I suspect today’s recollection may touch many Boomers, because I remember nearly all of my 1960’s friends had spring horses similar to mine.
The fascination that 20th and 21st century kids have with toy cars is probably directly related to archaeological discoveries of small terra-cotta horses in Greek ruins. The horse was the transportation of the day (at least for the well-heeled), and kids love playing with miniaturized versions of things that get you around.
Sometime during the medieval period, stick horses appeared. And by the 17th century, the first rocking horses appeared. The rocking horse King Charles I played with as a child still exists today.
As technology improved, so did the sophistication of rocking horses. Additionally, they became affordable to other folks besides royalty. And many handymen became adept at creating rocking horses that would turn into family heirlooms.
Spring horse like I had
The Wonder Products Company of Collierville, Tennessee was manufacturing wooden rocking horses during the 1940’s. The cheap cost of molded plastic caught their attention, and during the next decade, they began making plastic spring horses that were suspended from a tubular frame with four stout springs.
And believe me, a kid could spend many hours happily riding that plasticine bucking bronc. I have many, many memories of riding mine while chasing imaginary outlaws, or perhaps being chased by them, or simply watching TV from a fun perch.
Wonder Products continued to make the spring horses throught the 60’s and early 70’s, then became a victim of the bad economy of the decade. It’s a wonder any toy companies survived the 70’s.
In 1988, the Hedstrom Company began manufacturing spring horses right in the good old US of A. Unfortunately, at presstime, it appears that they have hit hard times of their own.
But Radio Flyer still makes them, in a beefier, safer version that the ones we played with. To be honest, though, I don’t recall ever falling off of mine ;-). So Boomer grandparents, keep your eye out for Radio Flyer spring horses that are quite similar to the ones you played with as children. I’ll bet you’ll have some very, very happy grandkids if you do!
I guess it was funny at the time. You had to be there. Of course, if you’re reading this, you probably were.
Spiro Agnew was definitely not a soft-spoken individual. An avowed Hawk, he was constantly criticizing those who questioned the Vietnam War. Remember his calling the media “nattering nabobs of negativism?” He was a dream come true for Johnny Carson, who was provided with plenty of material for opening-show-monologues every time Agnew would hold forth.
The watches came out in 1970. They sold like hotcakes for a time.
By the time Agnew was embroiled in his infamous scandals (taking bribes while in office was looked down upon), their manufacturing had stopped. 1973 saw him resign, and the watches quickly became a forgotten fad.
However, thanks to eBay, you can still score one if it tickles your fancy. They seem to run about $60 to $80.
So here’s to Spiro Agnew, man of many unique achievements. He was the only Vice President to have Greek lineage, the only one to resign in disgrace, and the only one to ever have a wristwatch named after him.
Some of our toys were unique to our own childhoods. The senior members of the Baby Boomer generation had Howdy Doody dolls. Boomers my age and a little younger had Schwinn Sting Rays.
But generations of kids stretching back to 1923 grew up with wagons produced by the company founded by Italian immigrant Antonio Pasin. And they still do. Even Calvin would take his friend Hobbes on some harrying trips down hillsides in a Radio Flyer.
The wooden wagons were known as Liberty Coasters when they came out that year. In 1930, Antonio’s company was renamed Radio Steel and Manufacturing. His first metal wagon, which came out that year, was known as the Radio Flyer.
Despite the Great Depression, Pasin’s company hung in there. The wagons were sturdy enough to serve for working purposes, and Radio Steel also made other implements like wheelbarrows.
With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Pasin and company went to work cranking out hundreds of thousands of blitz cans, the familiar five-gallon containers seen bolted to the backs of Jeeps. No Radio Flyers were produced during a period of time from 1942 to 1945.
However, that meant that as soon as our fathers got back from the war, Radio Flyers would once again be available for them to buy for us. And buy them they did. They recognized a good investment when they saw one, and a Radio Flyer would typically be handed down to multiple aged brothers.
Of course, girls enjoyed them too. Pasin made sure they would be included as his customers with his original slogan “For every boy. For every girl.”
The wagon was the finest kind of plaything that there was. The perfect toy should teach a child a lesson. A Radio Flyer was simply a four-wheeled device with a pulling handle that also steered. What you did with such a device was use your imagination.
Radio Flyer woodside 1960’s
For example, a kid down the street transformed his Flyer into a fire truck. A wagon that might have once served for hauling toys, puppies, rocks, pop bottles, or anything else a kid might want transported was serving noble duty loaded with bottles of water, a bucket of sand, and other various firefighting implements that he found appropriate. I believe the high point of his life was when a grass fire mom started in our yard to burn off thatch got a bit out of control. David came roaring into the yard making a siren noise and sprayed the miniature conflagration with his water bottles until it was extinguished.
Another lesson the Flyer taught was that you had to watch where you put your fingers. If you caught a digit in the handle hinge, it would get pinched and hurt like the devil. Like a finger in a light bulb socket, you only did that ONCE.
Radio Flyers continue to be big sellers. And unlike so many other toy companies from our childhoods, it has survived intact as an independent business. Radio Flyer, Inc. is a family-owned company in Chicago that is doing quite well, thank you. While their products are manufactured overseas, their administrative and creative center is right here in the good old USA.
So why not start a new tradition with your grandkid and give them a genuine Radio Flyer? His or her younger siblings will be as grateful as the lucky recipient.
1972 was a banner year for inventiveness, consumer-product-wise. That year, Mr. Coffee was born. The coffeemaker, which forever changed the way the morning brew was prepared, will no doubt rate its own future mention here.
The other big release that year was the Polaroid SX-70.
Polaroid had long ago made its name with instant photography. They released their first peel-and-see camera in 1948, just in time for our fathers, getting more prosperous by the day, to preserve images of their lovely kids (that would be US!). By 1965, they released the affordable Swinger, which many Boomers made their first camera purchase.
But let’s face it: peeling off the top layer after exactly the right number of seconds was, well, a pain. While still preferable to waiting days for pictures to get developed, we tired of having to carry waste disposal means with us wherever we went. And that emulsion was seriously nasty, sticky stuff if you happened to touch it.
Thus, the world was overjoyed when the SX-70 was released, a camera that spit out a picture that would magically develop right before your very eyes! And no nasty paper to throw away!
The SX-70 was a true SLR, i.e. you viewed the subject through the same lens that would record its image. This was sophisticated stuff for our parents, who might have owned Kodak Brownies that had primitive viewfinders that had to be used by looking down at the top of the camera. This feature was previously only available on expensive Hasselblads, Nikons, and the like.
Not only that, but its design was amazing. Polaroid had long produced cameras that would fold down to a smaller size for transportation between shots, but they went the extra mile with the SX-70.
The camera would collapse in upon itself to form a small rectangular box that would fit in the smallest purse. It wasn’t quite pocket-sized, but was a lot of fun for a kid to open and close. Now it’s a camera, now it’s a little box.
SX-70 accessories
It was a beautiful piece of art. Its metal was brushed chrome, it also featured genuine leather. Oh, and the camera had another groundbreaking feature: it focused itself! Though the initial model was a manually-focused device, it was soon released with sonar-activated auto-focus. Cool beans! Later on, Polaroid would sell the One-Step, which didn’t collapse and was made largely of plastic, to those of us who were financially challenged. That way we could enjoy the power of an autofocusing instant camera (albeit not an SLR) without the pain of the SX-70’s steep price.
Such a sophisticated instrument called for sophisticated accessories. Thus, you could purchase a telephoto adapter, a macro adapter, a self-timer, and external flashes (the original used a flash bar). It was possible to take some seriously detailed photos with the camera’s one-to-one ratio of image to film, though limited to 3.1 x 3.1 inches in size.
Experimenters soon learned that you could get quite artistic with SX-70 images. You could fold, spindle, and mutilate the prints into unique creations. Of course, you could also screw them up pretty good if you weren’t careful.
The SX-70 was a high flyer for the rest of the decade. The popularity of its more inexpensive instant cameras caused the company to discontinue the original SX-70 in 1981 (They also had instant-picture competition from Kodak, but squashed that with a victorious 1986 patent lawsuit). This was a cause of worry for its owners, as fear of no more film became a threat. However, Polaroid continued to manufacture SX-70 film until 2005. And even then, owners were able to hack their cameras to use 600 film. Unfortunately, Polaroid has ceased the manufacturing of all films for cameras of the 70’s and 80’s, but check out this SX-70 hack site, which shows that the inventive spirit of the camera’s fans will triumph over the mere lack of original accessories.
The digital camera revolution has forced camera companies to adapt or die. Kodak is doing great. Polaroid failed to change their business model in a timely manner. Hence, they have had a series of bankruptcies since 2001, but the company appears to still be going fairly strongly.Their website shows a diverse number of products, including digital cameras, “retro” film cameras, and some decidedly non-photographic items.
I hope they turn a profit. A world without the Polaroid brand name would be a little sadder. Any company cool enough to come up with the Swinger and the SX-70 deserves to survive.
You can do the tricks the surfers do,
just try a “Quasimodo” or “The Coffin” too
(why don’t you) Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin’ with me…
Jan and Dean summed up a late 50’s-mid 60’s craze with their 1964 classic Sidewalk Surfin’. Skateboards were big in those times, even though wipeouts were a frequent occurrence. Those steel wheels just didn’t have a whole lot of grab. Later boards in the 60’s featured clay wheels, which gripped the concrete just a bit better.
Skateboards have had an up, a down, and another long lasting up. They first started showing up in large numbers in the late 50’s. There had been some sorts of boards on wheels since the early part of the century, but trucks which allowed maneuvering were invented which caused their sales to soar.
By the early 60’s, they were a true phenomenon. I remember riding one when I was about six years old, around 1965. It was amazing that you could lean and make the board turn.
However, those problematic slick wheels made them dangerous. Cities started banning their usage. After three years of soaring sales, they practically disappeared from store shelves in 1965.
Few boards were spotted from ’65 to ’73. But that year, a sweeping revolution took place that would make the boards familiar sights for the next thirty years.
That revolution was the urethane wheel. FINALLY, skateboards had gripping ability that greatly improved their safety. Sales exploded that year, and every year, a new incarnation of teenagers grabbed them up. Cities that had once banned their use now build public skateboard parks.
But it all started with our generation, ending up with lots of bruises and broken bones on those old slick wheels.
I grew up with an aroma that used to be a regular part of the ambiance in my house. It was hot Plastigoop.
Like most kids on my block, I had a Mattel Thingmaker. And, like many of my toys, it would never be sold in today’s litigious society. It had an oven that got STINKIN’ HOT! And another familiar sight was burns on the hands and arms of my friends and myself. We didn’t care. We were making some incredibly cool flexible rubbery toys.
Mattel Creepy Crawlers
Thingmakers produced many flavors of toys. I owned a Fright Factory. It made third eyes, scars (to add to the real ones caused by oven burns ;-), skeletons, bones that clipped to your nose, and the ultimate: shrunken heads. The shrunken head even had hair you could attach to it!
But what made it megecool was the fact that you could swap molds with your friends and make other stuff, like Creepy Crawlers (snakes, lizards, newts, bugs), Creeple People (ugly little dudes that lived on your pencils), and Fighting Men (soldiers). The Fighting Men would let you stick little wires inside, so you could bend them into fighting poses! But you would always run out of wire, so you ended up with fighting men who just stood there like scarecrows.
My subjects for columns are frequently decided upon by pure gut feeling. If it feels right, write about it!
I’m a subscriber to Charles Phoenix’s Slide of the Week, and I recommend you do so too. Last week, I received a slide that featured a TV that I’d known about, but didn’t know too much about. It’s called the Philco Predicta, and it had the picture tube on a yoke in a wonderful expression of modern design. Charles had located a slide that featured a Predicta “in real life,” as he excitedly put it.
The next thing you know, I’m watching Revenge of the Nerds on TNT, and lo and behold: a Predicta! It was being used to play 80’s Atari games.
OK, two Predicta sightings in one week. Time to write a column!
Philco began in in 1892 as the Helios Electric Company. They manufactured batteries at first, but as electricity caught on, they diversified. In 1927, they began manufacturing radios, and soon became one of the Big Three in the business, along with RCA and Zenith. When televisions began appearing after WWII, Philco jumped on board.
A working Predicta
By 1957, Philco’s sales were flat. That year, the Russians electrified the world by launching Sputnik. Suddenly, the modern look was red-hot.
Philco looked at redesigning the traditional cabinet-mounted picture tube in TV’s to something radically different and uber-modern. The first Predicta, with a yoke-mounted shortened picture tube, thus appeared in 1958.
One of Philco’ biggest customers for the futuristic TV was none other than Holiday Inn. They bought thousands of the sadly unreliable television sets, probably to their regret.
You see, the Predicta was more gorgeous than gorgeous. But Philco never created a color Predicta, and there was a growing demand for color by the dawn of the 60’s. More significantly, it wasn’t well-engineered. The shortened picture tube ran very hot, bad for electronics. The circuit board for the tube was also extremely difficult to access, and the combination of the two made certain that Predictas were in the shop on a sadly regular basis, perhaps three or four times a year.
I think we Boomers remember how depressing it was to have the TV off at the shop in the 60’s.
Thus, ultimately, the Predicta was a failure. Many sat unsold in TV dealerships. Customers preferred reliability over drop-dead coolness. And Philco went under in 1961. It survived as a purchased product of the Ford Motor Company until the 70’s. Nowadays, what remains of it is in South America.
But you have to admit that it was absolutely the coolest TV ever built. And guess what! You Boomers with a little money to burn can get Predictas from the Telstar Company, which now owns the name and produces new models faithful to the original design!
In the 1940’s Mary Carter lived in Cincinnati, making a lucrative living holding fake seances.
Mary was also inventive. She created a slate that would appear to be sealed inside a box, inside which she was able to write messages “from the spirit world.” When she opened the box, her customers were amazed to see messages scrawled on the slate.
Her son Alfred admired the invention, but he realized that it took real skill and dexterity, which his mother possessed in droves, to operate the magic slate. So he set about inventing a device that would “tell the future” in a manner that required no input from the user.
In 1944, Carter created a tube divided in two by a wall that ran throughout its length. The tube had a die in each half, with a windows on each end allowing only one die to be seen. The dice floated, and the tube was filled with a dark, thick liquid. Answers were printed on each die. So the tube would reveal one answer, then it could be turned over and it would reveal another one.
Syco Slate
The tube was called the Syco-Seer, also the Syco-Slate, in honor of his mother’s creation. Carter took prototypes to a local retailer, and he expressed interest in selling them in his store, and also wholesaling to other establishments.
So Carter turned to his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, who is credited with the invention of the Magic Eight-Ball. Carter obtained patents for his tubes, then assigned them to Bookman.
At this point, Carter became so enslaved to alcohol that he left all for Bookman to handle, as he descended into a life of sleeping in flophouses.
Bookman surged ahead, marketing the Syco-Seer to as many stores as he could. Alabe Crafts, the company he formed with Carter, was producing the devices in steady numbers. Stores would hire women to dress in Gypsy clothing to demonstrate the “amazing” fortune telling tubes.
In 1950, Brunswick, manufacturers of billiard equipment and other sporting goods, commissioned Alabe to make Syco-Seers shaped as eight-balls. The promotion was modestly successful for Brunswick, but Bookman thought the tube reworked into an eight-ball would be a much greater hit among the masses.
He was right. After his commitment to Brunswick ran its course, he began cranking out Magic Eight-Balls for his own company to sell. And sell they did!
At first, it was marketed as a paperweight. But as time went by, it was aimed at kids as a toy, and that’s when things really took off. Sales went up and stayed up.
Nowadays, the Magic Eight-Ball is sold by Mattel at about a million units a year. It has become part of human culture. They are found in kids’ bedrooms, executives’ desks, and everywhere in between. It’s been seen or mentioned in movies, television shows, and novels. It even had homage paid to it in the form of a Microsoft Word “easter egg,” or hidden trick in a program. On an early version of Word, you could create a blank macro called “Magic Eight-Ball” and it would place an eight-ball icon on your toolbar.
Minor, I know, but it shows you that Redmond programmers dig Al Carter’s creation too.
Perhaps the name of the gadget featured in today’s I Remember JFK memory will ring a bell, perhaps not. But I’ll bet that one glance at the graphic will make you go “Oh, yeah!”
I wish I had my usual researched piece to offer you as far as where the Magic Brain Calculator came from, and its manufacturer, Chadwick. But there just wasn’t a whole lot I could find out. But what little I did glean, I hereby share with you.
A Boomer kid’s options for help in making mathematical calculations on the go in the 50’s and 60’s were pretty few. There were slide rules, which were only for the geeky. My oldest brother, who was in college, had one, but I had no idea how it operated.
Then there was the Addiator, manufactured by Addiator Gesellschaft in Berlin, beginning in 1920. They were sophisticated little hand-held mechanical calculators, but not terribly cheap, and once that nasty Nazi uprising took place, not freely available. But by the time WWII was over, they were back on the market, but still not real cheap.
But in the 1950’s, the Japanese factories began cranking out a low-priced version of the mechanical adding machine. Chadwick was the name of the enigmatic company that manufactured them, and they appear to have slid out of sight without leaving a trace behind.
But they did leave a legacy of thousands of Magic Brain Calculators. Durably made from high-impact plastic and aluminum, probably every one of them still exist in their original form, although many are now buried in landfills, awaiting future archaeological discovery.
Addiator calculator
The little calculators sold for a couple of bucks in dime stores, and were found in many a Boomer home in the 50’s and 60’s. For that matter, many are still buried in various present-day junk drawers, as they were virtually indestructible, and flat enough to live quietly buried by pens, pencils, and paper clips.
I know that we had one in our house. Seven-year-old I was baffled by its actual usage. Did I mention that math is NOT my strong suit? But that didn’t stop me from enjoying playing with the gizmo for hours nonetheless, inserting numerical values, running mysterious calculations, and pulling the wire handle up to clear everything.
The sheer indestructibleness of the Magic Brain Calculator, combined with its inobtrusive nature, ensures that many thousands still exist. At presstime, there were several on eBay with $9.95 opening bids, and one particularly nice model, with stylus intact, was going for $4.99 with just over a day left.
So if you Boomers still employed in an office want to impress the young punks you work with, pick up a Magic Brain Calculator from eBay, or possibly just dig your own out of the junk drawer. Read the linked instructions and practice making actual calculations, Then, at the next staff meeting, whip out a few figure faster than the youth can get their calculator-equipped cell phones to wake up!
The year was 1959. A machinist/inventor/tinkerer named Ernie Fraze couldn’t sleep. A few weeks previously, he had gone on a picnic and realized that nobody brought a can opener to open the sodas, a common situation of the time. So, to tire himself out, he thought he would ponder for a while on how a self-opening drink can could be devised.
Ernie envisioned a pull tab anchored securely to a strengthened rivet at the center of the can, which, when lifted, would perforate the can’s top and allow a tab to be removed along scored lines.
With that bout of insomnia, the canned drink industry was revolutionized overnight.
Beer and soda pop drinkers were heavily dependent on can openers before then. For a time, cans were produced with a conical neck that ended in an opening to be sealed with a bottle cap, but they were expensive to produce, and consumers preferred cheapness over convenience.
Much loved by the American public, the rings later came to be most reviled. The reasons are manifold.
One was images of fish who had unfortunately gotten pull tab rings stuck around their bodies as youngsters and who had become deformed adults, with that ring horribly constricting their body girth. I’m not sure how many fish this ACTUALLY happened to, but the image was very distasteful to the public, and gave pull tabs a bad name with the environmentally-conscious.
Various pull tabs
Another downside to the removable pull tabs was nicely summed up by one Jimmy Buffett:
I blew out my flip-flop
Stepped on a pop-top
Cut my heel had to cruise on back home
And while booze in the blender assuaged his pain, the fact is that it was darned annoying to cut one’s foot on a discarded pull-tab.
The third factor in their being banned involved a bizarre action taken by some in the hopes of keeping the tab from getting loose from the can: the habit of dropping the removed ring INSIDE your can, before the contents were consumed.
That was begging for trouble. But, as is the Great American Tradition, many who ended up with a pull-tab in the throat called a lawyer first, the hospital next. Soft drink makers and soda can manufacturers were sued for what amounted to irresponsible behavior on the part of the litigants, but still lost many cases.
The combination of these factors spelled the end of pop tabs in the US and many other places by the mid 1970’s. Alternatives needed to be found ASAP, before we were back to carrying can openers! One silly method was on Coors beer cans of the era, among other brands. It consisted of two holes in the top, one larger than the bother, which were intended to be pushed in with a finger or thumb! And they thought pull tabs were dangerous?
In 1975, Daniel F. Cudzik of Reynolds Metals invented the pop-top as we know it. Nothing was discarded as the mechanism would easily open a can of pop and stay put on the can.
So today, we are safe from deformed fish, cut up heels, and swallowing tabs we’ve put in the cans ourselves. Why don’t I feel safe?
