Primitive Past-Times

My generation, the boomers, may be the last to have experienced, almost exclusively, pre-video game fun. We lived in a pre-grand theft auto paradise and didn't know it. Most of our toys required no batteries or electronic power source of any kind. True, there were somre you could plug in, like an electric train set, and others that were battery powered. But when your allowance is fifteen cents a week, you can't be wasting it on packages of D batteries every other day For the most part our stuff had no internal power source; they had to be fueled by our imaginations.

Our toys connected us with previous generations of kids stretching back before recorded history. It was a rite of passage to play baseball in an empty lot, or spend a couple hours with your forefingers locked in a Chinese finger puzzle.

What my dad did as a kid, I did.
He read comics; I read comics.
He played marbles; I played marbles.
He lived through the Depression and fought in World War II; I played with my slinky.

On the news, did you ever see a bunch of third world kids standing around in the middle of a vacant patch of desert with nothing better to do except throw rocks at each other? That was us, except we had yo-yos and paddle balls.

(My favorite toys were the building toys. Legos prepared me, presumably, for a life of masonry while Lincoln Logs gave me an appreciation for early American architecture if not Abraham Lincoln, and erector sets, well, I'm not sure what I got out of playing with these things. Still, they were sort of fun in a self-baffling kind of way.)

Sometime in the late 1950's and early 1960's there was an explosion of non-electronic kid gadgetry. The hula hoop, the slinky, and silly putty hit the scene. They were what I would call one minute wonders. Take them off the shelf, play with them for a bit, and then on to something else.

Hey look. I can use this ball of silly putty to get Beetle Bailey's face right off the Sunday funnies. I can stretch it and twist it and... Okay. I'm done now.

Times were simpler then.

The strangest non-electronic toy of all was the Etch-A-Sketch. It didn't help you draw a single wick. It actually got in the way of drawing! I wasted the better part of a weekend madly twisting the knobs of an Etch-A-Sketch and ended up with a squiggly looking happy face. Still, Ohio Art sold a ton of these things.

Safety requirements were limited to common sense. You shouldn't swallow Silly Putty nor eat the potato that, for a day and a half, promonaded as Mr. Potato Head. And just to prove that safety was a complete non-consideration, one day in early July my mom brought home a set of "Jarts." Also known as lawn darts, a "jart" was essentially a twelve inch, stainless steel mini-javelin. You played a game similar to horseshoes, tossing them into a hoop set out on the ground. Well, that's what the instructions said to do. Us kids figured out a few other uses for them and soon there was a rush on the emergency rooms across the tri-county area.

The Era of Non-Video Game fun came to an abrupt end in 1980 when Atari released the third version of its video game system. True, the games consisted of pretty much the same concept: manipulating an on screen dot to a series of electronic beeps and squeaks. In many ways most Atari games resembled a more annoying version of the Etch-A-Sketch. But their popularity was undeniable.

Today when I shop I can sometimes see, behind the wires, the plastic and the whiz-bang technology, toys from my past. Interestingly enough the Kootie game is still around as is Mr. Potato Head (sans potato, if that makes sense.). And yes, you can still discover a plastic egg of Silly Putty.

When I see these artifacts from my kidhood, I suddenly realize what we have lost.
As it turns out, not really all that much

Prisoner of Now

Every year my parents rented a cabin in the woods "to get away from it all." At first we went to Ohio state parks. Then, as they grew bolder, we went to West Virginia, Tennessee, and, lastly, Michigan. It was always a big deal. We'd leave in the early morning before dawn, have breakfast along the way, and arrive in the early afternoon.

The cabins we rented were a crappier version of what we had at home. Everything was smaller, smellier, and more primitive. I imagine that was part of the charm, but for me, by then a serious television addict, it was a major crimp in my lifestyle. Absolutely no TV for a solid week. My only sources of entertainment were hillbilly radio and whatever comics I brought with me.

During most of my kidhood, I was super glued to the tube. I lived for my daily doses of what early television did best: situation comedies. I watched Hazel, I Married Joan, It's About Time, Car 54 Where Are You, and I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. I was one of the few true fans of Love On A Rooftop. And I think I may have seen every single episode of Gilligan's Island as it was being broadcast. I could never buy into an hour long drama, such as Bonanza. Hoss, Little Joe, Hop Sing. Trouble on the Ponderosa? Who cared, really. I wanted to be married to Samantha and be seeing Jeanie on the side.

My true passion was for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. At first I was not permitted to watch it. Too frightening, my parents thought. But I changed that. My subtle insistence wore on my mom's nerves to the point where it was easier for her to acquiesce than to punish me. Each week I gazed into the set at the designated hour and watched what amounted to a Rod Serling morality play.

My favorites were what are now considered the classics.

You know, the one where the guy sold his soul to the devil in exchange for looking young forever. But see, he only looked young, on the inside he was still an old guy. Lesson- pay attention to details when you sign a contract with Satan.

And the one where the guy was sure that the book the aliens left behind, How to Serve Mankind, proved they were benevolent. But, see, it was a cook book. Yes, they were serving man, but with a side of fries. Moral: never jump to conclusions and never, ever trust aliens.

And there was that guy who wore the thick glasses and loved to read, but could never find the time. He ended up surviving a nuclear war and having all the time he wanted, but broke his glasses with no optician around so he killed himself. Moral: well, I have no idea what the moral on that episode was. But it did involve nuclear war, so that was cool.

Years later, I made the mistake of watching some episodes of the Twilight Zone on a UHF channel. Even the good episodes were out dated and maudlin. You really can't go home again.

Now when I travel, television is ubiquitous. It's at the airports, at McDonalds, in every hotel room. So, for that matter, is hillbilly radio. You can dial up pretty much anything these days on a number of devices. All the old shows are there in rerun heaven, plus a cornucopia of shows I never saw (I recovered from my television addiction in 1971 while away at college, but that is another blog entry.)

You can go half-way across the world, but you can never really get away from it all anymore. With cellphones, the internet, and cable television we have become trapped in a prison of Now. There is no cabin in Tennessee with only a simple AM radio link to civilization.

Sartre was wrong.
Hell isn't other people.
It's an iPhone and 24-7 cable television.

Down Among the Fundamentalists (Part 4)

The Good
Bob Jones University was a closed community. On campus, protected by a fence, there was a post office, a hospital, a movie studio, the faculty residence, a high school, a grade school and a world class art museum (along with, of course, the university.) That's right, they had a world class "art museum," featuring religious art through the ages. That would be serious religious art. This was no simple hall showing pictures and sculptures, but a well designed display of simply amazing art.

I loved the art museum, the science center, the gymnasium (and pool), the bookstore and the library. Reading a magazine at the library was a somewhat jarring experience. Imagine leafing through a Time or Newsweek Magazine and finding whole pages missing. Winston Smith, call your office. The article and/or the accompanying pictures had been deemed by the resident persnickety librarian to be an affront to common decency and a danger to Christians of all ages.

BJU was also a cultural experience. Because of its conservative standards, avant garde art was simply not part of campus life. What was left, however, were the classics. Shakespeare was all the rage. I saw productions of both The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. Excellent. True, I had to endure Bob Jones III prancing about the stage as Romeo, but in a strange way the part suited him. Much like the title character, B3 was brash, impulsive and over flowing with tragic possibilities.

The central character in the play is Juliet, who was played by B3's wife. She was wonderful.

The Bad
One of the worst aspects of BJU, outside of racism, was the in your face judgementalism of the administration. I'm sure they thought of it as being uncompromising, taking a stand, or pulling a Luther, if you will. From the pulpit you would hear that Billy Graham was a modernist, C.S. Lewis was a false teacher, Methodists were hopelessly compromised.

And don't even bother bringing up the Pope.

They tossed these invectives around the way a french chef might toss a salad. With style and without thinking. Then they patted themselves on the back for being loyal to the Word of God.

However, demeaning a religion is a double edged sword. And that is especially true when the institution doing the demeaning is at the epicenter of American Fundamentalism.

The Not So Hot
I took a job, working in the college dining hall. The school insisted on having an evening meal together, all two thousand of us. That meant someone had to pick up the two thousand or so plates. And that someone was me. There were eight guys on the crew and throughout the meal we would run around the cavernous hall collecting plates, cups, glasses and dinnerware. By the end of the meal I was covered with splotches of gravy, pudding and whatever the heck the main course was.

I hated busing tables.
But I discovered I loved being part of a crew.

And that's all I have to write about Bob Jones University. Like everything else in life, it was a mixed bag. I met some truly Christian people there, learned discipline, made friends and did some growing up.

It was an experience.