Visiting Table Top Hockey Heaven

Halfway through the second period of last week’s Allen Americans game, a bunch of players got tangled up in the offensive corner. As I watched them push and kick and whack at the puck (and each other), a smile came to my face.

I was imagining a long metal rod protruding from behind the goal and a 12 year-old boy working that pole to free the puck from the corner. Another 12 year-old is pushing a metal rod at the other end of the ice trying to steal it back. Meanwhile, the players are just spinning in circles.

Despite the exciting game on the ice, my mind had wandered back to the days of playing Bobby Hull Hockey in my friend’s Gary’s basement. Bobby Hull Hockey was a table top hockey game that used rods to control players along a track in the “ice.” The playing surface was about 2’ x 3’ and included 5 players per team plus a goalie and a rolling puck.

I remember Gary calling me on his birthday to come over and play the shiny new game. A few kids had old hockey games with missing players and bent rods but a brand new game…well that could create a buzz in the whole neighborhood. The game lasted for years and filled many idle hours for us in high school.

Gary’s game came from the third generation of mechanical hockey games. The earliest model was built by Donald Munro in Toronto around 1933. The game was made of wood and was given as a Christmas present for his children at the time. Munro later built a small number of these wooden games for the Eaton's department store in Toronto. They were an instant success and stayed in production until 1955.

A plastic version was introduced in the early 1950’s and then the first “modern” version of the game was released by the Eagle Toy Company of Montreal, according to the fan website Table Hockey Heaven (www.tablehockeyheaven.com). Eagle Toys sold the metal games through the early 1960’s until the company was bought out by Coleco Toys in 1966. A big push for toy safety in 1971 spelled the end of the familiar tin men in favor of a mostly plastic game.

Like its cousin electric football, table hockey has never completely died out. The Table Hockey Heaven (THH) site lists over 60 tournaments in the U.S. and Canada for 2011 with the Stiga American Championships scheduled in late December. Stiga, a Swedish game manufacturer, is the official game of the NHL and only game to be used in most competitions although some U.S. tournaments allow classic games as well.

Serious fans of the sport on THH (and there appear to be many) have forums and online chats to discuss strategy and swap parts from old games. There are even music videos that feature close-up action and highlights.

No discussion of table hockey would be complete without mentioning bubble hockey games. These games were larger versions of the home games made for arcades. They were encased with a large plastic bubble or dome to keep the puck from getting lost or stolen. The most popular version made by Chexx in the 1980s recreated the Miracle on Ice between the U.S. and Russia.
With the realism of video games such as NHL 2011, Bobby Hull hockey is a dinosaur. Still, if I had that game today I am confident that it would only take a few phone calls to create a buzz in our neighborhood – at least among the fifty-somethings.

As for the Allen Americans, they won that game and the series and I look forward to seeing them again this weekend. How does Yellow Horn Table Top Hockey sound?

For Whom The Church Bell Tolls

I watched as several boys of about 9 years-old recently walked by the front of my house. One of them stopped, pulled out a phone and announced that his mother texted him that he has to go home. It didn’t surprise me that he had a cell phone since more and more youngsters carry phones. No, I was just surprised how convenient it was for mom to text message her kids.

My neighborhood in the 1960’s operated on two precise units of time measurement – the sun and the bells of St. Thomas The Apostle Church.

How much time kids got to play on school days was based on how fast they could get home, get changed out of the school uniform and meet back at the park which was adjacent to the school and church. The day’s activity would be based on the current sports season – football in the fall, basketball in the winter and so on. The pick-up games included all those kids who could get back to the playground before sides were picked. Late comers may or may not get into the game depending on their popularity and skills.

One big variable in the after school race to play was mom. Working mothers were still a novelty in our neighborhood so they were home each day and kids who hadn’t raked leaves or cleaned their room would be snared by moms. Even a 20 minute chore was enough to blow the whole afternoon. Games ended when the church bells rang at 5 or 6 o’clock. Picking a football squad required extra strategy when half the team might go home for an early dinner. The 6 o’clock dinner kids, including me, squeezed an extra hour of play but the rosters were limited.

The church bells rang every hour and could be heard for blocks away. When the bells chimed, I had 5 minutes to be home for dinner. It was that simple and I tested the system many times.

Sunset was the other limiting factor of course. Touch football games in the late fall would be played until the ball was almost invisible. Clever quarterbacks would toss the ball above the streetlights and it would reappear somewhere down the street. The local park called Vasser Field only had tennis court lights and their glow was just enough to dimly light a basketball court in the winter. There were only a few rules for after school play around the neighborhood. Listen for the bells, watch the sunset, stay clear of high schoolers who smoked cigarettes and hide if any nuns come by. Nuns were usually looking for a few strong men as they would say to carry groceries or move plants around the convent. Once asked by a nun there was no way a Catholic School boy could say no. An easier strategy was to hide in the wooden fort.

Unlike today’s hovering parents, mothers rarely came to Vasser Field. In fact, when one showed up we knew a kid was in trouble for something like missing a piano lesson or stealing fifty cents from his brother. Kids would walk right off second base and head towards the gate when their moms showed up – arguing was pointless.

One afternoon though, I got hurt playing football and there was my mother. Someone had texted her (just kidding) run home and told her I was hurt. I should have been embarrassed but instead I was grateful. Sometimes you just need mom.

The Price of Journalistic Freedom

The first Flipside Column appeared in this newspaper on March 30, 2007. My journalistic aspirations go back much further though. 

The first column I ever wrote appeared in the January 1970 issue of the Troop 22 Tooter. The Tooter was a publication that I wrote and published for Boy Scout Troop 22 in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Once a month I would pound the typewriter keys into the wax stencil and print the latest troop news. 

Each issue featured breaking news, merit badge tips, a scoutmaster’s corner and an editorial. Flipside readers are probably not surprised that I have a stack of Troop 22 Tooters stashed away in my filing cabinet next to The Camp Crier and Cold Turkey but I am getting ahead of myself. Alongside the Klondike Derby results and merit badge tips (“Home Repairs has only one requirement: need I say more.”) was my first column called Get It Together Guys. In the column I implored my fellow scouts to be prepared. “If a patrol leader fails to plan correctly for the canoe trip, the whole patrol goes hungry.” Frankly, I am surprised they didn’t publish that nugget of wisdom in the next edition of the Boy Scout Handbook. During the summer of 1972 I served as publisher and editor of The Camp Crier, the voice of Camp Christ The King in Blairstown, NJ. The mimeographed staff newsletter featured the lyrics of camp favorites like On Top of Spaghetti and jokes like this winner: “What did the hippie paper say to the pen? Write-on!” Captivated readers also learned that Cabin 8 was first in line for breakfast for the first time this summer and Sister Christine took two campers and a counselor to the Newton Hospital this week. My column in the one surviving issue of The Camp Crier offers tips for fighting off mosquitos which was a relevant topic in the Jersey woods. The third newspaper I was responsible for never bore my name. It was an underground newspaper called Cold Turkey that was distributed in 1974 among the young men of Essex Catholic High School in Newark, NJ. Cold Turkey was more of a silly satire piece than a newspaper. Instead of preaching anarchy or revolution, it offered record reviews, fake letters to the editor and weird school news. Freshmen were bribed with a free lunch to pass each issue out in the halls. “Dear Cold Turkey,” says one letter. “I am offended by your suggestion that Led Zeppelin IV is the best album ever. What about the new Osmond’s single or the greatest rocker ever, David Cassidy? – Signed Brother Dagwood, Principal.” My column in the spring of 1974 focused on the closing of our senior smoking section. It seems unbelievable by today’s standards but Essex seniors could smoke cigarettes in one section of the school cafeteria. The administration finally saw the error in that policy and moved the senior smoking section to the student parking lot. Journalists around the globe have been jailed for reporting the truth. My friend Jim and I received a few days of detention for reporting absolutely nothing important – a small price to pay for journalistic freedom. Thirty-seven years and hundreds of columns later, I am not sure if the quality of my columns has improved much but at least I can sign them with my real name.

My Old Kentucky Road Trip

I had a lot of time to think about cold weather last week. Locked up for most of four days by a crippling ice storm and thundersnow, I kept saying "it's not that bad."

Actually it was pretty bad and many Texans were unjustly mocked by out of towners from Pittsburgh and Green Bay for their reaction to the storm.
I ventured out each day and managed to get home without a dent but the odds were against me. It wasn't the first time I challenged those odds.

On a Sunday afternoon in January of 1978 I set out from Bloomfield, New Jersey for the 21-hour trek back to Murray, KY - my old Kentucky (college) home.

First let me explain a few things about my car. It was a faded green 1957 Chevy that came pre-dented and pre-rusted when I bought it two years earlier. The engine was smooth but the big car bounced along on worn shocks and ball joints that made it drift across the lanes. This forced the driver to constantly adjust the steering wheel to keep it aimed straight down the highway.

The flurries started about 20 miles into the trip but returning home would have been a defeat for this college senior. I was soon climbing hills in eastern Pennsylvania as the flurries turned to snow. I swung up north to the gritty town of Scranton to pick up a passenger and before we hit the next town south, the blizzard hit.

About the car again... the windshield wiper operated off of a vacuum pump that would lose pressure when the engine was stressed. In other words, accelerating up a hill would cause the wipers to stop until I released the gas pedal.

Facing near white out conditions, my passenger was leaning outside the window wiping the windshield with a snow brush while I slammed on the gas and let go intermittently. There was only 16 hours to go.

At the bottom of a long mountain hill outside of Wilkes Barre on Interstate 81, I did a 360 and fortunately struck nothing but snow. We shook it off and then caled it a day at the next exit. We stayed at a nearby relative's house and started out after sunrise for the other 917 miles.
The sun was shining but the temperature hovered near zero and the highway was covered with deep snow. We followed in the tracks of tractor trailers although we saw more than a few rolled on their side in the medians. Thirteen hours later we had travelled about 450 miles on snow covered roads. We called it a night in Columbus, Ohio.

One final word about the car - the floorboards in front had rusted out and only the original thin floor mats protected our feet from the cold air and moisture. The breezes were enough to numb the toes down there.

Tuesday morning we found the roads similar to our Texas roads last week - covered with ice. We rarely found dry pavement and crept 330 miles across the Western Kentucky Parkway in 10 hours - that's an average of 33 mph.

The 19-hour drive had taken 27 hours and still ranks as the toughest road trip I've ever endured.
As a footnote - we arrived in Murray, Kentucky just in time to enjoy several weeks of ice covered roads and cancelled classes. The winter of 1978 had just begun.

Sign In At The Door

Wandering around my hometown of Bloomfield, NJ, my son John and I found ourselves with time to kill. We cruised by my old grammar school and I impulsively slowed down.

“Let’s stop and see if someone will show us around,” I proposed. “I’m sure they remember me. It’s only been 41 years.”

From the outside, St. Thomas The Apostle School has not changed much since it was built in the 1940’s and certainly not since I attended school there in the 1960’s. Inside, we appropriately found ourselves in the principal’s office explaining that I was an alum and was hoping to get a tour of the school. The secretary left us alone as she looked for someone with more authority.

So here I was in the principal’s office half expecting the voice of my old stern principal Sr. Adrian to call out “Mr. Carroll – what brings you to my office today? Please sign the book.”

I glanced around the small office for “the black book,” a register of shame that visitors to the office signed. I later learned that the book had been retired many years before but a signature in the book guaranteed detention.

Instead of Sister Adrian, we were introduced to friendly Sister Joan, who had been doing God’s work as a teacher there since 1974. While I had graduated 8th grade four years before her arrival, she knew my name well. It wasn’t my reputation as a scholar or athlete at the school though – it was my mother whom she came to know over the years.

The first sign that I was getting old – make that really old – was that all of our teachers from the 1960’s were gone. Some quick math convinced me that Sr. Jean Jose would be 113 years old if she were still there. I was able to compute that in my head because Sr. Jean Jose whacked my knuckles with an old ruler to help improve my math skills. She would be proud that I learned my times tables and that my knuckles healed that summer.

As we walked up the narrow staircases I realized how familiar the school was – especially the top floor. Grades 6-8 were housed there and the little kids rarely ventured up there. There was one key exception called detention.

The assistant principal and chief enforcer was Sister Agnes, the 8th grade teacher. She held detention for those lucky enough to sign the black book that week. It was an intimidating experience for 3rd graders who sat alongside grizzled 8th graders in desks where their feet didn’t even touch the floor.

I would imagine that detention was about 45 minutes long but it seemed like hours. The only sound was the rustle of Sr. Agnes’ habit and rosaries as she walked around the room. The windows were opened wide to let in the sound of cheerful, law-abiding Catholic children playing outside.
Sister Agnes and I got to know each other well when she became my 8th grade teacher. We came to an understanding that I would be a compliant young man and she would not invite me to her weekly detention club. It worked.

I apologized to my son that there were no plaques honoring my accomplishments of eight years at STAS. But somewhere, in a musty old box in the storeroom, is a black book and oh the stories it could tell.

Tuning Into 77 WABC For The Top 100

Before IPOD playlists and MTV and classic rock, there was AM radio. For almost 20 years stations like KLIF in Dallas and WIBG in Philadelphia and WLS in Chicago dominated the listening habits of teenagers.

For millions of listeners in the greater New York City area, the two stations of choice for kids were WABC and WMCA. Like the scene from American Graffiti, radios in cars and on beaches might all be tuned to the same station as a single disc jockey like Wolfman Jack or Cousin Brucie rambled on.
I was right there with those millions of teenagers tuning every radio within reach to AM 77.

(Listen to WABC - 1967 Top 100)

My favorite day of the year for radio listening was December 26 because it signaled the end of non-stop Christmas music and the beginning of “the countdown.”

For a solid week, WABC would play the top radio hits of the year. The countdown would start at 100 and work its way down to number one and then start all over again. If you were a pop music fan, the countdown just sucked you in. If Incense and Peppermints is only the #18 super hit of the 1967, what could be better? There is no way that Judy in Disguise (With Glasses) came in at #17.
In the days before the Internet and instant information, there was no way to get the Top 100 list without first listening to hours of radio and the accompanying commercials. As a result, I found myself carrying a transistor radio and a crumpled piece of paper around the house. I numbered the page to 100 and scratched in the songs as they were announced.

The Top 100 was just an extension of the weekly Top 40 that was aired each Tuesday night. With the weekly excitement (at least in my house) of an American Idol final, the DJ would play songs from forty down to number one. It was big news in 1967 when Light My Fire jumped five places to push Windy out of first only to be bumped by Ode To Billy Joe two weeks later.

Top 40 radio was a format that began in 1954 at WTIX in New Orleans. The concept supposedly came from a radio station owner who kept hearing the same song played over and over on a jukebox. The owner trimmed the playlist of songs down to the ones determined most popular.
The bible for radio programmers was the Billboard Magazine Top 100 chart. The Billboard charts of pop songs started in 1955. Songs were rated based on actual sales nationwide and regional charts allowed regional bands to get more radio airplay.

Reaching #1 was every band’s dream but songs that stayed on the charts for an extended period were just as profitable. The Beatles, for example, had the most #1 hits (21) but Elvis Presley had the most charted records (107) compared to 48 for the Beatles. Interestingly, The Theme From a Summer Place by Percy Faith beat out the Beatles’ Hey Jude for the #1 song of the 60’s. The #1 charted song of 1970’s was surprisingly Debbie Boone’s You Light Up My Life.

If that last paragraph brought back fond memories instead of nightmares of an old statistics class, then look for a book called Top 40 Hits by Joel Whitburn.

There was a time when soul, rock and pop music all lived together on Am radio. How else could Sammy Davis Jr.’s The Candy Man, The Staple Singers’ I’ll Take You There and Neil Young’s Heart of Gold all hit #1 in 1972.

The rise of FM radio helped conquer and divide Top 40 AM radio in the 70’s but I still think back on those TOP 100 lists from the 60’s.

Share your comments and suggestions by emailing: flipside@tx.rr.com or visit the Flipside blog at http://flipsidecolumn.blogspot.com/

The Christmas Time Machine Is In Your Attic

The Christmas holiday is like a time machine. No matter how old we are, the holiday has a way of transporting us back in time. One reason is that we haul out a time capsule every year when the Christmas decorations appear.

It started with my family’s artificial Christmas tree. It magically grew thinner each year to the point where Charlie Brown would have been sympathetic. I was too young to remember it but we apparently enjoyed a silver tree lit with a rotating wheel of color in the late 50’s. The “new” tree lasted for at least 25 years and was finally retired long after we had left home.

Tree ornaments are a special part of Christmas decorating. Some survive generations while others get intentionally lost after only a single season. Our tree had an eclectic bunch or ornaments that were either passed down from grandparents or purchased when we were very young. My mother could tell a story about each one and I know my brother and I had favorites that we grabbed for first when tree trimming time came. Rarely were ornaments added to the collection in later years though.
The ornaments were carefully packed into several empty cases that once held 12 jars of Knott’s Berry Farm jelly. We knew Christmas was close when Aunt Maudie’s case of jelly arrived from California each year. Only a handful of ornaments and decorations from my childhood have survived but the familiar padded boxes are still in use 40 years later.

Still packed inside one of those cases is my mother’s favorite Christmas decoration - the Christmas Crèche or Nativity. All I know is that it was my grandmother’s and it got a prominent spot on the bookcase each year. I always imagined it as a valuable heirloom but it was probably purchased at Montgomery Wards in the 1950’s. I would offer to help set up the figurines each year hoping to create just the right effect. No matter how I positioned the wise men and the shepherds, my mother would patiently readjust them late at night to make the scene look more reverent and less like a sporting event.

Our living room was small and lacked a real fireplace so mom and dad were forced to rely on the magic of Santa and less on the “Night Before Christmas” scenario. Gifts appeared on Christmas morning under the tree but as we grew older Santa just dropped them on the two love seats nearby.
My memories from childhood may be foggy at times but I remember Christmas. I remember the pine scented candles and Santa cookie jar. I remember the popular Christmas songs that WABC radio played over and over and the four holly jolly Christmas albums my mother would pull out each year by Burl Ives, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand. I remember the same holiday TV specials and the same holiday TV commercials (Santa riding a Norelco shaver for example) and of course every New Yorker remembers the WPIX Yule Log that burned each Christmas Eve.

It’s because we did the same things year after year (and probably because we got new toys) that my Christmas memories are so strong.

Once we were married and had our own children, we started new Christmas traditions but kept many of our own from childhood. I am sure our parents did the same and their parents and so on. I can’t imagine it any other way.

I hope my kids feel the same way in thirty years and I hope that those old Knott’s Berry Farm cases are still holding those familiar ornaments and Crèche figurines.
Have a wonderful Christmas!