I have a cellphone, laptop, television, lights, electric guitar, clocks, internet, furnace, refrigerator and on and on. These days, it takes a power outage for me to realize just how dependent I am on so many things run by electricity. “I’m just seeing how many times I can throw a snowball and hit the clothes pole.” It produced conversations with parents like:
#Three little birds sat on my window how to#
We not only played games like football, baseball and basketball, back then, every kid knew how to make up games to play, whether they were with other kids or by yourself. Outside the house, we had no need for electricity.īut that didn’t mean we were without fun. Even when we got the color television, not all shows were broadcast in color.īut some of my favorites were, including Batman and cartoons like The Flintstones, Jonny Quest and all those Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning characters. When we got one, it was just about the most incredible thing we ever could have imagined.
In my early days, we didn’t have a color television. We thought you pushed the button, and the set came on.
The other way electricity affected us kids was through the television set, though we never would have really put that together back then. You have botched the operation.Įven though the names of the “organs” you were supposed to remove from the “body,” were things like “broken heart,” “bread-basket” and “spare rib,” it makes me wonder what kind of ghoul came up with this idea. If the tweezer touched the sides of the holes in the body, the buzzer would go off and the patient’s nose would light up. In that game, kids were the surgeons trying to remove little parts of a cartoon patient’s body on the game board with a tweezer. Some toy race cars and trains ran on electricity, as did the buzzer and the light on the patient’s nose in the game Operation. When the display was plugged into the wall, the design you had made in colored pegs was lit up from behind by a light bulb. We had a Lite-Brite board with the colored pegs that were pushed through dark construction-type paper and numerous holes in a plastic plate. My sister had an Easy-Bake Oven that had to be plugged in so she could bake small cakes and other goodies over an electric light bulb. Joe action figures, Play-Doh, Slinky, Silly Puddy, jigsaw puzzles, Duncan yo-yos and board games like Mouse Trap, Candy Land, and Hi Ho Cherry-O never needed any electricity at all.īack then, electricity was for toys on another level. I don’t think we ever really considered there to be any connection whatsoever between the holes in the wall socket and those big “D” and “C” cell batteries. Most of our toys, if they needed electricity, got their power from batteries. We didn’t understand it or anything at all about how it worked. In those days, us kids probably never had much of a real need to think about electricity. I know a lot of kids probably never thought of putting a fork into an electric wall socket until our parents gave us that idea. The cord ran to a wall socket that as little kids we had always been told to stay away from, and please do not stick a fork into it. As I recall, we had an electric waffle iron with a power cord on it that seemed like it was a half-inch thick. My earliest memories of understanding on this subject come from being a kid. It’s kind of a weird thing thinking about where electric power comes from. It’s like a 21st century version of “Quest for Fire.”
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