by N. A. Dalbec
After what felt like an eternity, my birthday rolled around, and yes, I got a train set. It was a Lionel. It wasn't a freight train. It was a special high-tech one with a rocket-launching device on one car, a freight car with opening roof panels that launched a helicopter, and all kinds of other stuff. The locomotive was a steam-type locomotive, which looked great, but didn’t really match the types of rail cars it was pulling.
I also remember getting an erector set one Christmas. They were new at the time. They were like a Meccano set, but you used plastic girders, and braces to build skyscrapers. I got the chemical-plant set with just enough skyscraper parts to build not-so-high skyscrapers.
Quiet Time
It was a busy household, no doubt about it. Four teenagers, six boarders, most of them university students, all in a big old three-storey house.
My brothers and I slept in one large dormitory-type room in the basement, and my sister had her own room, also in the basement. It was a big basement, as you can imagine.
I was the youngest, and much younger than anybody else, so naturally I went to bed much earlier than anybody else. To give you an idea of how big this room was, there were four beds, a few dressers, a full-size pool table, and an immense counter with a sink that was used by one of my brothers to do his photographic work. So off I'd go to the dungeon to get some sleep, and every night it was the same thing. From upstairs I would hear the stereo going, with all the best tunes of the era, everything from the Rolling Stones, Paul Anka, Roy Orbison, the Beatles, the Ventures, Gene Pitney, some occasional Mantovani, and other classical stuff, depending on who had the controls to the stereo. To give you an idea of how loud it could be when my parents were away, someone managed to blow up the stereo. It actually produced smoke, but of course that was when most stereos and televisions still had tubes in them. On top of the music was the sound of ten or twelve feet running about the house, a telephone that wouldn't stop, and doors that would open and shut just like in a hotel lobby.
There were, in the most positive light, a few benefits to all of this activity above my head. I've got a pretty good grasp of fifties and sixties pop music, even though I left the sixties at the ripe old age of fifteen, and I now can fall asleep just about any time of day watching TV. I can also fall asleep on a train or a plane while sitting down. I can sniff out a photo lab a mile away, and I know a good pool table when I see one.
When I think back to that time in my life, it still amazes me to this day that my father could make all the noise he wanted, and I'd fall asleep without a hitch. Not that he was a noisy person or anything, but when he had to rummage around the house, it was as if everything was done in a less noisy way. No doubt I felt secure because of his presence, but there was something else. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was aware that noise made it difficult for me to sleep. After all, he had the ambassadorial task of telling my older brothers and sister to keep things quiet. The ritual began with a request from me to my brothers and sister to quiet down. That wouldn't work of course, so I’d have to ask my father who would then get everyone to quiet down.
Once everything was quiet, I would fall asleep, easily. And if someone had to make some noise, I was always hoping that it would be my father who'd have to make it.
The Chase
Alone as a kid, there wasn't always something to do. You could get downright bored. But when you had lots of friends around, the collective mind would pretty well always come up with something interesting to do.
One game that we devised was really fun. You never had to prompt anyone to play. The more people you had, the better it was. The game was called Chase. The rules were simple. Two teams were formed. There was the chase team, and there was the chased team. Whenever possible, we would have an equal number of people on each team. The chased team would be given to the count of one hundred to get away. The members of the chased team were forbidden to go out of bounds. The members would usually adhere to this rule, mostly because the boundaries were immense. Imagine an eight or ten acre city block, covered with Victorian-style homes, an abundance of ancient shrubbery, alleyways and lanes like veins in an anemic arm, and you will have a pretty good idea of the playing field.
The game was usually played at night, and the participants were on bicycles. As a member of the chased team, your winning objective was to not be spotted by a member of the chase team. If, however you were spotted, you automatically became a member of the chase team. As the game progressed, the chase team inevitably became larger, and the challenge to the remaining chased members grew.
The action was furious, and you could be guaranteed a number of adrenaline rushes during each game. We all took the game quite seriously, and took great pride in finding new hiding places. I remember desperately trying to find one person and having combed the entire area, concluded that the person must have cheated, or gone home. I knew that area very well. What was stumping me was that you could not abandon your bicycle when you were playing the bicycle version. There are just so many places that you can hide with your bicycle underneath you. As it turned out, there was indeed a spot that had been overlooked by the chase team. It was a hedgerow adjacent to a gate. Proof that there had been no cheating was substantiated by the person hiding, that most of us had ridden by him several times. It truly was a genial spot to hide. I wish I had found it myself.
The game could, and sometimes did get dangerous. As spirits were awakened by the excitement of a catch, overzealous behavior sometimes created accidents. I remember spotting one of our friends walking back with his brand new three-speed in shambles. Another friend walked beside him. The pedal of one bicycle had gone into the wheel of the other, and both riders had taken quite a tumble. Of course, the old bike was undamaged, while the new bike required extensive repairs.
Nonetheless, the game was wonderful. It made you burn more calories than you could imagine, not that that was ever a concern with any of us at the time, and it got everyone involved in a most intense way. I find it hard to match the excitement to this day. One thing that the game taught you, among other things, was to use an old bike that you didn't mind trashing.
Trading and Collecting
There are many commodities to trade when you're a kid. You usually don't have much money but you always seem to have something to trade.
Collector cards were all the rage, but the process of acquiring them may have changed over the years. You could buy them then as you can buy them now, but the real way to get collector cards was to shoot for them. At recess, you would find an opponent to shoot for cards. The idea was to line up a series of target cards against the wall of the school, and step back about six or eight feet from the wall. From that point you would fling cards one at a time, alternately with your opponent, to knock down the target cards. Whoever was successful on each shot acquired the fallen cards.
I was never really good at it, so I would find a good shooter, give him some of my cards, and split the won cards at the end of the recess. One day I decided to get out there and win my own cards. It was a disaster. I felt like a gambling junkie who's on a loosing streak at the casino. The sizable collection that I had built up was quickly depleted. I realized then, that good management philosophy would have been to use better talent than your own whenever necessary.
I sort of lost interest in collector cards after that, but did not lose interest in building collections.
I loved comic books. They were a relatively expensive commodity when I was a kid but everybody loved them, and they were a commodity that could be traded, just like playing the stock market.
Just as with playing cards, I started off with just one comic book. It was a good one though, probably a Superman. It had trading value, and that was important. Yes you could buy a Casper The Friendly Ghost, or a Richie Rich, but the market appeal was narrow. For trading purposes you needed a good copy of a Superman, Superboy, Batman, Archie or Spider-Man, although Spider-Man did not seem to have the print or drawing quality of the other comic
books. You had to find a Spider-Man junkie to do some serious trading. Anyway, the idea was to trade one-for-two. It was the only way you could build up a collection without spending the big bucks.
So I began trading. One good Superman for another Superman, or maybe a Batman, and something else, something of more limited appeal, but which could be used in a future transaction. The exponential factor would come into play and all of a sudden, I was becoming a collector and trader of comics.
Some book stores came out with publishers' deletes. These were comics without covers. They were brand new, and came in cellophane packages, so you really couldn't see what you were getting. They were a fraction of the cost of regular comic books, but their trading value was rather limited. Funny sort of thing when you think about it,. All the reading and entertainment value was present, but the marketing appeal was lower. However, they were usable in reverse two-for-one trading. If you really wanted to get a good virgin copy of Superman, or Batman, you could use two of your deletes to get the one good copy with cover intact. And usually, you didn't lose because down the road, you'd get one-for-two for it. I ended up with hundreds and hundreds of comic books. It was truly amazing to be able to build up something out of virtually nothing. I wonder what happened to that talent as I grew older?
You Can’t Get Away with It
My mother was very sharp. There really wasn't much that you could get past her. Sometimes I would envy my friends, because their mothers were not as quick to detect a wrong-doing.
One of the first times that I ever remember disobeying is still with me, even though we're going back to when I was three or four years old.
My mother had to leave for a few minutes. She left me specific instructions not to wander away from the house. I even acknowledged that I fully understood. But once she got out of sight, I let myself be tempted to cross the street to have a look at the new construction site. There were some new houses going up, and I really wanted to see what all this was about. It was later in the day, probably after dinner, and the summer sun was still high. I wandered over and began to explore. I loved all the neat smells of the construction materials, and I was intrigued by the whole concept of construction. My biggest concern was not for what I was doing, but for how long I could do it, because the Boogie Man might come out as I had come to learn, sometime around seven in the evening. All the kids knew about the Boogie Man, but no one had the nerve to stay up late enough to see if he really existed. The Boogie Man was, of course, a great curfew tool.
As it turned out, I didn't have to deal with the Boogie Man that evening, but with a rather angry mother. I think she was more disappointed than angry, because I had proved to be a rather trustworthy fellow, even at my young age. Well she gave me a spanking, and a reprimand, and sent me off to bed. I was hurt, as all children are when chided, but I also fully realized that I had been caught red-handed.
A few short years later, a similar situation arose. The short absence scenario was quite similar, except that this time, I had turned on the stove to light a piece of string. String was used to light firecrackers, I had learned. I was very proud to have discovered this technique, but in my excitement had forgotten to turn off the stove.
When confronted, I denied having played with the stove. Unfortunately for me the evidence was looking right at me, there in the kitchen. I had lied outright. The approach to the dilemma was different this time. It was explained to me how dangerous my actions could have been. I was given a chance to tell the truth, and that was it. There was no spanking, and not another word on the subject was uttered.
It was at that point that I realized that there was no fooling adults, especially my parents. I also realized that you had to be really smart to lie and get away with it, something I was evidently not very good at. So I adopted a new policy. Don't lie, but if you don't have to, don't tell. Kids can make up the funniest policies.
Taking Care of Things
A lot of people seem to think that kid's toys aren't tough enough. That may be so. But what are kids doing to their toys to make them break?
When I was young, there were at least two types of kids. There were the ones who had so many toys they didn't know what to do with them, and there were the kids who really loved their toys, and who nearly cherished them. I was one of the latter group. Although on occasion, I remember outgrowing some toys, and purposely modifying them, sometimes with a hammer. Toy cars for example, were often made of strong metal, and you had to be really tough on them to break them. In normal use they would last beyond anyone's childhood. I remember taking a hammer to one of them to simulate a wrecked car. I guess I had seen some wrecked cars in real life, and I wanted to have one of my own. Once the experiment was over, I appreciated the fact that intact is better, and more usable.
I couldn't stand having parts missing on a car, or anything else for that matter. So I usually took care of my things. It usually broke my heart when something would get wrecked, but often the perpetrator was an adult who inadvertently walked on something that they shouldn't have walked on as they traveled through the house. This usually happened because adults don't look at the floor when they are walking, while kids, on the other hand, use floors extensively. I probably lost more toys this way than any other way.
The other thing I had to be wary of was careless friends, and cousins. If I'd had the opportunity to visit these people prior to them visiting our home, then I'd have some knowledge of their toy handling habits. In the case of reckless users and abusers, I would discretely hide the important stuff before they would come in to visit. Was this a selfish thing to do? Hardly. If they were responsible users, I was more than happy to share everything at my disposal. If they were trashers, I left out the stuff that was deemed expendable.
The destructive urge came upon my friends and me on occasion. We were kids, after all. But the sacrificial item would be discussed beforehand, its usefulness debated, and the fun factor in destroying it assessed. Younger siblings' trikes were an easy mark, mostly because they were very hard to destroy, and gave hours of pleasure up to the point of their demise. They were usually about to be replaced by larger trikes that would be spared until their usefulness would become questionable. The old trikes would usually be used for demolition derbies.
Model cars that we had spent rainy afternoons building also fell prey to destruction by fire, mostly because they burned very well, and because we were disappointed with the end product, which never looked as good as the picture on the box.
All in all though, the precious toys were spared, and lasted.
Things they Tried to Sell Us
As soon as you can understand the language and read the language, you become the prey of those who want to sell you something. Of course, when you're a kid, they are trying to sell your parents something by proxy, you being the proxy.
Comic books were a very good venue for adults trying to sell other adults things by way of their kids. Kids usually don't have any money, but their parents do. And kids are natural salespeople. They can take rejection very well. It just bounces off their backs. They are single-minded, and extremely persistent. If they get "no" for an answer, they just try later. So in essence. adults who advertise in comic books, have hired, at no cost to them, a powerful sales force that will do everything in its power to extract money from adult parents. It wouldn't have been so bad if the stuff that was being sold was of any value, but it usually wasn't.
I remember some of the junk we ordered from comic book back covers, when we were kids. There were the ubiquitous Ant Farms, always pictured like a regular farm, but run by ants. There were also those infamous pioneer log cabins, with a kid genuflecting in front of the log cabin, proudly holding a rifle, and wearing a coon-skin hat, as well as a buckskin suit. The frontier cabins were made of plastic garbage bag quality sheets that fit over a bridge table. You then would cut out the windows and doors. I remember placing a lamp inside the so-called cabin, and having it tip over into the side of the cabin. It took a
bout two seconds for the wall to melt.
One of the longest running ads was for X-Ray glasses. For all I know, the ad is probably still running today. None of us ever went for the glasses that, as suggested by the drawing, would allow you to see your bone structure. Maybe so, but how long were you expected to live after wearing the things?
BB guns were an advertising staple. I don't think they ever stopped advertising those. And of course, there was always the story of the kid who lost an eye due to a BB gun. Unfortunately, that story was sometimes true. I remember a kid in class had suffered this tragic occurrence. So maybe they could have advertised something other than BB guns.
The hand buzzer, itching powder, disappearing ink were also very popular, but as it turned out, you could get those things at the local joke shop. Anthropologically speaking, the interest shown by us for these items gave a pretty accurate indication of what stage of development our senses of humour had attained. It also gave a pretty good indication of how far we had left to go. But I also have to wonder about the people that sold this stuff. And where on earth were those government agencies when you really needed them? Caveat Emptor.
Eye of Fire
Summer was in its mighty glory once again, and there was the usual, what to do? A good boyhood friend of mime asked if I would like to stay at the family cottage for a week or so. I thought the idea was great, and so did my parents, once they were informed of the plan. It also took care of the, what to do dilemma.
