An Old Toy and a Wandering Mind

I've just spent a little time with Roy Rogers and Trigger, thanks to an old View-Master I found while going through a cupboard. I think it might be a little older than the one in the piece Yarntangler shares with us in today's blog. I have to hand it to Kodak...the Kodachrome colors are bright, true and unfaded since about 1950 (the copyright date).

One of the pictures features Trigger and Trigger, Jr. with ole Roy smiling away between them. I'd forgotten there was a Trigger Jr.

I haven't thought about the "King of the Cowboys" for a long time. He was a pretty big deal to us kids growing up in the '50's. He was mostly in black and white for me, so seeing him in color and 3-D would have been quite a treat if I'd had one of those things back then.

My uncle had one.

Uncle Charles was the world traveler in the family. Us kids were sure he had millions stashed away some place, because he always seemed to have the latest and greatest of everything. If he was alive today he'd probably have a gazillion-inch plasma screen (he was the first in the family to have a color TV, and I remember waiting anxiously for Bonanza to come on, so we could watch a show that was actually in color) and a Wii.

Uncle Charles was not a millionaire. In fact, he was an Army Chaplain most of his life. His travel was courtesy of the "needs of the service", and he didn't always go to neat, exotic places. Of course, us kids were not discouraged from thinking that he did. We were being "protected" a la the 1950's. Several years later, he would preside as Yarntangler and I started our new life together, in a church now deemed too costly to survive by the Diocese of Springfield.

But in the 1950's he had a View-Master. And he had about a billion reels of 3-D pictures from Europe. We'd sit in a row on the living room couch, and pass the brown Bakelite viewer down the line, so we could each share in trips he'd taken to places like Lourdes and London. Hours would pass, and between the pictures and Uncle Charles' stories about the places and people in those far off lands, it was like a family vacation overseas.

Looking at my meager collection of reels from Mount Rushmore and the Badlands of South Dakota brought those evenings back to mind. Oh, and Roy Rogers, too. That old single reel might become a collector's item some day. I guess I'd better hang on to it. It might come in handy.

Blog at ya later
-Geezerguy

Rehabing and Repacking

My cardiac rehab instructor says it's time for me to start some upper body strength exercises this week...which is good news. It means I can do more things around the rig without getting into trouble. So, tomorrow we start cleaning out the storage bins, and rearranging everything to make more room.

That's probably where the trouble will begin:

I'm a big advocate of hanging onto things that will probably come in handy some day. Yarntangler, not so much.

She can't understand, for example, why I still have the old water pump that went belly-up last winter in Coffeyville. I also have the complete inner workings of the porch light I replaced two years ago, and a whole assortment of perfectly good wires, switches, connectors and only partially-scorched fusible links from a variety of other items. The uses for all of these are, of course, obvious. So I'm not too concerned about having to justify them.


I do admit, I haven't been able to figure out exactly what some of the things are, but they just look useful. I couldn't pass them up.



...And I'll probably never have a chance to get some of them again...



When we get to the basement storage bays, there may be a few surprises. Some of the items down there haven't seen the light of day since we first went on the road (has it been that long?) I have a feeling I may not recognize some of it. Or I may recognize it, decide I desperately need it for some stupid reason, and then have to find a place in which to pack it all over again.

There may be other surprises, too. Last winter there was a mouse incident and...well, you get the picture.

Anyhow, that will be our next adventure. And we won't even have to get on the road for it.

Blog at ya later,
-Geezerguy