Experiment in nostalgia

Having posted about the board games and books of my childhood, perhaps it's time to mention another toy that, as it turned out, presaged my primary career path. I'm talking, of course, about the venerable Gilbert Chemistry Set.

My set came in blue metal box, similar to the one shown here; in fact this may be the actual model I had. I remember the square bottles of chemicals like the ones in the pic below. I can't recall much about the chemicals themselves, though I know they included borax, tannic acid, and (I'm pretty sure) cobalt chloride.

Like many of my toys and books, this one I inherited from my older brother – nobody gave chemistry sets to little girls in the 50s. Girls got dolls and play kitchenware and the like. But I happily took my brother's castoffs and experimented with acids and bases and litmus paper and even a real alcohol-burning lamp. (The set did not include a retort, no matter what the illustration might imply.)

I remember supplementing the glassware with a few extra test tubes and small bottles purchased from the local drugstore. (This was back in the days when a drugstore really was a drugstore, not a mini-supermarket and convenience store that fills prescriptions in the back.) But I certainly had no premonition that some day I would work with Bunsen burners and exotic glassware and considerably more hazardous chemicals in a real laboratory.


Apparently what passes for a chemistry set these days includes only miniscule quantities of the most innocuous stuff imaginable, like sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda), and they've even eliminated test tubes or anything glass, for fear that a kid might break one and cut herself. (Of course your kid would never encounter anything breakable in the home like a drinking glass, right?) And needless to say, alcohol lamps are nowhere to be found, let alone a retort.

Makes you wonder how any kid of our generation managed to live to adulthood without getting killed or maimed.

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Would Bingo by another name smell as sweet?

I've posted before about various bits of nostalgia from my childhood, such as the Brains Benton books and Flash Gordon shows. But I don't think I've ever written about the board games I remember playing as a kid, which is a bit of an oversight when you consider that anybody reading this is almost certain to have made my acquaintance by virtue of our mutual ties to a certain game company (aka The Company). (Upon adding tags to this post, I was astonished to find that I didn't even have a 'games' tag!) Since I no longer have any of these games (chances are, if any of them still exist, my older brother has them), I decided to dig up some vintage images of a few of the games I played.

After concentrating on the search for a bit, I came up with this box image of Milton Bradley's Concentration. From what I can find on BoardGameGeek.com, looks like 1st or 2nd edition, circa 1958, and I'm virtually certain this is the version we had. Nifty plastic case where you inserted the shuffled matching pictures behind the numbers. Very high tech for the time.

Like everyone else, we had a Monopoly game. IIRC, it was handed down from my aunt, and may well have been the 1935 edition pictured here, or something very close to it. Although I simply don't recall the box, the money and the rule sheet look right, and it definitely had wooden playing pieces (not the metal ones) like these, as well as wood houses and hotels.


This is one I had completely forgotten about until I ran across it on BoardGameGeek.com: Careers. This 1958 edition is the one that looks most familiar to me. You could pursue Fame, Happiness, and/or Money in a combination of your choosing (i.e., you set your own victory conditions).

But wait -- there's more!

I was surprised to find that our Rack-o was apparently a first edition (1956). You placed your cards in the rack initially in the order they were dealt, and then you had to get them in numerical order by swapping out a drawn card for one in your rack each turn. Or something like that. I mean, really, it's been about 50 years since I last played Rack-o. It'd be kinda scary if I actually still remembered the exact rules.

On the other hand, with some vintage games it's pretty hard to forget the rules, because they're still around in some form that everyone is familiar with. Case in point: This really vintage (1927) Hokum game, which is really just Bingo by another name. In fact, Parker Brothers actually had another game with a box that looked exactly like this one -- except the name of the game was Jingo. My grandmother had a Hokum game that looked like this, and I played many a game with my grandmother and aunt. The only trouble with the game was that there was a mighty limited number of play boards (I can't imagine there were more than half a dozen), and my grandmother's set was missing one of the caller's tokens (I'm pretty sure it was one of the O numbers, maybe O-18, and the fact that I remember that piece of trivia makes me doubt my own sanity; surely that can't be normal). Since that particular letter/number appeared on only one board, you soon learned that you did not want that board, because that was one spot you could never get.

So, does anyone else out there remember these games?

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"Decode this" revisited

Back in the heady, early days of this blog – that is, just about four years ago – I posted a bit of a puzzle: a six-word coded message from a novel, to wit:

Blime zax fernmo appentish wacko lushford.

I asked my readers three questions:

1. What is the translation of this code?
2. What book series is it from?
3. Bonus points for identifying the specific book in the series.

Well, as it happened, no one ever identified this piece of what I referred to as "arcane and utterly useless trivia". A few days later, I got sidetracked by starting a new job (that was the old new job in August 2005, not to be confused with the new new job in October 2008), and never followed up the post with the answers. I will now rectify that sorry situation, because I don't want to be the only one carrying around this mental baggage. As I noted in the original post, "... I just want to see if anyone else remembers this kind of thing, because the thought that it's just me is rather frightening."


And the answers are:

1. The code translates to "I am in trouble. Help me."
2. It's from one of the later volumes in the original Tom Swift series. (Not Tom Swift Jr. or any of that latter-day crap.)
3. More specifically, it's from Tom Swift and His Television Detector.
   

Like I said, it's obscure.

Oddly enough, the code doesn't have anything directly to do with the titular Television Detector, and didn't even originate with Tom himself. No, in this case, Tom's old chum Ned Newton invented a pocket-sized wireless radio transceiver, and along with it developed a handy code that he and Tom could use to call each other for help, just in case one of them should by chance ever get kidnapped or something. And dang, wouldn't you just know it? Next thing you know, Ned gets kidnapped and has to call Tom for help! What a coincidence! Darned lucky thing he invented that wireless and the code to use with it!

Well, anyway, that little code phrase – which, if memory serves, is the only one ever mentioned in the book – burned itself indelibly into my brain nearly 50 years ago. Heaven only knows what kind of valuable knowledge it has forever displaced. But what I wouldn't give to be a contestant on Jeopardy with a "Tom Swift" category on the board. "I'll take 'Tom Swift' for $100!" The other contestants stare in bewilderment as I intone, "What is Ned Newton's code for 'I am in trouble. Help me'?" Cue audience applause...

Oh, by the way, Googling the phrase doesn't help, mainly because the text of this book isn't yet online, as the first 25 books in the original series are. I believe the last few books are still under renewed copyright and thus not in the public domain.

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Beyond Romper Room

Recent posts by Hollywood and Shocho asked who else remembered TV shows from childhood like Bozo the Clown and Romper Room, which both featured actual kid participation (including Hollywood and Shocho themselves). I don't recall ever seeing Bozo, and have only the haziest memories of Romper Room, but there was a similar local show in our neck of the woods. Trouble is, I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.

Unlike Romper Room, which was basically a franchise with locally produced shows, the show from my childhood was probably a strictly local one. I think the host was supposed to be a ship's captain (no, not Captain Kangaroo, he didn't do a live show with kids on it) -- something like "Captain Bob" or "Captain Mike", maybe -- and I have a vague recollection of my older brother being on the show; I think I was there, backstage, with our mother. Since my brother is 4 years older than me, and these shows typically had 6- to 8-year-olds on, I'm guessing I was 4 at the most. Small wonder I can't remember anything more than that about it.

Now, I did think that Shocho's reference to Romper Room hostess being named "Miss [whatever]" (his "local" hostess was "Miss Joan") rang a bell with me, so I racked my brain trying to remember who the local "Miss" might have been. Turns out I was thinking of "Miss Frances", and it literally "rang a bell" for me -- Miss Frances wasn't a Romper Room hostess, but rather was the teacher of "Ding Dong School"! From 1952-1956, Dr. Frances Horwich created the prototype of the educational show format later used by shows such as Mr. Rogers. Anyone else recall Miss Frances and Ding Dong School?

One more 50s show that had kids on it was, of course, Howdy Doody, hosted by "Buffalo Bob" Smith. [The first Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody, by the way, was Bob Keeshan, who later became Captain Kangaroo.) Here's an obscure piece of Buffalo Bob Smith trivia: At one time he owned three radio stations in Maine, including WQDY AM/FM, located in Calais, Maine (for those not familiar with Maine, that's way Down East on the Canadian border, and it's pronounced "Cal-ous", not "Cal-ay"). He bought the station in 1964; I don't know just when he sold it, but I was told he still owned it when I lived in Calais and environs in 1974-76. My understanding was that he also was living in the Calais area at that time, or at least had a summer place there, but I haven't been able to verify that online.

Amazing what memories I can dredge up from 50 years ago, when I can't remember what I had for dinner yesterday.

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The Most Fun You Can Have For $1

So I was browsing through a local Dollar Tree store (not to be confused with Dollar General, All For a Dollar, The Dollar Store, Everything's a Dollar, etc.), and there was this display of DVDs of classic TV shows. Classic as in '50s-'60s. Typically had 3 or 4 episodes each. Most of'em didn't interest me much, but this Flash Gordon DVD with three episodes from 1954-55 caught my eye. I was only 3 to 4 years old when the show aired, but I still have (very) vague memories of watching them. Only a buck? I couldn't resist.

Today I popped it in the player to check out Flash Gordon and the Planet of Death, which happens to be the first episode of the series, and had so much fun that I went on to watch Deadline at Noon and The Subworld Revenge, which both came near the end of the 39-episode series. I laughed my ass off.

Think classic Star Trek had cheesy production values? Flash Gordon is artificial plastic cheese food stuff in comparison. The plots (I use that term loosely), the dialog, the acting, the effects (I can't bring myself to call them "special"), the props -- all so dreadful they're hilarious. The costumes, remarkably, were just about on par with classic Trek's (that silver swimcap Flash is wearing on the DVD cover didn't actually appear in any of these three episodes); heck, Dr. Zarkov's uniform (and his beard) looked as if they might have been the model for the TOS Klingons. True, I wasn't exactly impressed with Flash's form-fitting white T-shirt in Planet of Death. But Dale Arden was, for the most part, attired in a sensible trouser uniform. Come to think of it, she could almost have been the precursor to Majel Barrett's pilot episode "Number One."

Deadline at Noon was a particular hoot. The titular deadline was for the explosion of a "duranium bomb" (tell me Roddenberry didn't steal that name) that had been planted in Berlin in the 1950s by time-travelling aliens. This bomb was going to destroy Earth, and it was planted in the 1950s because it somehow would take around 1250 years for the duranium to explode -- apparently this series is set in the 33rd century. (This sounded like it was intended to be some kind of "radioactive decay" with a long half-life -- they were searching for the duranium with a Geiger counter -- which didn't exactly jibe with the fact that the bomb had all kinds of weird mechanisms that Dr. Zarkov had to disarm when they found it. Or maybe I misunderstood the technobabble; the sound, supposedly "enhanced" according to the DVD jacket, was atrocious.)

Anyway, it's 11 AM of the day it's supposed to explode and blow up Earth at noon, and Flash and his buddies from the Galaxy Bureau of Investigation have exactly one hour to travel back to the "sixth decade of the 20th century," as it was quaintly referred to by Zarkov, and find and disarm the bomb. Evidently this is one of those cases where the time in the past marches in parallel lockstep with the time in the present (i.e., the 33rd century), which makes no sense at all, but whatever. Dr. Zarkov conveniently happens to have brought a time machine aboard the Sky Flash (their cheesy space ship which looks about the size of one of Trek's tiny shuttlecrafts) in his carry-on, and they travel back to the 50s with much less fuss and bother than a slingshot-around-the-sun maneuver entails. They identify some major cities (DC, NY, Paris) from the air, marvel at an "aeroplane" and an ocean liner, and engage in amusing exchanges about how primitive this culture must have been.

At this point I felt as if I had stumbled into ST: Voyager's Future's End or the original series' Tomorrow is Yesterday. The Enterprise -- excuse me, the Sky Flash -- is spotted over Berlin and assumed to be invaders from outer space. The cops (driving an old VW Beetle) are sent to find them after they land, but Flash "freezes" them with his ray gun while Zarkov and Dale locate the bomb and defuse it, two seconds before noon. Dale wants to stick around and look up their ancestors to tell them what the future will bring, but Zarkov says no. (He must be the original Temporal Agent.)

Oh, and if you're wondering why the heck they picked Berlin, of all places, for the location of the duranium bomb, it's undoubtedly because this series was actually filmed in West Berlin.

I can't remember when I had so much fun for a dollar. And I can't wait to get back to the Dollar Tree, because they also had a "Volume 2" Flash Gordon DVD featuring the episodes Akim the Terrible, The Breath of Death, and Claim Jumpers, and I want to see what else the Great Bird stole from them. Only a buck? I can't resist!

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Happy Father's Day

I wish my father was still around for me to get him a box of chocolate cherry cordials for Father's Day. Daddy passed away in 1979. I still dream about him sometimes.

My father was an auto mechanic who owned a gas station back when gas stations almost always were an adjunct to a full-service repair garage (not a convenience store). Back when those gas stations-cum-garages were open seven days a week till 10 PM. He typically had only one employee, so he worked a lot of late nights and weekends. I didn't know what it was like to have a father with a 9 to 5, weekdays only job.

I remember the smell of Sunoco gasoline, oil, and grease that saturated his work uniforms. I remember how he would lie down on the living room couch to read the paper and fall asleep watching football on TV. It was "his couch" -- us kids could use it when he wasn't around, but when Daddy wanted his couch, you got off it. I remember getting to go in the truck with my father to take the trash to the dump on Sundays. (Yes, our town had an open-burn dump -- I'm talking about the late 50s and early 60s.) He was at work so much of the time, getting to go anywhere with Daddy, even to the dump, was a treat.

I remember how he loved to go to the stock car races at Oxford Plains Speedway when he wasn't working on a Saturday night in the summer. I remember when he got a motorcycle in his 50s, and how my mother (also in her 50s) took up riding with him (as a passenger -- she never went so far as to get her own bike). I remember the letter from my mother telling me he had lung cancer.

I remember the last time I saw him. I had taken a week's vacation during spring break at Cornell, with no specific plans, and then decided on the spur of the moment to fly up to Maine to visit my folks. I was so glad I did that, because four months later he was gone.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy. I miss you.

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I remember...

Meeting Jason and other dStaff at Star Trek 30 in Huntsville, and coming in 7th in the first STCCG "Nationals" -- my first tournament ever.

Hashing out the dilemma rules with Jason by email.

Being invited to "help out" at the Exhibition Tournament Weekend in Rochester, New York, and watching Jason lose a gunslinging match when he inadvertently seeded a stack of dilemmas under his own mission.

My first unsuspecting trip to the basement restroom, puzzled by Jason's inexplicable "Have fun".

Collaborating with Evan by email on the Useless Romulan Review.

Finally meeting Evan at the second First Contact playtest. He wasn't as blue as I had expected.

Lord of the Rings movie premieres.

Evan and Matt's "Men In Black" impersonation at STCCG '97 Worlds.

Proofing the First Contact rules sheet with Evan on the red-eye out of Vegas.

Teaching Chase Masterton to play STCCG at '98 Worlds.

Hairstyle variations -- dyed orange, shaved off, shoulder-length, ponytailed... and that was just the guys.

Job jackets.

Helping Evan, Brad, and Todd design The Borg.

Evan interviewing me and Brad on RFD before the Borg playtest.

Helge's tantrums.

Sheer terror, flying into Norfolk from Pittsburgh with Mark and watching as lightning struck the wing of our plane. The pilot came on the intercom and assured everyone it hadn't come near us. Yeah, right.

Brad's bottomless bowl of candy.

Tripping on the carpet during booth setup at Essen, plowing headlong into one of the black shipping crates, tearing my pants and almost breaking my wrist.

Escalating e-mail wars with Sandy over rules committee issues.

Thanksgiving dinners at Kendrick & Bonnie's, Tom & Kathy's, and Tim & Melony's.

Not having a phone for my first two months in-house. I got so used to hoofing it upstairs and down to talk to anyone, I kept doing it even after I got a phone.

Mark and me being accused by the lady on the plane of having diarrhea of the mouth.

The Bin of Mordancy.

Four-hour rules committee conference calls.

Trying to figure out the German subway ticket system. I was probably riding illegally most of the time. I'll never know.

Judging Continentals and Worlds with Evan.

Blurting out a totally stupid, totally broken card suggestion at 3 AM at the playtest house. It took Evan all of 3 seconds to point out its fatal flaw. I think 2 of those seconds were just to be polite.

Bad news -- that Jason was leaving -- that spawned some good news -- they hired me to be the new "dAnswerman".

A phone call from Carol with good news -- they were hiring Evan -- and bad news -- I wouldn't be handling rules any more.

A year later, good news -- Evan was moving into PD -- and more good news -- I got the rules-guru hat back.

Breaking Jason's record for tenure as STCCG rules guru.

Listening to Mark record... and re-record... WARS Radio in the office next door.

Memorial Day cookouts at Tim's.

"Porn runs."

Getting tipsy at a Mexican bar in Germany. At least, I think it was a Mexican bar. And I think it was in Germany. But I could be wrong. Does anyone remember just what we were drinking?

Looking for Grunty photo ops.

Playing the Pez Game with Tom and Kathy and Chuck.

Splitting the Worlds photo and article assignments with Marcus.

Putting the booth together and tearing it down at all those Origins and Gen Cons.

Joy at the job offer from Bill. Terror at the thought of pulling up roots and moving to Hampton Roads at the age of 50. If I hadn't already had so many friends here, I couldn't have done it.

I miss you all.

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A Little Nostalgia for Bygone Days in Maine

I grew up in a small town in Maine, about 2000 people. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to attend school right in my home town, all the way through high school, with no bus riding. (This was around the approximate end of the Dark Ages.) My class, the Class of '68, was the last to graduate from Mechanic Falls High School. The following year the high school population was swallowed up in a "School Administrative District" or SAD, which consisted of of the nearest city, Auburn, plus our town. Unlike some of the state SAD's, where numerous small and medium towns banded into one district and the students were all bussed in and all pretty much on an equal footing, the Mechanic Falls students were resented and/or ignored outsiders in a large, established school population. The kids who had been sophomores and juniors when I was a senior, and thus knew what attending a small-town high school was like, hated the move with a passion. Those who came after perhaps had a somewhat easier time, but not much, always treated as second-class citizens.

In the 50s and 60s, Mechanic Falls was in many ways, I now realize, an idyllic place to grow up. Most people didn't lock their doors (heck, some of my neighbors didn't even know where the key was) or their cars; most kids could walk or bike to school (and AFAIK no one owned a bicycle lock), and if you lived close enough you could even go home for lunch. Illegal drugs were essentially non-existent -- that was something in New York City -- as was crime in general. Oh, there were a few "bad kids" in town; everyone knew who they were, and the trouble they got into was pretty much limited to getting drunk and hotrodding. We still had an old-fashioned 5 & 10 cent store; several mom and pop grocery stores (I'm talking small convenience store size, but they weren't convenience stores, which I don't think had been invented yet), at least one of which had an honest-to-God butcher who would cut and grind your beef to order while you stood there and watched; and a drugstore that was really a drugstore (not a wannabe supermarket) with a pharmacist who knew everyone by name, including the kids.

I suppose from today's perspective I had a deprived childhood. Like I said, convenience stores hadn't been invented, shopping malls didn't exist, and -- I swear to God I'm not making this up -- I had never heard of McDonald's until I spent the summer when I was 16 in an NSF science program for high school juniors. (There may have been a McDonald's in Lewiston or Auburn 10 miles away, but if so it never impinged on my consciousness.) My high school didn't have a cafeteria, or teach calculus or any foreign languages except French. We got three TV stations when the weather was right, on a black-and-white TV with an antenna on the roof. But somehow, even now, I don't feel I was deprived at all.

OK, enough nostalgia for now. Except for this: a piece of a 1956 topo map that shows my home town. I was 4 years old, and I lived in the house that the red arrow is pointing to. About one inch to the right, you'll see a building with a little flag on top, down near the Little Androscoggin River. That's the high school from which my Class of '68 was the last to graduate. Last I knew (it's been 12 years since I've been back to Maine), the building was still there, but it's now the Town Hall, and seems strangely cramped and small.


Trivia time: The town of Mechanic Falls holds the perhaps dubious distinction of having been mentioned, in passing, in a national best-seller novel -- I believe it was called "The Stand" -- by one Stephen King. When I was a freshman at the University of Maine, Steve King was a senior, writing a column in the weekly student newspaper called "King's Garbage Truck." No, I never met him.

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