Buzzing About Electric Football

   The nation is buzzing over the news that Normam Sas recently passed away at the age of 87.  Sas is the inventor of electric football, a game that has captivated kids for more than 60 years.

   A mechanical engineer by trade, Sas worked for his father Elmer who owned the Tudor Metal Company. The company had created a motor that vibrated a metal sheet for horse and car racing games but Norman used the technology to invent the electric football game in 1949.

   Considering that the game is extremely noisy, unpredictable and somewhat futile to master; it is amazing that it became so popular.  Yet despite its flaws, Tudor sold 40 million electric football games over the next 63 years.

   The game was a hit because it allowed kids (and dads) to recreate NFL action on their dining room tables. In the days before video games, controlling the actions of players in a sports game was a unique experience.

   Of course the game only gave the impression that kids could control it. It was actually impossible to control the game because the small plastic players wandered helter-skelter around the field like they had recently attended a campus keg party.

   I inherited the original 1950’s version from my brother in the late 60’s. By then most players had lost their “cleats” and the teams had been painted and repainted at least 4 times. We overlooked its flaws and played the game for hours changing the rules to accommodate the lack of mobile players.

   A quick Internet search shows that some guys never stopped playing. Electric Football Leagues exist in numerous northern cities (think long winter days). The 17^th  Annual Electric Football Super Bowl and Convention was held in Columbus, Ohio in 2011 although no record exists of the 18^th annual event. It is possible that the other hotel guests complained at the buzz of 50 game tables below their room.

   I asked Facebook friends to post their own electric football experiences and found a common theme of futility.

   Tom Heline had an old game with metal players who had a mind of their own. He even kept a notebook of which direction players ran in so he wouldn’t give a ball to the guy who ran in circles.

   When the electricity was out, we just tapped on the board and it worked the same, said both Jim Cummings and Barry Lanier.

   “We used to stick a wad of cotton in the quarterback’s arm and let it fly. Unfortunately he almost never made a touchdown. Instead he would fall over and shake to the sidelines,” commented Mark Sceurman.

   Mike Keenen remembers being frustrated that his game vibrated too much and the players quickly fell over and just laid there shaking.

   I once bought an electric football game on Ebay and tried to convince my ten year-old son that we could spend some quality time together.  I didn’t remember the game being “that noisy” and it took way too long to set up plays. We played it about five times and then resold it on Ebay.  It just couldn’t compete with Madden 2003.

   So thank you to Norman Sas and Tudor Games for all of the collective hours that we played the most annoying and noisy game in our closet.

A Tribute To TV Theme Song Composers

If I could have dinner with three famous people, I might choose Hoyt Curtin, Vic Mizzy and Earle Hagen. You probably never heard of them but you know every word of their work. That’s because they wrote theme songs for ten of the most popular television sitcoms and cartoons of the 1960’s.

Popular television today still uses opening musical themes but the golden age of theme songs with lyrics was the 1960s and early 70s. It was a time when the opening music set up the whole series.

How did those castaways get on Gilligan’s Island again. We all know it was a three hour cruise because we can sing it. The composer of “Gilligan’s Island,” Sherwood Schwartz also wrote The Brady Bunch and the theme song for a short lived sitcom called It’s About Time.

When you step back from the shows and listen to the themes as complete songs, you begin to appreciate the art of composing 60 second songs that are informative and catchy.

Hoyt Curtin, for example, was writing a Schlitz Beer commercial when he was approached by the Hanna-Barbera studios to write a jingle for a new cartoon series. That project earned him a full time gig with the studios where he wrote their most famous theme songs such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Quick DrawMcGraw, Johnny Quest, The Smurfs and Superfriends.  When it came to cartoons, the guy had the golden touch.

Another composer who had the golden touch was Earle Hagen. Like many people in the music business in the late 50s, Hagen started with the big bands of the 40s playing with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey among others. He began writings cores for movies and ultimately moved into television.

He co-wrote a little song called The Fishing Hole which became inseparable from the popular Andy Griffith Show. He also wrote themes for the Dick Van Dyke Show, GomerPyle, That Girl, Make Room For Daddy and The Mod Squad.

Howard Greenfield lived in the same Brooklyn apartment building as Neil Sedaka and co-wrote many of his most popular hits like Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Oh Carol, Calendar Girl and Love Will Keep Us Together.  He took time out from his pop song writing to compose the theme songs to Gidget, Bewitched, Hazel and The Flying Nun.  Listen to some old Neil Sedaka and follow that up with his TV theme songs and you will hear the similarities.

I once devoted a column to Vic Mizzy and his traffic safety song about jaywalking called In TheMiddle, In The Middle.  Mizzy also wrote the classic Addams Family and Green Acres tunes. He went on to write the scores to all five Don Knotts movies.

Fans of country rock music in the 70s might remember a pedal steel session player named Pete Kleinow or Sneaky Pete. He was also a founding member of the Flying Burrito Brothers but before his hippie days he wrote the odd theme songs for Gumby and Davey and Goliath – go figure.

My favorite TV theme song story takes us to the talking horse Mr. Ed.  His theme song was written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone. According to an interview with the pair, they never saw film before writing the music or words. They just imagined what the horse would say.  It was first sung by an Italian opera singer but the producers used Livingstone’s demo version and voice instead.

“I feel sorry if anyone ever has to sing these lyrics,” he said in the interview which is posted on YouTube.

The truth is that all of us have sung the lyrics to Mr. Ed and many more silly sixties theme songs. For that we say thanks to Hoyt and Vic and Sheldon and friends.

Blowing Stuff Up

There were three unrelated incidents that led to my respect or fear of personal fireworks.

Our family was visiting my mother’s clan in Chicago and I was introduced to Billy, a thirty-year old who had three fingers on one hand.  He had lost two fingers in a fireworks accident as a kid. It made an impression on me.

A year or two later I read a paperback book called “Follow My Leader” by James Garfield.  The book details the story of Jimmy Carter, a young Boy Scout who is permanently blinded by a firecracker. The book, which is still in print, probably doesn’t get a lot of checkouts from the library these days but it was a cautionary tale that made an impression on me.

Neither of the events above made a lasting impression though because we were shooting off fireworks ourselves just a few years later.

Like most states north of the Mason-Dixon line, New Jersey deemed all fireworks illegal with the exception of sparklers. That didn’t seem to stop the 13-16 year-old crowd from obtaining them. It just made the purchases more exciting.

My favorite experience was the day an older kid (at least 16!) approached us in the park and offered to sell us firecrackers.  “Give me $5 and I’ll get them from my basement,” he said. We followed him to a house on the edge of the park and gave him our money.  He went inside and just never came out.

It took about ten minutes to realize we had been swindled.  As you can imagine, our options were rather limited. We could knock on the door and demand our money back but even two dumb kids like us knew the answer would be “what money?”

We could indignantly tell our mothers that we wasted $5 buying illegal fireworks but we knew the answer would be “that’s what you get for dealing with criminals or something like that.”

Instead we quietly sulked away and ate a few less sundaes at Friendly’s that week.  I recently drove by that same house in Montclair, NJ and remembered that incident like it was yesterday. Maybe I should have stopped to ask for my money back or threaten exposing his crime to readers of the Allen American Newspaper.

Most readers my age know that firecrackers were only a gateway explosive.  Cherry bombs “blowed stuff up real good” and the waterproof ash cans were great for blowing stuff up real good in water. M-80’s were a whole different explosive.

According to Wikipedia, the M-80 was originally created for the military as a simulator for live explosives. The M in the name stood for Military and the 80 referred to the size of the tube. They typically held 3 -5 grams of explosive. It was the damage to property and people by M-80s that led the U.S. Government to pass the Child Safety Act in 1966 banning the use of most consumer (Class C) explosives.

I never actually bought an M-80 but the older kids would recklessly set them off at the local park and schoolyard around the Fourth of July. Rumors that an M-80 was equal to a quarter stick of dynamite (not even close) were enough to keep us at a safe distance.

The only thing more entertaining than blowing stuff up was watching stuff fly.  Fireworks with names like bottle rockets and pinwheels added suspense to the backyard activities because they were so unpredictable.

Unpredictable and unsafe – it sounds like a recipe for trouble but there will always be a new crop of kids looking for a thrill as they blow stuff up.