an eye toward the past

My niece is visiting from Croatia and has been snooping through family photo albums, and came across this artifact. It's not hard to give it a rough date if you know the people involved. On the left there's my late aunt Monica, who passed away on the farm in 2006 (those cigarettes did her in). I'm shirtless in shorts in the center. My older brother, on the cusp of adolescence and in the mandatory -- and very itchy -- physical education shirt issued by Stafford County public schools, is in character on the right. Now a Canadian, he still doesn't wear shorts. The setting is the farmhouse kitchen. But the details in this photo really do capture a time.

Whatever the precise year, my aunt was visiting from Berlin. She was a writer and filmmaker. As a German she welcomed the heat of Virginia summers and spent her days in her bathing suit, drinking cheap white wine with soda, typing stories, and smoking self-rolled cigarettes. She loved watching "Soul Train" on TV whenever she visited. Host Don Cornelius presided over the country's top R&B hits, the famous Soul Train dancers would boogie, and my aunt would pick me up and make me dance with her. The Cold War wasn't always so bad. Years later she would come to live on the farm with my mother, her sister.

The photo shows our country-style wooden chairs and old metal kitchen cabinets, which were replaced with wooden ones sometime in the '80s, I think. The tablecloth is one of those cheap red-and-white checkered things. Ubiquitous then, now you only see them in Italian restaurants that still serve 8-dollar bottles of wine. A few years after this shot was taken I really learned to hate that black wall phone, here pictured with a sticker of emergency numbers pasted across its face. It was from that phone that a teenaged me would have to call girls to try to arrange dates (something my students of today don't need to do anymore). Mounted at the nexus of our kitchen and living room, and with a cord that stretched maybe four feet, that phone granted zero privacy for a boy learning to talk to the other sex. Everybody heard my business.

But one easy-to-miss detail really helps to date the photo. Hanging between my head and the light switch is a yo-yo and a barely discernable set of clackers. Clackers were a global toy fad of the early '70s. The setup was simple: two glass (later plastic) balls linked by a string. You held the string in the middle and, by lifting and dropping, the balls would clack together rhythmically (and loudly -- another reason why kids loved it). The problem with clackers is that the colliding balls would sometimes shatter. Kids were losing eyes to flying splinters. So, in 1971 or thereabouts, the federal government intervened and the toy was no more, at least in the US. 

We moved to the farm from a smaller place in neighboring Spotsylvania County in 1972. This photo therefore suggests that we were, at least for a time, clacker scofflaws, but I do remember being pretty upset when my parents eventually took my clackers away. (As a parent today, I suspect it was as much for the noise as the safety concern.) All told, this bit of cultural-legal history dates the picture to about 1973 or '74.

Interestingly, at least one person holds that the clacker craze and subsequent government recall are  responsible for today's much-debated "helicopter" style of over-parenting. That seems unfair, especially given the existence of lawn darts, which actually killed kids. To be honest, apart from the yo-yo, that little balls-and-string was probably the safest "toy" on the whole farm, where we experimented with rifles, unpowered (but not unmanned) flight, and my brother once mixed random chemicals in the basement trying to build a firebomb. But I will thank the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission -- born 1973 -- for preserving my eyesight.     

 

My aunt (family photo.)