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.
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.
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.
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?
The year was 1970. Cigarette prices had been steadily climbing throughout the 60’s. Why, they had just hit an obscene 40 cents a pack! Something had to be done.
Thus, the Laredo cigarette rolling machine was released. The plastic device would compress tobacco into a tube of cigarette paper to make a more or less professional smoke. You could add a filter if you like. Laredo sold the machine and the supplies. Killing yourself just became cheaper.
Unfortunately, the history of the Laredo machine is shrouded in mystery. I did find out that it was roughly 1970 when it first appeared, and by the mid 70’s it remained modestly popular. The tobacco section of the drug store featured the machines and the Laredo branded tobacco, as well as complete kits that would produce a carton of smokes.
Laredo tobacco
Personally speaking, I remember seeing one up close in 1972. That was the year that we purchased a farm near Pea Ridge, Arkansas The wife of the owner was a chain smoker, and I recall a Laredo machine sitting on the kitchen table the first time we looked at the house. My mom had quit smoking the year before, and I also noticed a strong tobacco stench in the house that I had once been oblivious to.
I’ve always been fascinated by gadgets, and I stared at that plastic wonder for quite some time.
As sin taxes rose throughout the 70’s, Laredo machine sales remained steady. Technique was everything, though, and an incompetent roller could create “sticks,” as one board commenter I found in my research described them. Cramming too much tobacco into the paper tube would cause the cig to be nearly impossible to draw a breath through.
You could buy a kit to roll a carton of cigarettes for half the price of Marlboros. Thus, the inventive smoker had a way to cut the costs of his/her habit.
Like me, most kids love gadgets, and no doubt a significant number of them were delighted to create smokes for their parents with Laredo machines. One board commenter stated that he would roll out twenty every morning for his father before he went to work.
Laredo owners remained faithful to their brand, and thus the product survived. It never really tore the roof off of the market, neither did it pose any real threat to cigarette manufacturers. Eventually, it disappeared, the process no doubt aided by its original 1970 customers stopping smoking. This choice was either voluntary or not. But the Laredo cigarette machine did provide yet another contribution to the memory banks of those of us who remember JFK, and who were around smoking households in the 70’s.
Basic Pan pipes, like I received from Commander Whitehall
I’m always hesitant to write about more obscure memories. After all, just three months after putting this site up for the first time, we already have a nice amount of traffic in the form of reminiscing Baby Boomers. I don’t want to discuss things they don’t remember, but on the other hand, maybe they’ve been looking for info about the same obscure factoid. So here goes.
I was unable to find ANYTHING on the web about Commander Whitehall’s Explorer’s Club. So I’m operating on memory alone. Fortunately, my memory is pretty good.
Mrs. Cox, my third grade teacher, introduced the class to the Explorer’s Club. It cost about $5.00 a month, and a child would receive a box in the mail filled with genuine treasures from all over the world.
When your eagerly anticipated package would arrive, you would rip it open to discover a flexi-disc record, a brochure with pictures of the featured land, and, best of all, a trinket from that country!
I was in the club for six or seven months before dad decided that $5.00 a month was too much to spend. But during those months, I learned a tremendous amount about other nations.
Commander Whitehall would narrate the record, filled with sounds of the land he was in at the time in the background. It was killer stuff, and it wasn’t unusual to listen to the recording ten of fifteen times while playing with my monthly treasure.
I can recall three of the items I received. Apparently, Commander Whitehall was actually touring these countries, because all of the ones mentioned during my too-short membership were in South America. I got a set of pan pipes from Peru that looked just like the pictured ones. I also got a “pipette” as he called it, a miniature non-functioning pipe with a person’s face carved in the bowl. And I got a little drum-on-a-stick that you operated by twirling between your hands. Sadly, I don’t remember what countries the latter two delights came from.
I also recall that dad got into a fight with the Explorer’s Club when he tried to quit. They sent a final package that he didn’t want to pay for. All he got was letters demanding payment, because we were living in rural Missouri at the time, and didn’t have a phone yet!
But despite dad’s bad experience with Commander Whitehall’s Explorer’s Club, it is still a precious memory for me, and it made me curious enough about geography that I grew up to be one of those exceptional adults who can pick out South America on a world map ;-).
Who grew up in the 60’s or 70’s and hasn’t seen one of these? We used to jump in the old Fury III (Dad was partial to Plymouths) and head for Iowa and Texas every year (not at the same time) where my grandparents lived. On the way, we would stop and eat at cafes (no fast food for us!). It seemed like every one of them had a dippy bird doing his thing, many times on a shelf high up enough to be seen throughout the eatery.
I guess they had some horribly toxic substance in them, hence their rarity today. But if you remember JFK, you probably remember the dippy bird being a very common sight.
Hey there cola hearted woman
Come and drink from my loving cup
It will melt your cola heart babe,
Cause it is filled with 7up
7up embarked on the Uncola approach with its ads starting about 1970. They went straight for the youth (that would be US!) with its commercials featuring bright lights, rock and roll, and promises of romance.
The one featuring the can light stuck vividly in my mind.
7 Up light with flickering bulb lit up
My oldest brother’s wife actually bought me one of the dancing filament 7up lights. I was mesmerized by its rapid flickering, particularly in a dark bedroom with WLS on the radio.
The flickering filament wouldn’t last very long before burning out. And, they were expensive to replace. So most 7up can lights, mine included, ended up with regular bulbs in them.
I was recently delighted to find under my house (built in 1972) a 7up can that looks exactly like the one in the illustration. Perhaps I’ll turn it into a lamp someday.
Ah, the avocado-green-era we all knew and loved, aka the 70’s. The turbulent 60’s were still fresh in our collective memories. But in 1975, the Vietnam War was officially over. Protests were a thing of the past. Nobody had been assassinated in a long time. It was a time of peace and love like we had wished for in the Woodstock era.
So what did we do? We grew our polyester carpets long, We quit turning on, and instead, the country’s youth turned to much more mild-tempered grass as the illegal drug of choice. And the keyword of the laid-back years following the breakup of the Beatles was MELLOW.
So what did we buy with our extra bucks during the mid-to-late-70’s?
Oil-dripping rain lamps.
These bronze-tinted plastic liquid-pumping sources of illumination were sold by the droves in the era that immediately preceded disco music. When you think of a fondue party, you think of a Venus rain lamp providing subtle illumination on the goings-on.
Besides, the illicit effects of inhaling smoke produced by the dried leaves of plants of the cannibas family were significantly enhanced by visual stimuli like drops of oil slowly spiraling down plastic tendrils, or so I am told.
Anyhow, the dripping rain lamps experienced a rather short lifespan, especially when compared to the ever-popular Lava Lamp. The Seven-Up flicker light would be more of an apt comparison, as their reign was only about a year or so.
But they had a quirky appeal all their own. Even though the pump that sent the oily rain to the virtual heavens of the lamp’s lid was prone to breaking down and needing replacement, the lamps’ owners loved them.
Here’s to a short-lived period of time when gas prices were falling, when war was not a regular subject of the nightly news, and when we had some free time and bucks to spend on watching little droplets of oil surrounding a plastic statue.
