Toys and Technology: Our fate

Toys and Technology: Our Fate

I still marvel at the wonders of technology, and it is often during that same moment of wonderment that my kids give me that “duh-whatever-are-you-new” look at my naivety. Call me simple, but when I am sitting in a truck stop in rural Alberta looking at a picture on my Blackberry taken just seconds before at my grandson’s birthday party in Waterloo, Ontario and then in turn be able to forward that very same picture wrapped in a microwave signal to a communication tower, then ricocheted off to a satellite in a geostationary orbit around Earth, shot back to the Earth’s surface and on to my sister, also in Waterloo, all in micro seconds, well, that to me is mind boggling wonderful like a hand dipped ice cream cone. Technology has its place and I love my Blackberry like my first car.

When Bill Gates went to high school, computer programming was still in its infancy. He was lucky though, according to Malcolm Gladwell author of the Outliers, Gates went to a school that had a remote computer terminal with programming capacity, a rarity at the time. Access to this terminal and the opportunities for practicing programming was one of the initial factors, along with a measure of talent, dedication and a little OCD thrown in which turned Bill into the successful billionaire that he is and may explain why he does not return my calls.

As for me, I was born five years before Bill Gates and by the time I went to university my first programming course was completed with a relatively crude programming style using Fortran on a key punch terminal. My clumsy programs would then be presented to a computer operator as a thick stack of cards bundled together with an elastic band and God help you if you ever dropped that deck because numbered cards had not been invented yet. 

Now I’m not saying that had I been born a mere five years later into an upper middle class family in Seattle Washington, and had my dad been a lawyer and my mom a bank official, and if by some fortuitous chance my high school had better computer technology, maybe, just maybe, well, I’ll just leave the possibilities to you. As it is now I still struggle with technology. The gods and fates are so fickle.

I marvel at the technology that gives margarine a yellow colour and allows us to make twenty different mustard brands, and aluminum pop cans so thin you can crush them against your forehead with minimal cranial damage. I marvel at pop tarts filled with mystery chemicals, “wonder” bread that never gets stale, hybrid cars that seemingly run forever, electric razors that clean themselves and Nair, a hair removal product for women. But In my excitement, for all the good things in life, I am getting ahead of my story.

I have to admit to a certain degree of humiliation, or a strong sense of my mortality, when I tour a museum and witness on display, for the world to see, artifacts that had been created during my own life time. This occurrence surprises me because I’m not that old, really, even though I can get senior rates at most movie theatres and have for some time, I am really not that old. I guess I said that already. Items from my childhood, like metal toys built before the days of plastic, now sell on e-Bay for amazing prices. And I have seen displays of antiquated computer technology dating back as far as the early 1980’s.

I think fondly of the metal friction engine powered toy cars and trucks I had as a kid. I was the proud owner of a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and a 1954 Cadillac. I had a blue one my brother a red one. I also owned a Rexall friction engine powered tandem transport truck. As a result I have favoured Rexall products well into adulthood, a tribute to the power of advertising. 

On a recent shopping spree through e-Bay I managed to pick up an antique, vintage cast metal toy race car for $95.85. The identical one I had as a child probably cost my mother $1.47. As a footnote, do they have to use such a pejorative term, such as antique, when referencing my childhood toys? I take offense. 

I also found a set of three Branch-line HO scale railroad box cars, still in the original box for $58.87. I think whoever could keep a toy in a box for 56 years is a master of delayed gratification and deserves the asking price. My favourite find was a 1950 dinky toy, a scale model metal toy of a Borden’s milk delivery truck at 1:24 scale for $67.00. 

The Borden milk truck for me is a trip down memory lane to a simpler age when guys in white suits delivered milk right to the house from trucks parked curb side. There were even little doors on the side of the house into which the milkman could place a range of dairy products. When I was in high school my cousin John hired me as his assistant to deliver milk house to house from a milk wagon pulled by horse. I think the horse knew the route better than we did. We would get our deliveries together in a metal basket, step from the wagon and as if on cue the horse would pull the wagon up to the next house. 

Although the days of milk delivery, even during that summer in the 60’s, were drawing to a close, the dairy thought it would revitalize the market for home delivery through the nostalgic use of horse drawn vehicles. It was not to last. I had my summer fun. Today, with improved technology and in our modern ways, we drive miles to a gas station to get those same products. 

My last find on e-Bay was the one closest to my heart, a Dinky matchbox 1951 Volkswagen deluxe bug for $27.27. My first car was a similar model only a few years older. I drove that car until it was destroyed in an accident along with my heart, for that VW bug was my first car and my first love. I was side swiped making an illegal left turn into a farmer’s lane and the car, but not my life, was taken from me. I still keep my VW matchbox bug on my night table to this day and gaze at it with fondness.

The sad thing to day with kids and technology is that it is now all electronic. Seldom do I see kids outside playing Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, hide-and-go-seek, frozen tag and other outdoor pursuits because more likely than not children today are on their X-box, Wii or looking at a screen of some sort playing a game in a darkened basement recreation room and playing that game alone, or worse, with a partner on another continent who they will never see or meet.

I’m not trying to imply that life “back in the day” was better because it was simpler. I just prefer to see kids playing outside with balls and skipping ropes, playing tag, baseball or touch football in the rain or sunshine and certainly there is nothing more comforting and reassuring that certain childhood traditions will live on then when watching children playing out on school yard with their skipping ropes during a warm Spring day, as in their happy sing song voices I hear them say, “Strawberry shortcake, huckleberry pie, whose going to be your lucky guy?” The enders then up the pace and rush through the alphabet until the skipper misses the rope and it is at that very letter of the alphabet when the rope and skipper stop that fate has been sealed forever in play.