Things that Disappeared When You Weren’t Looking – Page 5 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

Home Movies

Our Boomer childhoods were quite well recorded when compared with those of our moms and dads. Growing up in the Depression, when you could either eat or take pictures, but not both, ensured that few photographs of our parents as cute kids would exist. And movies were simply unheard of.

But in the boom years after WWII, our parents could afford nice gadgets like they would never have dreamed of owning in their youth. And they were also very proud of their kids. So many of us were immortalized on 8mm film in our childhoods.

My father didn’t have a movie camera. But I had an uncle who had one, and I’m reasonably sure that he shot movies of me. It would be a thrill to see them, but I probably never will.

My wife’s parents had a movie camera as well, and also have movies of her running around as a toddler. She was a real cutie, BTW. 😉

They also have footage of the 1964 Winter Olympics. Cool stuff.

8mm film can trace its origin to 1932. Eastman Kodak released a movie system that used a 25 foot 16mm film roll. The film was exposed, then turned over and exposed again. When processed, it was split lengthwise to produce a 50 foot 8mm movie.

By 1965, the venerable 8mm format received a major overhaul with the development of Kodak’s Super 8 system. The sprocket holes were shrunk, providing 50% more frame size. Plus, Super 8 cameras had a built-in filter that allowed you to use one type of film for both indoor and outdoor movies. Previously, you had to buy daylight- or tungsten-balanced film to get the right colors.

Another innovation of most Super 8 cameras was a light meter. Amateur moviemakers now had a much better chance to create a perfectly-exposed film.

Oh, and Super 8 was now one continuous 8 mm roll of film. No more turning a cartridge over and shooting the other half of your movie.

The mid 60’s to the early 70’s was home movies’ heyday. Super 8 sold like hotcakes, and Boomer kids all over the country were being filmed in massive numbers.

That meant that many of us also grew up with the rest of the home movie equation: a noisy projector and a screen to present the fruition of our fathers’ cinematic efforts.

One of the first things we learned was how HOT that projector bulb would get! We would generally only touch the metal enclosure only ONCE.

And of course, having company over meant getting everything out and forcing them to watch our movies, which we assumed was as much fun for them as it was for us.

Of course, the invention and eventual affordable price of the videotape recorder caused Super 8’s popularity to decline. This is particularly ironic considering that a Kodachrome movie of the 60’s that has been kept in moderate conditions is likely in pristine condition. However, twenty-year-old videotapes are frequently unwatchable due to tape deterioration. If you have videotapes you want preserved, you’d better get them digitized quickly.

8mm and Super 8 moviemaking has made a nice comeback, with vintage cameras in good condition available for reasonable prices on eBay and would-be cinematographers using the still widely obtainable film to make movies that have a lot of charm that digital recording lacks.

However, we kids of the Boomer generation can remember when home movies were cutting-edge technology, and how vacations were frequently accompanied by the familiar whir of a camera recording our fun times.

Drive-In Theaters

Circa 1966, nearly every town in America with a population of 5,000 or more had at least one drive-in theater. In bigger cities, it wasn’t unusual to see two or more screens backed up to each other so more films could be shown at once.

Drive-ins were one of the earliest manifestations of the effect that Baby Boomers had on the nation’s economy. After the War, returning soldiers were buying cars and having kids. They were looking for affordable entertainment for their youngsters, and they also loved driving. Drive-ins were a natural result. Thousands were built in the 50’s, and a smaller number followed in the 60’s.

I remember going to Miami, Oklahoma’s drive-in with my parents and absolutely loving it. As hard as I’ve tried, I can’t remember any individual movies we watched, but I know that it was an absolute highlight of my summers, to be watching a movie with both parents and getting to stay up past midnight! Of course, teenagers loved the drive-in for, ah, different reasons ;-).

Probably, the death knell for the drive-in was sounded by enhanced theater sound. That little speaker, while having lots of character, just couldn’t compete with Dolby Digital SurroundSound.

Interestingly, drive-ins that survived the last three decades seem to be well-established and in good shape to stick around. Most offer sound via FM stereo, allowing Boomers to take advantage of those Bose stereo systems in their vehicles. Also, the drive-in experience is catching on with younger generations.

A survivor in my neck of the woods is the 112 Drive-In in Fayetteville, Arkansas. You have to line up at least an hour before sunset on summer Saturday nights to get in. They show double features every weekend, and have the aforementioned FM sound broadcast. And they have the best hamburgers on the planet in their snack bar.

Here’s hoping they resist the overwhelming pressure to sell their valuable land to a car dealership, who would love to use their perfect location. America needs drive-ins.

When You Got Your First VCR

As I sit back and watch my episodes of The Sopranos that my DVR automatically records every Wednesday night from A&E, I sometimes think about days long ago when you either watched a show on TV, or you missed it. If you were watching Bonanza, and the telephone rang, or company came over, you didn’t see the ending. Your only hope was catching the rerun.

If you can recall TV from the early 50’s, even THAT was not an option. It was live, and the only recordings were kinescopes, which were films shot by pointing a camera at a television monitor.

The first kinescopes were useful for preserving performances for posterity, but they weren’t suitable for broadcasts, although they would be later used to air shows three hours later for west coast audiences.

This all changed in 1975. That was the year Sony introduced the Betamax. This machine was instrumental in turning the world into commercial-skippers, thanks to that handy remote control. It also meant that you could watch TV programs ANY TIME YOU WANTED TO. That was pretty profound stuff the first time we realized it.

Of course, that convenience would cost you. The Betamax recorder, which came with a 19″ Trinitron TV, cost $2495 in 1975. Yikes.

But VCR’s were the devices that taught us that when something cool and expensive comes out, just be patient. It will soon get INexpensive, and still be cool!

By the next year, you could get a rival VHS recorder for less than a thousand dollars. By 1985, when I finally sprang for one, it was down to $299. And it played back in stereo, too, so I could watch movies like Days of Thunder and listen to the stock cars roar by from the left side of my living room to the right!

It also came with a digital clock, which, if you’ll recall, usually flashed all zeros.

That leads to another new concept which arrived shortly after the VCR’s themselves: renting movies.

We rented movies because they were too stinking expensive to buy. A movie on tape circa 1978 could cost over a hundred dollars. As a result, we signed up at video rental outfits, and didn’t mind shelling out as much as fifty bucks to sign on! That seems outrageous today, but I recall my older brother, who obtained a VCR about 1980, ponying up that cash to join a store that required a 15 mile drive to get to.

Oh, and the movies we watched. Years before the world wide web, VCR’s allowed you to watch ANYTHING you wanted to. The result was that many video rental places had a special “back room” that was opened to you by request only. You can guess what sorts of films were available in there. And, they generally were quite regularly rented.

In the meantime, Hollywood, in a rare moment of conscious thought, realized that the pricing structure for taped movies would have to be changed. Movie prices dropped dramatically, with many rental places being put out of business since you could buy a film for twenty bucks, the price of renting it four times. Paid memberships were also gone by the mid 80’s.

The buyers of the original Betamax machines, which had visibly better picture quality, were dismayed to see the VHS format win out. By 1998, you had to go to Japan to find a new one. But Sony kept cranking out a few each year until production finally ceased in 2002.

Today, the same situation exists in the high-definition DVD field with Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. If you invest in a player for either format, which are incompatible with each other, you run the risk of putting lots of bucks into a dead technology.

That’s okay. My standard DVD looks pretty darned good on my modest 30″ high-def TV. I’ll be happy to wait a few years while the two technologies slug it out. When I finally sprang for a VCR in 1985, it was clear who the winner would be.

When We Dialed Telephone Numbers

Try this experiment: tell your grandchild to dial a telephone number. Do you get a puzzled stare back?

Indeed, many of our grandchildren are oblivious to such telephone antiquities as cords, dial tones, answer machines (which are still newfangled things to many Boomers) and, of course, dials.

For many of us, a quantum leap in modern technology was the colored phone. Our parents grew up with (if they had phones at all) a black chunk of bakelite that weighed five pounds or more. It was leased from the phone company, and likely was manufactured by Western Electric, thanks to a sweetheart deal with Bell System. Actually, it wasn’t so much a sweetheart deal as a monopoly, since Bell and Western Electric were actually under the same corporate umbrella.

Indeed, for many years, it was a breach of Bell contract terms for a homeowner to plug any device into the phone line except for the leased brick phone that Ma Bell provided. Inspectors would check the lines for any devices that varied from the peculiar voltage requirements of WE’s phones, and any customer with the chutzpah to do such a thing would be threatened with disconnection.

My best friend’s sister had one of those pink Princess phones in the mid 1960’s. It was a nice act of generosity on the part of her parents, because it too was leased, and cost extra since it was (1) an extra phone, and (2) a fancy phone. Remember, back in those days, it was one basic phone per house, unless you wanted to shell out more bucks.

But this column is creeping a bit. It’s not about leasing phones, it’s about when dialing a phone number meant DIALING a phone number.

Push-button phones appeared as early as 1963 in urban areas, but since I (and many of you) grew up in small-town America, they really weren’t an option. No, that familiar clicking sound would count off each number dialed through the earpiece as the spring-loaded dial reliably did its job, with just the right amount of resistance to the finger as we patiently entered in five or seven numbers.

Some of the older phones, like the one my grandparents in Texas had, would have a strange silent spring-like resistance, and wouldn’t make the familiar dialing sound until your finger was released. I never could get used to that.

Bell continued to have a leased-phone-only policy throughout the 70’s. But prices must have dropped precipitously on colored phones, because I remember my thrifty parents sprang for a harvest gold model in the middle of that decade. It had a dial, of course. While touch-tone phones were available in northwest Arkansas in the mid 70’s, they cost extra, hence not in OUR house!

In 1983, the reorganized and split-up AT&T allowed consumers to connect their own phones to their network. That meant that suddenly K-Mart and the like began marketing extremely cheaply-made phones, in contrast to the massively rugged Western Electric models that we paid for many times over through leasing. And it was cheaper to make push-button phones than dial-up types, so the venerable dial began disappearing at that point.

No touch-tone service? no problem. The phones all had switches on them that would cause the pressed keys to make clicking sounds just like dialer phones, so you didn’t have to pay the extra five bucks or whatever a month to make them work.

Unlike many of the wonderful long-lost things we grew up with, dial-up phones can still be used with most phone companies. They have maintained backward compatibility so that you can dig out your mother’s avacado green bedside phone, affix the proper plug, and use it to dial out on the same wires that might be providing you with high-speed DSL service.

It’s nice when an occasional thing doesn’t change.

Clip-on Watchband Calendars

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.

Nah, I’m just making that last part up.

TV Trays

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!

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.

Tudor Electric Football

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.

When the World Ran on Tubes

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.

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.

The Vac-U-Form

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 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.

(sigh)

The Spring Horse

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.

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!