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