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The Child Within Us
by Alex Mendelsohn
With the holiday season upon us, for lots of us toys now figure in our thinking. Yes, there's news about those nasty tainted toys from China. But, on an upbeat note, playthings of all sorts let us shower affection on our children, and that's a good thing.
Some say that the only difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys (I suspect this maxim applies equally well to women). I admit I subscribe to this adage.
My own toys have a decidedly retro aspect to them. My spouse claims that's how I re-live that part of the past that was especially good to me. Judging by the Chrysler Group's success with its PT Cruiser automobile, and GM's Chevy HHR, I know I'm not alone.
What my wife doesn't understand is that I like my ancient toys because they speak to me about an era where things were less transitory. I view most of today's toys as momentary diversions; many are electronic widgets that quickly become obsolete.
That rubs me the wrong way. I like things that last -- whether it's a relationship with an employer or lover, or a toy.
Admittedly, these days my toy collection includes items that I couldn't afford when I was an adolescent back in the 1950s. Today I own a Rolleiflex twin lens reflex camera, replete with a Carl Zeiss Jena lens. This pre-WW-II camera never fails to amaze me with its utterly silent shutter and silky smooth manual adjustments, to say nothing of the edge-to-edge clarity of the images it dishes up.
The camera's ground glass viewfinder includes a pop-up magnifying glass that fairly speaks to a shutterbug, telling me to slo-o-w down and carefully focus the instrument. It also makes only 12 exposures, a feature not conducive to snapshots. Although some of you may say this camera is ponderous compared to today's automated point-and-shoot digital cameras (and I own one of those, too), I like the deliberate feel of the old Rolleiflex.
The same is true as I spin the dials on a Collins R-390 shortwave receiver, a genuine circa-1953 boat anchor. Restored from the ravages of a house fire, this vintage vacuum-tube military radio is nearly as sensitive and selective as today's software-defined radios -- and it's utterly stable.
Manually tuned, the R-390's Veeder-Root mechanical counter displays frequency to a fraction of a kilocycle (oops, kilohertz), and is highly repeatable. The temperature-compensated permeability tuned main oscillator in this beast (the set weighs 80 pounds) is also extremely linear. Best of all is the old set's implausibly mysterious electro-mechanical design, mute testimony to concurrent engineering -- 1950s style. I can blissfully waste time watching the set's cams and gears go through their motions.
My collection also includes a few things that I actually did afford back in the days of my youth. One of these is a pullstring gyroscope top. They're still available, but you can also get motor driven and LED-equipped versions today.
By saving my meager allowance and newspaper route earnings, I scraped together the $29 needed in 1959 to mail order a Heathkit AR-3 five-tube shortwave receiver. Don't you wish the Heath Company was still in business making electronics kits and ham radio gear? I guess you can no longer sell a kit that includes an 800-V half-amp power supply!
Then there were those wonderful gifts my father gave me. I'm still fond of the American Flyer model trains I received for my eighth birthday. Back in those days just about every middle class kid owned electric trains. The now famous Lionel Company sold most of them, but I preferred the more realistically styled American Flyer sets made by the A C Gilbert Company of Erector Set fame.
I still have my original S-gauge American Flyers; they're all set up and running in a Fifties-appropriate basement layout. Remarkably, their locomotive's universal motors run as well today as they did nearly a half-century ago, despite unceremonious drop-testing from a height of four feet to a concrete floor.
We made some of our own toys when I was a kid, too. How many of today's youngsters do that? My childhood contemporaries built foxhole radios, winding oversize tuning coils on used oatmeal boxes. I constructed a one-cylinder steam engine, carefully filing and drilling its tiny reciprocating piston, cylinder, valve, and flywheel. Everything came from pieces of copper pipe and scrap metal found in my dad's home workshop. I still have that engine (and wish I had spent more time back then refining the workmanship).
We also put together a large -- and dreadfully dangerous -- Jacob's ladder, using a heavy neon sign transformer for its 25-kV spark source. Later, I added a Leyden jar to this setup. This capacitor was kludged together from aluminum foil lining an empty mayonnaise jug. One of my boyhood chums helped me lash up a Morse key in the 110-V primary circuit so that we could transmit coded spark messages around the neighborhood. How many radio and TV programs did we interfere with!
In the post-Sputnik years, kids were inspired to build rockets. These weren't the sanitized kinds made with prefabbed rocket motors either. We built ours from scratch, mixing volatile chemicals and packing the stuff into paper cores wound from old Life Magazine covers (we had the good sense to steer clear of metal pipe casings).
Do you think today's programmable Leggo Dacta robots, plastic radio-controlled race car models, digital cameras, Nintendo games, GHz multimedia computers, and the like can compare with the activities my contemporaries and I unwittingly enjoyed so many years ago?
Do today's kids enjoy enriching and exciting (and safer) toys than we had? Do the best of these toys cultivate learning and experimentation, or do their alluring LCDs shield kids from knowing -- or caring -- about what makes them tick?
It's unlikely the toys of today will be saved and cherished in the future, or handed down or even become collectibles. How times have changed since the formative days of my boyhood back in the 1950s.
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