Slide Rule? Abacus anyone?

Ahh... the good ol' days...

Back when I had to walk to school, barefoot in the snow.  Uphill.  Both ways.

(Rambling Nostalgia Alert!)

When I was a kid, I had a really cool uncle, on my dad's side.  Uncle Curt.  I admired that man greatly, and I loved hanging out at his place.  He lived with my grandmother, supported her, and was a life-long bachelor, as far as I know.

He used to say "Sambo, you ain't a' courtin' are you?"  Meaning he wanted me to eschew females too, I suppose.  Of course, I was a' courtin' whenever I could, but I didn't tell HIM that!  Didn't quite connect with him in that mentality... thus the following pic:

My Uncle Curt & my daughter Leslie, in the Summer of 1990, I think.

There had been some courtin' going on, to say the least!

But this is not about his philosophy.

The stuff he had was a wonderland for me. I know my sisters didn't always feel the same way, but I usually lost track of time while there. We would usually visit on Sundays, and that alone made it worthwhile, because we'd get to watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. On cable.  (No adjusting the antenna, no fuzzy picture!) And in color! If we weren't ushered to the car too soon, we'd also watch The Wonderful World of Disney (aka "Walt Disney")

He also had collections of books; science, nature, geography related... entire sets, I think from Time/Life or something like that. I don't remember the sets he had, but there was a bookcase full of them. I don't know how many hours I spent with my nose buried in those books. That alone was enough to lose myself for hours... but there was more!

He had a typewriter, and when I asked, he would let me play with it. It was not electric, but I didn't care.  I would write nonsense, other times I would start my Great American Novel... never to be finished.  He had a desktop calculator in his office, and would let me play with that too.  I was amazed that a small "box" like that could contain every arithmetic problem I could present. (I had no concept of binary arithmetic, twos complement, registers, floating points, integers, etc.  I simply thought it had EVERY possible problem & solution stored within. I now know that computers & calculators are simply very fast at counting on their fingers.)

Now we move on from the house. He had a workshop which fascinated me far beyond what Charlie's Chocolate Factory could ever hope to do. There were gadgets and gizmos and what-cha-may-call-its.  Some things I knew a little about... some were enigmas.  Two things I distinctly remember were a metal lathe and a motor winder.  The lathe was used to shape & fabricate metal parts. The tray beneath was usually filled with razor sharp coils of metal shavings. The winder, which was used to rebuild large electric motors, had arms inside for wrapping coils of copper, and it had a counter to match coil counts.  As much as that place technically fascinated me, it was also fun. He had built three shop stools with wheels for sitting. One was short, the other two were of average height. Being the smallest, I took the low center of gravity "built-for-speed" model. My sisters & I would race around the concrete floor like demonic possessed clowns.  They usually won.  I think they were more possessed than me.

Something like this, except screw height
adjustable, and with only 4 wheels.

The shop was also built (like a bridge) over a creek, and one could take the floor drain up and drop stones directly into the water below.

These things alone were enough to occupy me, but I have yet to approach the Inner Sanctum, the Holiest of Holies.

There was the train shop.  Oh.  My.  Gosh.

Curt was a collector of Lionel O27 trains.  I only saw small portions set up on the floor in the house from time to time, but somewhere along the way, he acquired massive amounts of rolling stock, locomotives, track, accessories, etc.  I suppose he intended to set it all up "someday" which never came.

But when no one was watching me (which was par for the course...) I'd slip off and sneak over the inclined concrete bridge, up to that shop, remove the lock from the hasp (it only LOOKED secure) and sneak inside. I wasn't really supposed to be there, but I gradually became more bold, spending more and more time in that building, until it seemed like hours... and no one called for me.

I looked at first, salivating, a kid in a dreamland toy store. On later visits, I would open a box or two, piece together a few sections of track on the workbench, cautiously roll a box car and tanker car along, couple them together, then put them away and pull out a passenger car.  The only thing missing was electricity, otherwise, I'd have had locomotives running.

I can not tell you the specific models... otherwise I'd post images. Suffice it to say, the images in my mind are better than anything I can find on Google.  I've tried.

I think Curt was successful, he was inventive and as far as I know, had plenty of money most of the time. He owned a bulldozer and a backhoe, and showed me how to run each one when I was about 10 or 11. I'd have trouble remembering it all now, but it was so much fun to do that when before, all I had was toys in the dirt.  The real thing is much more fun!  You folks that do it for a living may laugh at me, but it takes fine skill to run an excavator, backhoe, etc.

That same summer, I worked with him on a spare piece of land he had acquired. He put in a mobile home for family get-togethers and so we'd have a bathroom. I helped him garden, I learned to run a tractor, I spent hours in the hot sun, and the family patch brought in acres of corn, potatoes, and so on.  I probably wasn't as helpful as I'd like to think I was, but for a 10 or 11 year-old, I worked my butt off.

Late that summer, Curt asked what I would like.  He had given me some money along the way, bought snacks, etc, and I wasn't expecting anything in particular. I had enjoyed the hell out of spending time with him, learning stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise had the opportunity to experience... but when he asked... that 24 inch Free Spirit 10-speed bike (red, white & bicentennial blue) in the Sears & Roebuck Catalog sprang to the forefront of my cerebrum.  At the time, it was the princely sum of about $110, and as far as I know he chipped in, or bought outright, that bike for me.  It was the first bike that I had which was not a hand-me-down, or "Frankenstein-ed" together from spare parts. (Yes, one of my early bikes I put together from 3 identical bikes which were crushed in a barn collapse where some of my cousins had them stored.)

Several years later, when I was in High School, I lived with my maternal grandparents. Otherwise either my father or I would have wound up in the morgue. How Curt & my dad could have come from the same womb eludes me. But as they say, one can choose their friends, not their relatives. One of those winters, my grandparents went to Florida and stayed with their daughter (my aunt) for a couple of months. I had school and lived in the log cabin behind their house. The main house had a coal fired stove which also heated the water for the house. Having a warm or hot shower would involve getting up 2 or 3 hours prior and building a fire. Me? High school? I was up past midnight! I chose to simply have a cold shower before school. I'm not talking a "Who used up the hot water?" cool shower.  It was like ice water! I dealt with it. That summer, I had a major hand in building a new laundry/utility room for my grandparents. They had purchased an electric water heater, I ran the wiring, but we had not yet plumbed it in before their Southern Sojourn.

Curt learned of my bathing habits. He brought over his pipe dies and he taught me how to cut and thread galvanized pipe. We screwed it all together, and by the end of a day, we had a functional electric water heater and I had hot showers. I wish I could have learned 1/10th of what that man had in his head.

(I warned you that this was a Rambling Nostalgic piece.)

The inspiration for this piece was me looking at one of my calculators, a Casio fx-260solar.  Oh, that's not the only one, and it's relatively new; I've got them lying about the place, they're also on my smartphone, my iPad, and of course on any of my computers.  Apple II, 68040 Mac, PowerPC, OS 8, 9 & X, Win XP, Win 7, yada yada yada...

But there was a time when calculators were not ubiquitous.  There was the time I borrowed my aunt's calculator, and as I rode my bike, the bag split and it hit the dirt road. The cost of repairs was many times more than what a new scientific calculator would cost now.  (I think it was an HP gadget, a pioneer in the field.)  Suffice it to say, I had to do my homework the old-fashioned way.

I never learned to use a slide-rule.

I came in at the close of the analog age, and the dawn of the digital age. And now for the tie-in with my rambling.

At some point, Curt bought my sisters & I each a calculator.  Just a basic add, subtract, multiply, divide, calculator with a red Light Emitting Diode (LED) display from Texas Instruments.

It was the greatest thing ever invented since the wheel.

Yep... this is it. Counts on its fingers
faster than I can ever hope to.

Of course, taking it to school resulted in a plethora of calculator groupies. (Try this, what does this equal? Times this for me! Of course the "million x million" resulted in the flashing red overflow indicator.) Then there was the popular 7734 (HELL) or 710 77345 (SHELL OIL) and turn it upside down.  My personal favorite was a joke about Dolly Parton going to her doctor and having various procedures done for breast reduction.  As one narrates, you punch in numbers and the end result is 55378008 (Upside-down: BOOBLESS)

Anyway, would that I could have sewn my wild oats and gotten laid by calculator groupies.  I guess I just didn't know how to work it.

BUT WAIT!  Tell them what else they've won Johnny!

At about the same time, Curt also bought me a digital watch. Serious James Bond super-secret squirrel shit.  He also bought one each for my sisters, but theirs had girly orange bands, and at this time I can not find an image online.  Mine was the masculine James Bond save-the-world version:

This is a promotional image... if you wanted to know the time,
you had to push a button to light it up.

I'm not positive that's the exact model, but it's pretty dang close.  When I wore that watch to school, I had Time Groupies. I was in 5th or maybe 6th grade, and people I didn't know would walk up to me and ask me what the time was.

If only I could have worked it.  Calculator & Time Groupies... could have gotten laid and STDs out of the way before AIDS paranoia.

(sigh) Hindsight.

I still miss Curt.  In some ways he was more of a father than my own biological unit. Of course he was imperfect, he sided with my father in disputes with my mother too many times. I could focus on that, but I choose to remember the good.

In 1997, while I was on leave from the U.S. Air Force and visiting my parents, a phone call came in to my mom's house.  It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but Curt had been in an auto parts store and collapsed.  I think he was heading over to see me & my visiting family, but I never got to see him, never got to say goodbye.  He died very quickly, perhaps even instantly. I was a pall bearer at his funeral.

I miss you, Uncle Curt

And thus accelerated my father's downward spiral... which did not end well. But that's another story entirely, one which I won't launch at this sitting.