with UFO’s. Morrison began producing the Pluto Platter that year, and was more successful. The owners of a small but up-and-coming company called Wham-O saw big sales potential, and bought Morrison out while still giving him royalties. Everybody won.
The only thing Wham-O’s Rick Knerr didn’t like about the amazingly aerodynamic disks was the name. “Pluto Platter” didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Having heard the pie plate story, he decided, with a trademark-ready spelling change, to call the flying disks Frisbees.
Today, Frisbee is one of the most recognizable brand names on the planet. In fact, it was back in the mid 60’s, when I got my first one and tossed it around the yard. You can buy them in many incarnations, from glow-in-the-dark to edible (for your pet) to expensive tournament models.
Of course, if you don’t mind an advertisement on it, you can get them free at trade shows. That’s my preferred method of ownership.
There was a tiny little world that I remember entering as a child. To get there, you had to use an object that required you to point it to a bright light source. Once you did so, you peered through the eyepieces and observed a miracle: gorgeous color images of national parks, cartoon characters, or perhaps animals in incredible three-dimensional realism!
A Viewmaster was found in practically every house with kids in the 1960’s. Perhaps one reason for its popularity was that it wasn’t just fascinating to the young! Parents got a kick out of them too.
The Viewmaster actually predates the Baby Boomer generation. It was debuted at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It was invented by organ maker and photographer William Gruber, who wanted to create a stereoscopic way to view recently invented Kodachrome slides.
The product was inexpensive from the start, and this contributed to its popularity. And it also contained few moving parts and required no batteries. Plus, it established a standard size for the Viewmaster reel, or disk, that let you view the latest releases on the oldest Viewmaster, or vice versa.
And they also opened up a wonderful world to kids. We saw stunning images of Yosemite, Yellowstone, New York skyscrapers, massive mountain ranges, and, of course, Donald Duck.
The fact that every kid had one meant that visiting your friends’ homes would give you access to reels you might have never seen before. A Viewmaster sitting out with a few reels would quickly be grabbed up and checked out by visiting playmates.
After several ownership changes, the rights to Viewmaster were eventually purchased by Fisher-Price, who still manufacture them today. In fact, you can buy a brand spanking new viewer for six bucks. It doesn’t look much like the pictured vintage model, but it works the same.
How about it, fellow Boomers? Why not introduce your grandkids to the same wonderful 3-D world you remember as a child?
You want to keep a kid absolutely entertained? Give him (or her) something they can make their OWN toys with.
That was the premise of the Mattel Vac-U-Form. It was a very sophisticated little manufacturing system which would allow kids of the 60’s to create their own plastic molded toys, using the very same process that produces bathtubs, windshields, and countless other everyday items these days.
The Vac-U-Form used plastic sheets that were heated via the same mechanism that would later power the Fright Factory, i.e. a hot oven that would make modern-day ambulance chasing, mass-media advertising shysters drool with delight. The sheets would be drawn by manually creating a vacuum over molds that would allow kids to create some amazingly cool toys and gewgaws.
My memories of the Vac-U-Form were solely of the cool name and the fact that my first best friend’s older brother had one, or so I thought. Then I watched the featured YouTube commercial and I recalled the trademark line “What can you do with a Vac-U-Form?”
The many parts of a Vac-U-Form
The fact is that you could do an amazing variety of tasks. Built-in extras allowed you to make miniature signs with included letters, a glider that would launch with a rubber band, a cool little race car, put-the-balls-in-the-holes games like you might find in a Cracker Jack box, and, most stupendous of all, YOUR OWN CREATIONS.
You could take modeling clay, mold it into a positive mold, and draw the heated plastic over it to create anything you wanted! Such power in the minds of creative youngsters no doubt launched many a successful engineer and artist.
The Vac-U-Form was aimed at a more sophisticated youthful demographic than mine. What I mean by that is that my buddy’s older brother (probably ten) could handle it. But seven-year-old Ronnie Enderland was more suited for the aforementioned Fright Factory.
It was kismet that someday I would attain Vac-U-Form-worthy wisdom, but alas, the product ceased being manufactured before I ever had a chance to get my hands on one. Ergo, I had to settle for chemistry sets.
So here’s to yet another creative, fun, slightly dangerous toy that our parents didn’t buy for us until we were mature enough to handle it. If we burned ourselves, it was a valuable lesson to be learned, not an excuse to call a sleazy lawyer.
