Guest Post by Fred Reed
It was 1953 in the white newly prosperous suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, just outside the Yankee Capital. I was eight, having been born, like so many of my small compatriots, nine months and fifteen minutes after our fathers got home from the war. These men, my father anyway, had spent years in the Pacific, being torpedoed at and watching Hellcat fighters screaming off wooden decks, and seeing ships sink. What they wanted now was lawn mowers, lawns, children, and a life as boring as possible. They got them.
We kids did not know that we were at the cusp of an explosion of technological mastery. We were, though. In addition to me there was Michel Duquez, dark-haired, raffish, and of Frog extraction, who would later die fighting for the French Foreign Legion in the Silent Quarter of Arabia. Or if he didn’t, he should have. And there was John Kaminski, or Mincemeat, blond and crewcut, who could spit out of the side of his mouth with casual aplomb the way Humphrey Bogart did, or would have if he had spit much.
American society on North Jefferson Street, and all the burbs for miles around, was everything that today would be thought intolerant or not very inclusive. There was no crime, diversity not yet having become our strength. When we rode our bikes under blue skies, I think the only kind we had then, to the shopping strip at Westover on Washington Boulevard, we could leave the bikes for hours on the sidewalk, or anywhere else, and they would be there when we came back. There were no transgenders. We were little boys and little girls. This seemed to work. For some reason now forgotten, for a year or so we referred disparagingly to each other as “queerbaits.” There were no queers to bait though, and anyway we didn’t know what one was.
But this is a techno-economic column, so to Gilbert and Edmund Scientific. We were, if not quite scientists, at least tilted in that direction. At age eight or nine, we had microscopes. There were two kinds. First was Gilbert, which cost ten bucks and had lenses of, I think, fifty, one fifty, and three hundred power. Mine, more upscale, costing fifteen dollars, was from Edmund. I guess this indoctrinated me with elitism or classism or some other demonic trait. Anyhow, they worked, and you could look at bugs and rotifers and such horrors as right into a hornet’s face. These instruments actually were instruments, and could not quite be called toys. When I got to real bio courses, I already knew how to use microscopes, mechanical stages, well slides, and such. Dukesy and I occasionally slit our wrists slightly to get blood to look at.
Hey, we were little boys.
In those far-off days, a lot of kids were smart, which was OK, or even encouraged, since there was no affirmative action. There was no one who needed it, or had the gall to ask for it. Reading seemed normal to us. In the drugstore at Westover were shelves with long rows of The Hardy Boys books, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and The Lone Ranger. This, as noted, was before national enstupidation. The Hardy Boys have since been dumbed down. This will make us all love each other, or something.
You can see where this is going. Microscopes. Reading. Then Chemistry Sets. These, from Gilbert, were red sheet metal cases whose degrees of gloriousness were measured in bottles: Twenty-five bottles hoi polloi and, I swear I think I remember, fifty bottles the illuminati. All contained such powders and elixirs as sodium thiosulfate, cobalt chloride, sodium silicate, sulfur, and iron filings that you could blow into the flame of the alcohol lamp, included and not thought excessively dangerous. The particles burned in a shower of sparks, which was Oxidation.
There was also a booklet that explained atomic structure and the difference between atomic structure and atomic weight. Not…exactly toys. We just thought they were.
In this, I tell you, were the seeds of the Apollo program.
Add Captain Video. This was a TV space opera, still available on YouTube. Captain Video was a nondescript hack whose sidekick was the Ranger, also devoid of personality or acting talent. It didn’t matter. When their spaceship, the Galaxy, was going off on an adventure, the two stood behind the steering wheel, like a ship’s wheel, and swayed monotonously back and forth to indicate motion.
Look, you need to know this. It’s cultural history. Read it.
For several episodes, on the flickering black and white screens of the day, with rabbit-ear antennas, we watched these two inspirations being chased through space by Tobor. Tobor was a malign robot whose name plate had been put on backward at the factory, making him go bad. We had nightmares about Tobor. Anyway he finally landed on the hull of the Galaxy, and Captain Video went out in a spacesuit and fought him, spraying his joints with what looked like a shellac gun until he was gummed up and couldn’t move.
Now, put all of this together and you can see the genesis of the Heroic Age of American technology. This lasted into the Sixties. Then it all went to hell as if a switch had been pulled and the polarity of everything reversed.
Microscopes. Chemistry, Reading. English grammar. Encouragement of intelligence. Spaceships. Robots, however misspelled. Shellac guns.
Even the psychostructure (patent applied for) moved us toward building supersonic aircraft and the Hubble Telescope. We played baseball, not knowing that it was toxic masculinity and hierarchical . We had Mattel windup submachine guns that fired whole rolls of caps in long satisfying bursts. This was homicidal violence, but nobody had yet realized it. In recess at school we played tag, which we didn’t know would make some kids feel left and tnd turn them into psychopathic killers.
We enjoyed, or today we would say suffered from, a measure of adventurousness. Running under Arlington were storm drains. These were–are–concrete pipes, usually with a trickle of water running through them, that a kid can go through, bent over, tennis shoes making an echoing Plonk Plonk sound that, once heard, cannot be forgotten. A world closed to adults, who wouldn’t fit.
It was entered by lifting a manhole cover when no one was looking. We got candles and learned different systems. I will never forget where the pipe widend out at Westover and we saw the Monster Rat with Red Eyes. OK, it was probably a normal rat but that’s not the spirit of the thing.
Around the Fourth of July we got skyrockets and fountains and other fireworks, which were then legal, and fired them deep underground, oh wow. I know, we should have spent our time in a cooperative game led by a caring adult, but we would rather have committed suicide.
See? This is why America briefly did all sorts of astonishing things. It was not because of capital flows or compound interest or free enterprise or the rest of the world being in wreckage because of the war No. It was Edmund Scientific, Gilbert, schools that taught things, kids like Dukesy and Mincemeat and a society that knew when to leave kids the hell alone.
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I remember those days in the 60’s when I would hang out with those “hoodlum friends of mine” in lively Shively, KY. Down the street was a drainage ditch which has now been named a “creek”, and we would hang out under the concrete bridge. On occasion we would ride our bikes down to the ‘plaza and hit up the bartender at the bowling alley for a quarter to buy some smokes. Then we might head over to “the jungle”, which was the undeveloped back end of a cemetery. We had ropes hanging from trees from which we swung, and lots of jumps and trails with which we could risk our lives.
I remember one time the Robinson kid I hung with broke his leg and his mom blamed me for it, even though I wasn’t there when he broke it. She was never very friendly after that.
He left out Erector Sets. Ya gotta have at least one of those. Better to combine yours with a friend’s. You could build some really neat shit then…
And later, Lawn Jarts. Those were great.
During the early 1970s, my parents bought me a monthly subscription to a series of science kits.. Some were cool; others I ignored.
Pretty sure it was this: “Things of Science”.
https://ecg.mit.edu/george/tos/
I remember the times well. Technology is faster and more efficient. It was better then. To bad we let it die.
Adventurism…where is it now? I have a 3 month old grandson. I want to do lots of crazy stuff with him. I might be too old. Sucks.
Great article.
We used to make contact explosives in chemistry. We would stuff it in keyholes and pencil,sharpeners, so when the key/pencil was shoved in it would go off, blowing the item back out on a good explosion.
We also loved the big round metal static electricity generation machine. We would make a long human chain from the ball to the doorknob, turn on the machine (no one got zapped as long as the chain was grounded to the doorknob first) and wait for the teacher, who would get a jolt, but who quickly learned to watch out for that trick.
No one got in trouble for this – instead I think the teachers were actually proud of what we had learned, and of the fact we were able to apply the learning in real world, albeit pretty naughty, ways.
That chem teacher was one of my favorite teachers ever. He was quite tall, with a beard. One day he was demonstrating two very large very powerful magnets, letting them crash together on the bench. Well, he was quite tall, and the bench was groin height. He let the magnets go, and they crushed his nuts between them. The class, mostly boys, of course fell into hysterics. He was much more careful with those magnets thereafter.
Boston Latin School 1960’s. When you had to wear a jacket and tie. Kid in front of me in Chemistry was son of Mafia lieutenant. Which is why I got in big trouble for his plaid sport coat going up in flames. I shoulda been able to beat the rap since my father, a college classmate of the headmaster, worked for the mayor. Who knew the mob was really in charge in those days.
Riding our bikes for miles, pocket knives, cherry bombs-the real ones, older brothers 8mm porno movies, getting men to buy us beer with money we stole from our moms’ purses, forts we built in the woods, teasing girls, making fun of the fat kid-there was only ever 1, dodge ball where head hunting was the target, walking through the stream looking for crawdads, coming home only at dusk. A million other things gave us an upbringing the kids of today will never experience. Wasn’t it grand!
“There was no crime, diversity not yet having become our strength. ”
Poor unfortunate kids of modernity will never know the joy of a childhood gifted with the freedom to be a kid, free from the degeneracy and crime a burgeoning protected criminal class and cartel government has inflicted on a once civilized nation.
If race ain’t real, then why collect data on “crime by race”?
“Furthermore, with such enormous numbers of young black men now in prison, we might naturally expect that the racial character of American urban crime rates has sharply declined over the last couple of decades. However, the quantitative evidence demonstrates the exact opposite situation, as may be seen by examining the combined twenty-five year trajectories of our various racial crime correlations, which have steadily grown more extreme. The images shown on our film screens or television sets may portray one America, but the actual data reveals a very different country….
One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980. But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700% larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or Asian immigrants as they are for whites”
https://www.unz.com/runz/race-and-crime-in-america/
I got that exact set for Christmas in ’68. I can still remember what the glass vials felt like in my hands, the smell of the powdered sulphur and what happened when you applied heat to ammonium dichromate.
Those were the days.