Gadgets – Page 8 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Keeping the Grass Mowed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mood Rings

Technology was a fast-moving thing for us Boomers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ring’s colors were to be interpreted thusly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mimeograph Machines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Ice in Metal Trays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet the Swinger, Polaroid Swinger

It’s more than a camera, it’s almost alive. It’s only nineteen dollars, and ninety-five!

Polaroid instant cameras had been around for years, but they were expensive gadgets that our PARENTS owned. In 1965, the camera company saw the obvious: there was a huge number of youngsters out there who needed to buy their product. So they came up with an ultra-modern (and inexpensive) design that was aimed straight at the face of youth.

Now, to top it off, we need a beautiful babe on the beach (Ali McGraw, if I’m not mistaken) as well as the catchiest tune of 1968’s commercials to make this a cultural icon. Mission accomplished.

Of course, I was an eight-year-old kid in 1968 (although I fondly remember that babe on the beach), so I didn’t get my mitts on a Swinger until a couple of years later, a gift from my oldest brother after he upgraded to a better camera.

It was a pretty cool item. The film was a bit pricey (hey, you can’t make money selling cameras at cost!), and gave black-and-white images about three inches square, as I recall. Not studio quality, but perfect for a generation that was always on the go.

And yes, it really did say YES when the light was right.

Here’s to a piece of Boomer culture that will live forever in our minds. Just TRY to get that song out of your head!

Matchbox

We Boomer kids were used to seeing “Made in Japan” on the bottoms of our various toys. Japan was the cheap place to make everything back in the 50’s and 60’s. But we were also used to seeing “Made in England” on one of our most beloved playthings: Matchbox miniatures.

It all began with a couple of unrelated Brits by the name of Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith on January 19, 1947. They founded Lesney Products in London, and began producing die-cast steel stuff. By the end of the year, the stuff included toys.

British kids grabbed them up from local stores as fast as Lesney could make them, so they kept it up.

By 1953, Lesney realized that they could make a very nice living concentrating on toys exclusively, and began looking at new product lines. Partner Jack Odell had a daughter whose school would allow kids to bring toys with the restriction that they be able to fit into a matchbox. So he took an existing Lesney toy, a green and red road roller, and miniaturized it so that it would be school-legal.

Lesney decided to sell the miniature vehicle in a replica matchbox. Thus was born a Boomer memory.

More models followed, and they were soon designated as the I-75 series. The implications were obvious: ALL must be collected! While some kids with generous parents were able to accomplish that, most of us had to merely settle for as many Matchbox cars as we could cajole from mom and dad.

Matchbox miniatures had no rhyme or reason as far as scale was concerned. They were all roughly the same size, whether a VW Bug or a dump truck. This caused derisive comments by some collectors who insisted on a particular scale. Whatever. The world in general didn’t care, and sales skyrocketed.

Kids loved the sturdy, detailed vehicles. While they were pricey compared to lower-quality toys, they were faithfully manufactured as authentic miniaturized versions of their bigger cousins, even original blueprints being used in many cases to get everything just right.

As the 50’s transformed into the 60’s, miniaturized cars were very, very hot. Two other British companies, Corgi and Dinky, got in on the act with their own accurately scaled, larger incarnations, and everybody sold lots and lots of cars, both in England and all over the rest of the world, particularly the USA.

Matchbox created other series, including airplanes, ships, and car/trailer combos. In 1968. Mattel turned up the heat with the introduction of Hot Wheels. Suddenly Matchbox had a real rival.

Hot Wheels were built with speed in mind. They had those cool spring-loaded wheels, too. Matchbox soon responded with their own Superfast series, and practically every American middle-class boy had either Matchbox, Hot Wheels, or both brands of cars in their bedrooms.

Matchbox cars seemed to appeal to more serious kids who appreciated their accuracy. Hot Wheels were more for us happy-go-lucky types. Some would take the rivalry so far as to shun one brand or another, but not me. I loved them all.

The bad economic air of the 70’s doomed Lesney, as it did so many other successful companies who couldn’t cope with the tight times. In 1982, they went into receivership, and the Matchbox brand name was sold for the first time. By 1992, rival Mattel owned Matchbox. This distressed collectors, who feared that the line would either disappear or become Hot Wheels clones.

But Mattel has for the most part kept Matchbox a more serious, accurate line of miniatures. Of course, they’re no longer made in England. However, they are still around, unlike many of our treasured toys that we grew up with. And they still exist pretty much as we remember them. In fact, many of us middle-aged businessmen have a few kicking around our offices or cubicles as stress relief.

Sometimes, a brief trip down memory lane with a toy is what it takes to deal with corporate stupidity.

Magnus Chord Organs

The world was full of budding keyboardists in the 1960’s. However, that didn’t mean homes were full of pianos. Pianos were big, heavy, and expensive. Having one in your home meant that you were committed to playing it, otherwise it just took up space.

The same wasn’t true for a musical instrument that was inexpensive, lightweight, and small enough to tuck away into a closet when not in use.

Chord organs were found in lots of homes during this time. The most common brand was Magnus. Magnus chord organs were made of various shades of plastic. They were made to sit on a tabletop, or there were also models that came on legs. They would necessitate benches with built-in compartments for the sheet music that was also a familiar sight.

We never had a chord organ in our home. I guess that’s a comment on the Enderlands’ musical talent. But lots of my friends had them.

The Magnus chord organ had a fan, which you could hear spin up when you switched it on. When you pressed the keys, you allowed air to blow over certain reeds. The resultant sound was similar to that of a harmonica, which works the same way.

There were also chord buttons on the left side, which could be used to provide nice background sound to your expertly played keys.

Of course, expertly played keys did not necessarily accompany the organs. The sheet music showed you how to play the right notes, but the music actually required talent to be done well, something which I, and many of my friends, sadly lacked.

However, many successful musicians did start out with a humble Magnus chord organ, and used it to propel them on to bigger and better things. A likely upgrade for such a prodigy might be a Hammond organ, capable of all sorts of cool stuff. Its electronically-produced sound made for imitation of different instruments like the trumpet, the clarinet, or the piano.

Most of the time, when I write about old toys and gadgets, I can find a good deal of information on the subjects. That’s not the case with the Magnus organs. Lots of folks remember having them, but nobody seems to know the origin of the toy/musical instrument itself.

I did find one website that stated that Magnus organs originated during the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps they did, but the plastic/electric models we had in our homes more likely arose sometime in the 50’s.

Some households proudly owned nicer wooden Magnuses. They coughed up three-figure prices for the organs, which would then be considered considered real furniture, not to be placed in the closet when not being played..

Nowadays, you can buy nice Casio keyboards capable of some amazing electronic sounds for around a hundred bucks (considerably cheaper than the Hammonds that cost over a hundred 1966 bucks). They will pipe music into your computer, where you can save it as a midi file. While not nearly as commonplace as the Magnuses of the 60’s, many aspiring musicians are discovering their talent by playing with them at a young age, much as we did with our plastic, air-driven chord organs.

Magic Rocks

They were magic, indeed. Place some colored rocks in a clear glass container. Mix up some solution and pour it over them. Let the magic begin.

Boomer kids were all about stuff like mixing up chemicals. And we REALLY liked stuff like growing rocks. That’s why two brothers, James and Arthur Ingoldbsy, made a peck of money with their 1940 invention: Magic Rocks.

I remember these bad boys being advertised in comic books. The thing is, I don’t remember seeing them for sale anywhere in my hometown of Miami, Oklahoma. I got my paws on Magic Rocks for the first time while on vacation in 1967. We traveled up to Montreal that year for the world’s fair which was called Expo 67.

Somewhere on the way up or back down, we stopped into a roadside restaurant/gift shop (probably a Howard Johnson’s) and there sat the magical minerals. I convinced my parents that they were something I could not live without, and became a proud owner.

I waited until we returned home to grow the Magic Rocks. I had forgotten the exact procedure, but this site reminded me.

You mixed up the chemical solution with tap water at room temperature. You put half of the rocks into a glass container (a goldfish bowl, in case you wanted to create an weird underwater scene with a fish swimming around it) and poured in your solution. After six hours, you poured off the solution, mixed it up, and poured it back in. You added the rest of the rocks. Six hours later, or more likely the next morning, you poured the solution down the drain and rinsed off your now towering rocks. Once well rinsed, they were to be kept submerged. You could now add your goldfish if you grew them in a bowl.

The Magic Rocks were one of the coolest things a kid of the 60’s could produce in his bedroom. Their surreal towers submerged in clear water could take you on a journey in your mind to a kingdom far away, where dragons ruled the air and brave knights kept them at bay.

They would last for as long as months. Generally, they would be forgotten and the water would evaporate. They would quickly disintegrate in the open air. They would last longer under water, but would still start breaking down after a while.

But the cool thing about Magic Rocks was that they were cheap, and easy to grow again.

Magic Rocks are still cheap, and readily found online. So perhaps one rainy afternoon you might choose to revisit your childhood by growing the magnificent little towers out of colored rubble. It might do your psyche some good

Made in Japan

“Made in Japan.” Our fathers, who may well have fought in the Pacific theater in WWII, would derisively roll their eyes when reading this out loud from a label on a cheap piece of junk. “Serves them right” they might have mused, recalling fallen comrades in arms, “to be the lowly producers of the world’s cheap junk.”

When we grew up, probably 90% of our toys bore the label claiming Japan as their place of origin. Long before we became so dependent on foreign oil, our first serious trade deficit arose thanks to huge ships loaded with every sort of plastic or tin gewgaw which was assembled in that Asian island nation half a world away.

And that label implied cheapness, shoddiness, disposability, lack of quality. One would NEVER give someone else a meaningful gift that was made in Japan.

How times have changed.

At presstime, the economic roller-coastering of late has put many American companies in a state of crisis. General Motors in particular is in serious trouble, the very continued existence of this industrial giant being in real jeopardy.

Yet, Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Mazda, and Honda are all doing very well, thank you. And the reason they are doing so well is that “made in Japan” has come to mean something very, very different than it did when we Boomers were kids.

Where did it all begin? When did the “Made in Japan” label go from something to be derided to a stamp of the highest quality?

A date would be hard to pick. But by the mid 1970’s, Japanese-made items like cameras were recognized by the rest of the world as being sophisticated instruments manufactured to extremely high standards.

There was nothing shoddy about a Nikon. Or a Pentax, a Canon, or an Olympus, for that matter.

The elder members of the Boomer generation were coming home from Vietnam loaded with goodies picked up very cheaply overseas. These goodies included Pioneer stereos, Seiko watches, and Nikon cameras.

The same kids who played with toys that their fathers sneered at now viewed items made in Japan in a very new light.

What Japanese-manufactured items would be the next hot tickets?

During the Korean conflict, Japanese automakers, who had been around since the early 20th century, were commissioned to manufacture army trucks. The much-needed business from the nation’s conquerors was just the ticket to revive an industry that had been driven to near-extinction by the loss of WWII.

After the Korean armistice, the manufacturers cranked out tiny cars perfect for Japan’s crowded roads and expensive fuel prices. Occasionally, one of these miniature vehicles would show up on American highways, to the amusement of WWII vets driving massive tailfinned land-boats.

By the 1970’s, when all of those Vietnam vets were arriving back home, Japanese cars had gotten a bit larger and more powerful. They also had developed a reputation for dependability and durability. And they got good gas mileage when fuel prices began going haywire.

That leads to today. When my kids began looking at the possibility of purchasing their first cars (which would be affordable on a minimum-wage budget), I told them that dad would work on them for free as long as they were (a) Japanese and (b) fuel-injected. They kept up their end of the bargain, so did I.

Now, China is the world’s laughingstock when it comes to cheap junk. Sometimes, it’s not so funny when things like poisons get into foodstuffs.

But look for the world’s most populous nation to sooner or later learn the lesson so effectively demonstrated by Japan: Quality is much, much more valuable than quantity.

Listening to Dad’s Shortwave Radio

It recently occurred to me that I came by my geekish (and I use the term with great honor and reverance) nature naturally. My father was a B-29 mechanic in WWII. Not only did that keep him from getting killed on some south Pacific island, he was also involved in state-of-the-art technology of the time. The B-29 was a monstrously huge, powerful, beautiful airplane that required highly skilled personnel to keep flying. I’m very proud of my father for qualifying for such exalted, technically challenging, honest duty.

Dad show his geeky side in another way as well. He was passionate about fancy radios.

Dad would play with the shortwave band from time to time. He would tune in a station from Denver that would broadcast coordinated universal time (At the tone, the time will be 9 hours, eleven minutes coordinated universal time.”). My brother the Air Force pilot would give him beautiful Seiko watches in the 70’s he obtained cheaply overseas. Dad reveled in knowing that his watch was accurate to the second, and knowing that 24 hours later, the amazing Seiko would only be a few seconds off.

Of course, I used the time station to set my LED watch as well. That way I could count down to the exact second the classroom bell would ring.

That was the extent of his interest in shortwave, to my knowledge. But I would borrow his big fancy radio and spend hours searching for strange radio broadcasts that were literally coming from all over the world. In fact, I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about how thrilling it was to stumble onto the BBC, Radio Moscow, the Voice of America, and weird Morse code signals.

It was pretty wild hearing the Russian side (in English) of how the Vietnam War was going.

But I had just as much fun finding stations that just broadcast electronic noise. Much of the noise, I later learned, was telex data. Telex was a precursor to the internet that allowed the transmission of typed words among businesses and government organizations. The signals would be translated by telex machines into messages. The system was fast, cheap, reliable, and decidedly cool.

The Morse code broadcasts were lots of fun, too. I would transform myself into a secret agent who was getting his encrypted instructions via shortwave from some strange, exotic place.

It was great stuff to fuel a kid’s imagination, knowing that some of the signals were coming from lonely towers located in the middle of Siberia, or eastern Europe, or on an African mountain.

Shortwave radio is still around, of course, and bigger than ever. There are websites that are virtual radios, where you can tune to frequencies and listen via streaming audio. And shortwave radios have gotten cheaper and more sophisticated, like all other electronics.

However, the rise of the internet and the fall of communism has made shortwave less cutting-edge than it used to be. I remember feeling a little guilty listening to Russian shortwave! But the medium is still out there, and still heavily used.

Maybe it’s time for ME to buy a fancy multiband radio . . .