Monday, May 24, 2021

The Best Toy Ever

I was a science nerd at a young age, spending hours poring over National Geographic when the Space Shuttle was still a far future concept and Ham the space chimp was a reluctant astronaut.

 I had a meager chemistry set during grammar school, until the day I spotted the mother of all Gilbert chemistry sets sitting by the curb on garbage day not far from my home. I guess someone had gotten tired of science. That was the year I was given a junior lab bench for Christmas. After I completed modifications, it had a sink that drained into a bucket and running water from a gravity-fed reservoir above. I spent most of my lawn-mowing money at the local hobby shop on laboratory glassware and replacement chemicals. Fire was a major attraction. Many experiments involved a small alcohol burner.

 

But there was also an unremarkable yet amazing little object tucked innocently into the folded and latched metal panels of the set I acquired. That object is still with me, and occasionally I take it out of storage to look at on the darkest of nights. But I’ll get back to that.

 

Some toys were dangerous when I was young, and that’s part of what made them fun. I won’t mention the company that made these toys (it was Mattel.) They didn’t intend for their products to be harmful, but apparently safety wasn’t top of mind in the 1960s. And that’s intriguing, since Underwriters Laboratories’ headquarters was just a few miles from my house in Illinois. Founded in 1894, they had plenty of time to ramp up testing of toys by the time the following childhood marvels hit the market, but I’m glad they didn’t.

 

The first was called Vac-U-form. This was the source of great fun for imaginative ten-year-olds in the early 60s, and kind of the 3D printer of its day. The name was descriptive. Square sheets of colorful plastic were clamped into a holder and heated over a hot plate to moldable softness, then flipped onto the other side of the device. The user then frantically pumped the air out of an underlying chamber upon which a desired object rested, about to be encased – formed by a vacuum – in softened plastic that quickly hardened when heat was removed. Presto! You had a mold of your target object. In my case, that was often the body of an Aurora HO scale race car. I carefully removed the excess plastic with an Xacto knife and painted the molded car body for substitution on a body-less chassis. Sales of consumables for this toy must have been significant. Me and my friends went through stacks of plastic squares in an afternoon.

 

In 1964 Creepy Crawlers, or the Thingmaker, made its debut, also from Mattel. I guess flesh-searing hotplates being all the rage among kids of the day inspired another use for a 390 degree kid burner. S’mores over a backyard bonfire at least had a longer handle than the short one that came with this device (see lower left corner of the photo at left.) The toy came with a series of die-cast metal trays, each with an assortment of bug impressions into which “Plasti-Goop” liquid was poured. 

The colors of Goop multiplied as the popularity of the toy increased. Soon there were fluorescent variants of the original somewhat dull rainbow, even including one that was a glow-in-the-dark greenish radium color. You simply filled the molds with Goop and then heated until a noticeable color change indicated that the plastic had cured. After a bit of cooling and you pried the insect from the mold with a pointed metal stick. Bottles of Goop didn’t last long at the rate we created our creatures. Up until this point, fake bugs were gotten one at a time from clear plastic eggs in a grocery store gumball machine at a cost of ten to twenty-five cents each. We made hundreds of them! This toy line became a franchise unto itself, spinning off dozens of themed sets all the way into the early 1970s.


When I had kids of my own I was thrilled to see that these toys still existed, sort of. By the 1990s, safety conscious manufacturers substituted light bulbs for hot plates, encasing the previously open and accessible scalding surfaces deep within the machine. They took forever due to lower heat and were just not that fun. My kids never enjoyed them much.





The final member of the Mattel triad was the PowerShop. This was a truly useful little tool that morphed into one of four configurations: jig saw, lathe, disc sander and drill press. It came with an assortment of balsa-wood pieces and project ideas but could handle much more. I made the little cannon pictured here.

 

But back to the toy that didn’t go wherever toys end up when you age. This one is so intriguing I kept it. 


To read the rest of this story and more than seventy others, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 


😎


If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.


 

Monday, May 3, 2021

Room With a View


          “Isn’t summer the BEST?” asked Tommy.

 

The three boys agreed and laughed. Their games and adventures had an urgency that had been bottled up until the recent end of school. After all, it would be another fourteen months, a full year, before summer came again. They intended to enjoy every minute. And for now, every day was Vennday, first day of the three-day weekend.

 

Residents of Colo lived comfortably above and away from Lake Sippi. The long, sloping shoreline was a wilderness of sand dunes and low scrub that ended suddenly at the edge of the great western wilderness. There, old growth stood as tall as the sky and overlooked the vast lake. Great canopies of heat-loving mammoth cypress trees enjoyed fringe swampland, yielding to palms and pines for hundreds of miles. Then came the home of the Sequoia and the Rock Mountains, borderlands that led to the MexiCanUS western shore and the Calicific Ocean.

 

            “You boys be careful in those woods,” said their Maman. 

 

            “We know,” said Hector. Tommy and Wayne nodded emphatically. “Mother and Mamay say the same thing.”

 

Off they went, explorers all, carrying lengths of rope and backpacks filled with tools and treasure.



To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


😎


If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.


Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by a town in Illinois, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon. Click on the image below.