Things that Disappeared When You Weren’t Looking – Page 9 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

How Did Our Dads Play Golf With That Equipment?

One of my dad’s spare time passions, and, by extension, one of mine, was golf.

His preferred course was the Miami Country Club (not a member, BTW). It was a nine hole layout that I never played. However, I did earn many a quarter (worth approximately $200 in kid bucks of the 60’s) for dutifully pulling his clubs around and staying (mostly) quiet.

I was too short to effectively take a real swing. However, he did allow me to take putts when there was nobody behind us to get irritated at a kid messing around on the green ahead of them.

Dad had an Acushnet Bull’s Eye putter, a classic design that is still manufactured and still popular. He also had a McGregor Tommy Armour Ironmaster, nowadays a valued collectible which I am proud to still own.

He was a bogey golfer who once shot a nine hole round at even par. What makes that feat all the more remarkable is that he did it with 60’s vintage equipment.

Golf equipment evolution had remained pretty stagnant since the quantum leap of replacing the old torque-plagued hickory shafts of the Bobby Jones era with steel versions that didn’t force you to close the club face at setup in order to achieve squareness at impact.

By the time our fathers went to war, the golf clubs they left in their garages back home had the newfangled steel shafts.

60’s era golf ball, out of round out of the box, and prone to getting cut by a topped swing

So when dad headed for Baxter Springs, KS to play the course there (another favorite haunt of his), he took along his trusty state-of-the-art Wilson Staff blades and laminated woods. He also had a bunch of Titleists in the bag, which set him back about a dollar apiece at the pro shop.

I would head for the rough and pick up lost golf balls at every opportunity. Dad would pay me a dime apiece for mint-condition examples of top-end brands like Spalding Dots, MaxFlis, or Tourneys. And a primo still-shiny Titleist might fetch as much as a quarter! That bought a lot of candy.

However, most of the orphaned balls I located had big “smiles” on them. Those were nasty cuts that were caused by “cold-topping”, i.e. swinging too high and striking the ball with the sharp lower edge of the iron.

Those laminated woods would make the ball fly, but they had the same basic flaw as did the blade irons: a sweet spot approximately half the size of a gnat’s wazoo.

Dad had sprung for a Kenneth Smith customized driver made of a block of pure persimmon. That was the same material that Arnold Palmer used in his woods. Of course, Arnie could also afford his own jet.

Persimmon woods, with a sweet spot the size of a gnat’s rear end

The persimmon was inherently harder than the cheaper laminated wood, and theoretically made the ball fly farther. It definitely had a different feel that was worth the extra bucks, in the opinion of 60’s golfers.

Dad had a pretty pure swing for a weekend golfer. He played a natural draw, an accomplishment in itself. When he connected, he could send the ball out as far as 240 yards.

Nowadays, we Boomers play with cavity backed irons that allow badly mis-hit shots to still travel a respectable distance and fly pretty straight. We swing feather-light metallic woods the size of travel trailers that routinely allow us to pop cut-proof balls with scientifically-enhanced spin 270 yards with ease. Steel shafts? How passe. We use graphite models that have various inherent properties that cause them to flex exactly the right amount at exactly the proper locations to cause the ball to fly as far and as straight as possible.

If you’re lucky enough to still be able to enjoy a round of golf with your old man, ask him if he misses the equipment he played with back when LBJ was in the White House.

Hot Lather Machines

What a happy coincidence. The younger members of the Boomer generation began shaving at roughly the same time that a formerly familiar device began appearing in our bathrooms: the hot lather machine.

Shaving is a rite which few of us guys enjoy. I’m sure you ladies enjoy it even less. But if you could replace that ice-cold lather with deliciously warm stuff, that would certainly make things more bearable, right?

Well, for a stretch in the 70’s, much of the world thought so. Thus, millions of hot lather machines, the most famous a model by Shick, were sold in drug stores and the like to those of us looking to make the daily shaving rite a bit less dreary.

My own first experience with hot lather started at the barber shop. The barber I used would finish up my haircut by getting hot lather from a big chrome machine and spreading it just over my ears, then taking a straight razor to remove all traces of hair about a quarter inch above them. That hot lather felt wonderful, but only for a moment. It quickly reached room temperature, but not before filling me with a feeling of temporary delight.

There were a variety of hot lather machines available during the Decade of Polyester, but Shick was by far the most popular and familiar to us. It used a lather manufactured especially to be heated up. It reached a higher temperature than the generic models which would accept almost any can of shaving cream. And it certainly received more advertising time than its competitors. I remember many a TV commercial extolling the benefits of using the Shick Hot Lather Machine.

But there certainly were others. One was a little ball that snapped on top of a standard can. I believe it was called the Shick Hot Top. There really isn’t a whole lot of info out there about hot lather machines sold in the 70’s.

GE made a machine that let you put almost any brand you preferred into it to be heated up for your pleasure. I believe that it was the machine that I once owned.

I enjoyed my hot lather machine, to be sure. But one day, I stopped using it. I’m really not sure why. Perhaps I had grown impatient with waiting for it to warm up. Eventually, it was relegated to the garage shelf, where it sat until sold at a yard sale, as were most of the other machines that were eagerly snatched up by us in the 70’s.

A hot shave is still a delightful experience, well, it’s better than a cold shave, let’s put it that way. But the days of fierce competition among manufacturers of hot lather machines are definitely over.

One thing I DID discover in researching this piece is that some men are quite passionate about the shaving experience. One blog went into a lot of detail as to the proper technique to get a perfect shave, including using a genuine Badger brush to apply the hot lather and letting it set for a while before actually shaving.

Yes, you can still obtain a Conair hot lather machine. They make models that range from a spiffy chrome model that eats up the better part of a c-note to a more basic black version that goes for less than twenty bucks.

Hmm, I’m tempted. But then again, that would mean that this wired type A would have to wait around for that lather to get hot, all over again.

Maybe I need to cut back a bit on the coffee? 😉

Grandma’s Wringer Washer

Today’s column will probably wake up a few long-dormant memory cells. In my case, it was my grandmother who had a wringer washer. But for many of you, it might have been dear old mom herself.

Keeping one’s clothes clean has been a challenge since clothing itself began being worn. The wealthy would have servants do their laundry, or perhaps would take it to a laundry business to be picked up later. The rest of society used rocks at the creek, or perhaps a tub and a washboard.

But in 1907, Maytag began marketing the Pastime. It was a hand-cranked washer, equipped with a flywheel to aid in the agitation of the clothes, which featured a wringer at the top so that the wash water could be extracted before the clothes were fed into a rinsing tub.

The wringer washer was high-tech stuff. No more endless hand-wringing of clothes! How much easier could life get?

Today, of course, wringer washers are largely unseen outside of antique shops. But it turns out that our grandmothers were actually green advocates before there even was such a movement. That’s because wringer washers use a fraction of the water and electricity (or gasoline, in some cases) that modern multi-cycle washers do.

You see, grandma would fill the washer with water and finely-shaved Fels Naphtha soap, them agitate the mixture so the soap would dissolve. Then, she would put the whites in and agitate for ten minutes or so. If the home had electricity, the more well-to-do would have an electric motor to do the job. Out in the country, a gasoline motor did the work. Of course, the less affluent turned a crank on the side.

Once the whites were done, they were wrung out and dropped into the bluing tub. The bluing made them look whiter. Then, another wringing and into the rinse tub.

In the meantime, the lighter colored clothes were being agitated in the same water the whites used! And when they were done, the darker colors went in. That’s three loads of clothing for the price of one load of soap and water!

The rinse water too was reused. So a family’s entire week’s worth of clothes could be laundered with the amount of water used to handle a single load in a modern washer.

No wonder some of our thrifty parents and grandparents were reluctant to give up their wringer washers.

By the 1960’s, few homemakers still used wringers. But it seemed that many of them couldn’t bear to throw away the reliable, economical devices either. Hence, the one I played with at my grandmother’s house in Mason, Texas. And many of my friends had wringer washers stashed in outbuildings, garages, and sometimes sitting outside.

They were fun for a kid to play with, too, although you didn’t want to get an arm caught in the rollers or you would get one ugly blister.

In researching this piece, I found a website (lehmans.com) that will sell you a Saudi Arabian made brand new wringer washer for about 900 bucks. It’s an exact remake of the classic Speed Queen. They also sell reconditioned Maytags with electric or gasoline engines!

So Boomers, if you really want to go green, follow the example of your grandmother. And you’ll have it much easier, too. Just pour in some liquid detergent. You won’t have to shave that Fels Naphtha soap anymore!

Giant Rockets and Subs in Comic Book Ads

How cynical we Baby Boomers are. And for good reason, too. After all, we devoured comic books like they were cotton candy. And the comics’ ten or twelve cent price was subsidized by advertising. But it wasn’t just advertising. It was huge, colorful, lavishly illustrated ads for things that, if we could persuade our parents to part with their hard-earned dollars so that we could obtain them, turned out to look nothing like the ads promised.

Take, for example, the six-foot Polaris submarines and rocket ships. My beloved Archie and Superman comics were profusely populated by half-page blurbs showing unbelievably real looking submarines and rocket ships available for a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars their real-life counterparts would cost.

What a bargain! What kid should be denied their very own submarine for a paltry $6.98? Just think how much fun it will be when we take that bad boy down to the lake and surface in the middle of startled swimmers!

Well, as we learned from any monkeys or dogs in teacups that we might have tried to obtain, the truth is often different from what the ads promised.

I never knew any kids who actually obtained the sub or rocket ship. But stories spread throughout Nichols Elementary School about a kid that someone else might have known who ordered one, only to have a big, flat package delivered to their home. The package was full of pre-cut cardboard and assembly instructions.

No rivets, no titanium, no nuclear powered propulsion. Just a big cardboard thing that, if left out in the rain, would quickly biodegrade into dirt.

I wouldn’t try surfacing under any surprised swimmers at the lake in that puppy if I were you.

Thus, the rest of us decided that hounding our parents for such a disappointment simply wasn’t worth it. Instead, we concentrated in sales pitches for more substantial items like, say, G.I. Joe’s.

However, that didn’t keep me from reading the ads over and over again. Part of me wanted to believe that the other kids had lied, that you really could receive a space-worthy vehicle for what you dad would spend to fill up the car two or three times. No wonder we didn’t trust The Man. We couldn’t even trust Superman.

But you know what? This amazing photo of a kid in an actual Polaris sub, taken in July, 1967 shows that the cardboard Polaris sub was a pretty stinking cool looking item. Check out how that conning tower raises and lowers!

So why did the sellers of rocket ships and submarines not just come clean with us and let us know what exactly it was that we were buying? Their sales might have been even more brisk, since the derisive talk at school about what you REALLY got for your $6.98 wouldn’t have been around to cause them (and, by association, all other advertisers) to be mistrusted.

Oh well. At least we Boomer kids got a dose of how the world really operates at a good young age.

Flash Bulbs

If you were to time-travel back to the mid 60’s, you would find that photography was a pretty technically challenging affair. I mean, nowadays, we shoot auto-focused, auto-exposed, auto-flashed shots with our $100 digital cameras and see the results as soon as we plug the memory chip into our computers.

But our fathers went through a more arduous experience. Open the camera, wind in the film, then, if the pictures were indoors, insert a flash bulb and instruct the camera to take a flash exposure. Then, of course, the exposed film had to be removed and sent in for processing.

It’s the flash bulbs that we’ll be concentrating on today.

Perhaps our fathers felt like they had it easy. They might have been old enough to remember when using flash involved igniting a pile of magnesium powder on a tray! But sometime in the thirties, the magnesium powder was changed to thin pieces of foil, and was contained within a glass bulb that was ignited electrically. It was truly a quantum leap in photography.

By the time we Boomers came along, the bulbs had been coated with blue plastic which provided the perfect color balance for use with outdoor color film. Thus, the same color pictures looked right whether shot inside or out. That plastic coating also kept the bulb from shattering from the sudden influx of heat, a common occurrence with earlier models. The foil had also been replaced with very thin wire strands.

By the 60’s, another leap in technology was made. Four flashbulbs were included in an ingenious device known as the flashcube. My father’s Kodak Instamatic used flashcubes, and my dad must have thought they were the greatest thing ever!

Flashcubes got even smarter. The earliest ones relied on the camera’s battery for power, but by the early 70’s, the Magicube was produced. It had primers similar to those used in ammunition which ignited the fine wires inside each bulb. Now, many cameras didn’t even need batteries!

How could things possibly get any better? Enter the Flipflash.

The Flipflash showed up in 1975. It had eight bulbs that would fire off consecutively. Once half of them were used, you flipped it over to use the rest.

How much better could flashbulbs get? The answer was none.

Electronic flash showed up shortly afterwards. I bought an affordable Kodak 110 in 1977 which had it. The end was in sight for the flashbulb industry.

But flashbulbs really don’t cause me to look back longingly on their former presence. Let’s face it. They were a pain. However, many a kid learned to listen to their fathers thanks to them. After ejecting a spent bulb, he would say “Don’t touch that, it’s hot!” Yet, how many of us just HAD to learn for ourselves?

A flash bulb also made a convincing space craft, flying alongside the electronic tubes I also used for the purpose.

Taking photos has gotten very easy. I just fired up my photo manager and found that I have 1,814 of them on my computer. And I really don’t consider myself an avid photographer. Historians will likely view the arrival of the cheap digital camera as a turning point in the number of photographs taken by the average Joe.

The same could certainly be said for the invention of the flash bulb.

Filmstrips in School

How did kids in school see the world in the 1960’s? Frequently by means of film strips.

Film strips were strips of 35 mm film that had positive images on them, much like movie film. However, it wasn’t designed to be quickly run through the projector like a movie. No, each slide was a scene in itself.

Many film strips were silent. Words at the bottom of the image described whatever was portrayed. But it was also common to see film strips that were synchronized to records. The teacher would play the record, and a beep would indicate it was time to move on to the next slide.

Of course, it was easy to get lost. When that happened, the class would loudly offer the teacher their assistance in locating the correct slide for the dialog.

We loved film strips. It meant a break from the tedium of regular classwork.

The sound film strips would be shown at my school through an ancient projector, much like the one illustrated above. It had a noisy fan that kept that great big light cool, and presumably the film as well.

But in the school libraries, there were more personal versions of film strip viewers. I remember we had models designed for single use and text-only filmstrips. There was no provision for sound, like the students from 1972 had in the illustration to the left. We had little separated cubbies on a long table so we could view our film strips side by side.

We would be shown pictures from other countries, photomicrographs of cells and protozoa, health/hygiene stuff, and occasionally, fun stuff like cartoons.

I remember one teacher with a two-pack-a-day habit who would appoint a kid to be the film strip advancer and would slip off to the Teacher’s Lounge for a smoke. Don’t worry, Mrs. Finley, your secret is safe with me. 😉

Today, of course, our grandkids in school are treated to live videos streamed over the internet, or perhaps DVD’s viewed on plasma TV’s. But if you’re old enough to remember JFK, you can recall when multimedia in class meant the teacher wheeling in the 1950’s model film strip projector, and playing a scratchy record. It was great stuff.

Essential 60’s Accessories: Ashtrays and Lighters

Let’s step back in time and step inside a typical home of the 1960’s.

We’ll use my modest Miami, Oklahoma dwelling, of course. It was a 1950’s era tract home sitting on a modestly traveled street. Very typical of what WWII veterans were raising families in.

If you have time-traveled from the 21st century, the first thing you will notice when you step through my front door (three small staggered vertical windows placed at adult-viewing level) is a pervading odor of stale cigarette smoke.

If you see me sitting on the carpet, playing with a pile of toys, please note that I am completely oblivious to the odor. Second-hand smoke was a fact of life for a kid of the 60’s, completely unnoticed. There are many different accessories for the home that we all use everyday ranging from toiletries and kitchen ware, to coffee table books and coasters for your drinks. In the 1960’s coasters and kitchenware were both essential things to have to furnish your modern office or home, but ashtrays and desktop lighters were must a have. They were used by most people whereas today’s home furnishings and modern office furniture will usually only have them as nostalgic decorations, if at all.

You will also spot a variety of smoker’s accessories. These include ash trays of various shapes and sizes, as well as desktop cigarette lighters. No properly-furnished 1960’s dwelling would be complete without them. Even if it turned out that the owners didn’t smoke, odds are that any guests who came over would. It would be an ungracious host indeed who didn’t provide an ashtray for a visitor.

Ashtrays and desktop lighters were ubiquitous home furnishings that could be found in an amazing variety of shapes and sizes. Some gadgets, such as the depicted hand grenade model, consisted of both a lighter and ashtray when separated. The image of the brass, hand-decorated Indian ashtrays seen to the right spurred childhood memories for me. We had one of the “sultan’s shoes” sitting on the coffee table, and it was transformed into a speedboat when pushed across the carpeted floor. I must have spent hours sliding that little shoe around making appropriate motorboat noises.

Mom tolerated me playing with ornamental ashtrays, but desktop lighters were strictly hands-off, of course.

Naturally, that didn’t stop me from playing with them when mom wasn’t around.

It’s difficult to effectively stress to today’s younger generations just how deeply smoking was embedded into 1960’s society. Every restaurant had an ashtray at every table. Hotel and motel rooms featured cheap ones, the assumption being that guests would likely make off with them. Grocery stores would feature a free-standing ashtray at each front door, placed there in the hope that you would finish your cigarette before grabbing a cart.

Cars had ashtrays on back seat armrests, and perhaps another one that pulled out of the back of the front bench seat.

Floor-standing ashtrays were found in banks, hospitals, churches, school gymnasiums, stores, and office buildings. Sitting before the desk of a doctor, lawyer, or insurance salesman would mean that there was an ashtray or ashtray/lighter combo within your reach.

Mom’s weekly visit to the beauty shop would mean that she would grab a small ashtray from a collection on a desk and carry it with her as she went from shampooing to sitting under a huge hair dryer. My own visits to the barber shop would be accompanied by the patrons in line using a couple of community trays, and the barber having his own personal model, right next to the jar full of blue Barbacide.

Mom gave up the habit about 1970, and got rid of all of the smoking paraphernalia around the house. That meant that Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Russell would have to use a small saucer during their visits.

Nowadays, of course, smoking is looked upon as a vice. No self-respecting smoker would dream of lighting up in someone’s home without express permission from the host. Isn’t it interesting that forty years ago, the shoe was on the other foot? It would have been considered the height of ill-mannerliness to fail to provide the smoking guest with all of the appropriate accessories for his/her use.

Chemistry Sets

Man, the things our parents let us play with in the 60’s and 70’s. I haven’t looked at modern-day chemistry sets, but in a land where you can’t get authentic Kinder Eggs because of the fear that you may be stupid enough to give the hidden toys inside to a child of less than three years of age, I can’t imagine either of the two chemistry sets I once owned being offered for sale today.

More’s the pity, because a chemistry set, circa 1970, made you more mature. Read on for more details.

My first set was a Skilcraft my parents bought me in 1970. I was ten years old. The manual that came with it was divided into two sections: lightweight magic you could perform with chemicals, and more serious experiments that would teach you about chemistry.

Kay chemistry set, possibly 50’s vintage

The magic tricks consisted of stuff like preparing two test tubes of clear liquids (one contained phenolphthalein solution, I can’t recall the other needed chemical) which you could mix together to magically form “grape juice.”

You can see where this is heading. Today’s poor, stupid, coddled youngsters, upon being told that they could make chemical “grape juice,” would obviously gorge themselves on it, necessitating an emergency room visit, as well as lots of legal action.

At least that’s what our modern society would have you believe.

The more serious section of the Skilcraft manual taught you how acids and bases would interact, how you could use red and blue litmus paper to detect them, how you could mix two liquid chemicals to immediately form a solid precipitate, and how it happened at the molecular level, stuff like that.

As much as I ate that stuff up, I’m surprised that I never pursued a career in the field. In fact, I never even took chemistry in high school, despite the urgings of the teacher to do so. Don’t ask me why.

But I seriously loved messing with my chemistry set when I was ten. Eventually, it fell into disrepair and vanished. But when I was TWELVE, I got the most equipped Skilcraft set that they made!

I was in heaven. This incredible set even came with a balance beam, so you could compare the weights of chemicals! Cool stuff indeed.

Just think for a moment about what kids were given: Chemistry sets came with an alcohol lamp, which you filled with the flammable liquid, lit with a match, and used to provide intense heat for experimentation purposes. They also came with glass test tubes, which could shatter upon impact, or even from heating them too fast. They came with lots of chemicals, most of which were relatively harmless, but a few of which (e.g. cobalt chloride) had long, finely worded warnings printed on the back of the bottle warning of dire consequences in the unfortunate event you poured them into your eyes, or ingested them. And carelessly mixing benign ingredients without guidance could create harmful reactions, as well.

Ergo, a ten-year-old with a chemistry set instantly became a mature young man who knew how to safely handle fire (the enclosed manual stepped you through it), potentially dangerous chemicals, breakable glassware, and also knew enough not to venture too far in experimentation.

It’s a pity today’s ten-year-olds aren’t given the opportunity to do the same

Cardboard Records

As a borderline audiophile who used to spray his records with a preservative that would supposedly extend their lives, I am a real fan of digital music. I love the fact that my extensive mp3 collection is backed up four ways, unlike my old record albums, which either wore out or were warped by leaving them in my car on a hot day. Just dropping an album might result in a permanent skipping spot, as happened with my original Rickie Lee Jones debut album. Right at the end of Company, too, my favorite song!

But there is one area where analog record album technology has it all over digital. That’s in the case of cardboard records. Yeah, let’s see you digitize THAT!

You probably remember these on the backs of cereal boxes. That’s where the depicted Archies album came from. Larry Staples, who, BTW, designed this site’s logo, and who came up with this column idea, once owned the very record depicted here. He nearly wore it out, as a matter of fact.

And wearing them out was a real possibility, too. They were nothing but a thin coating of vinyl affixed to cardboard. It was up to the music fan to cut it out perfectly, smooth out the warps, and liberate the music from its crude container.

While cereal boxes were the commonest place to find these puppies, I remember MAD Magazine would sometimes include one. The one in particular I recall was some song called “Makin’ Out”.

Another phenomenon was the flexi-disc, which was a thin piece of vinyl frequently featured in magazines. I won’t talk about it here, as I feel it warrants its own column at some future date.

The Archies became superstars via cardboard records, even though they never accomplished existence in the real world. They were simply a collection of studio musicians whose makeup varied from session to session. Hmm, maybe they need their own column too.

Anyhow, if you managed to hold on to any cardboard records from the 60’s or 70’s, they are highly collectable. Just like those Reggie Jackson rookie cards I attached to my bicycle to be beaten to death by the spokes. (sigh)

When Vending Machines Required Muscles

Ah, the love/hate relationship that we have with vending machines. on the one hand, it’s pleasant not to deal with a surly convenience store clerk behind bulletproof glass, on the other, getting ripped off involves taking on a machine weighing much more than one’s self, with possibly disastrous results.

But by and large, with the exception of manhandling larcenous machines, the experience of popping in currency and retrieving merchandise has gotten much more mechanized than when we Boomer kids were, well, kids.

For instance, a vending machine typically has rows of chips, candy bars, etc. behind glass with corkscrew mechanisms that operate when you push buttons. You hear a little whir, your prize drops, you walk away.

But flash back to 1964, and vending machines involved muscle power. One of the experiences that I recall the most clearly was getting cigarettes for dad. I would drop two quarters into the machine, locate Philip Morris Filters, and pull the knob underneath them with a mighty jerk. One pack of coffin nails would obediently drop into the tray below for retrieval.

There was a yellow warning sign on the front that announced the illegalities of minors operating the machinery. That didn’t concern me a bit. Though we had lead and zinc mines in the area, I most assuredly didn’t work at them.

I was a bit confused as to why those who dug up minerals and metals for a living should be forbidden from buying cigarettes from a machine. Probably something to do with their lungs being exposed to dust, my seven-year-old mind reasoned.

Candy machines required a similar hard tug to get to the sugar-sweetened delights within, to be retrieved at the cost of a dime. I know that I paid a nickel for a Pay-Day at the corner grocery, I don’t recall ever seeing a vended candy bar for less than ten cents. In fact, one of the first lessons that a kid learned about life was that you only had one shot at your favorite treat once that dime went in the slot, and you’d better give the handle a hefty tug. It was tragically possible to pull a handle out only part way, so that you lost your ten-cent credit AND walked away empty-handed.

However, school troublemakers also delighted in spreading accounts of how you could pull TWO handles at precisely the same time and get two candy bars for the price! I actually saw it happen, and even did it myself a time or two. However, you would walk away empty-handed enough to where I believe the odds were, just like at Vegas, in the house’s favor.

The illustrated Coke machine shows that once you bought your can of pop, you still had work to do. You had to place the steel container underneath that opener and shove down with all of your might to place a triangular hole at the edge of the can, then rotate it 180 degrees and do it again.

I wonder how often that cutting blade was washed?

Dad’s old nickel Coke machine required work, as well. It had a big handle that turned the internal mechanism to align a Coke bottle up with the opening so that it could be removed by an eager kid.

So the next time you put a ten-dollar-bill in a vending machine and get your sandwich accompanied by a rain of dollar coins in the change tray, think back to when you were a kid, and recall when vending machines required strength and dexterity to operate. And maybe, just MAYBE, you could get two items for the price of one!