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Vintage

Saturday, July 18th, 2020

This little guy is over 40 years old:

He’s our Jawa Star Wars figure, which was probably purchased in about 1978. I saw ‘our’ since B and I used to mostly share these as I recall, although some figures were bought in pairs so we both had one.

This guy was one of the earliest we bought, and was one of at least a pair. Originally he had a little gun as well, but that’s long-lost by now. He took part in many elaborate Star Wars dioramas we made both indoors and out, and as with the others figures shown here today miraculously survived being melted by fireworks in the mid 1980s.

We also used to throw our figures into ponds, take them to the beach, and even tie them to parachutes and throw them off our roof! It’s a miracle he’s in such great condition.

That’s an original Yoda figure, from about 1980. As with the Jawa we had two of these, and this guy is in extraordinary condition considering his age. I always loved this figure due to its tiny size and large amount of accessories.

I remember we used to occasionally get one Star Wars figure each when we went shopping, but when the Empire figures hit shelves in 1980 dad bought us a whole bunch at once, including this guy. I can remember being overwhelmed as a kid by all the new figures before I’d seen the film, and had fun imagining what roles some characters would have.

That’s the final vintage figure I have, a guy named Squid Head from the Return Of The Jedi line that came out in 1983. I always loved this character (who was on screen for only seconds) and it was one of my favourite figures from that film. This figure I recall as being distinctly mine, although I don’t recall why.

I remember a trip to Sydney with B and dad in the early 1980s. We stayed in a bright apartment and went to a nearby mall every day. We played video games at a tiny arcade and dad let us each select some Star Wars figures from the toy store. I think that’s when we got Squid Head, because I recall playing with him (I would have been 11) in the garden patio of the apartment.

I asked dad about that trip last year, but he couldn’t remember. I wish I knew more about where we stayed and exactly when.

When I came to America I didn’t bring these guys with me: Bernard sent them to me years later. Back in the day we had loads of Star Wars figures, but some were melted and some sold off. Maybe these were saved because they had cloth parts? Maybe just because they’re cool? I wonder if B remembers?

Whatever the reason I’m glad they survived, because they’re now amongst my oldest possessions. Each of them trigger many happy memories of my childhood, and I’ll treasure them forever 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, History, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys | 2 Comments »

Paper Boys

Sunday, May 17th, 2020

In 1985 or 1986, Bernard and I got our first jobs. My memories are somewhat vague regarding certain details, but I seem to think it was Dads idea and he was instrumental in getting us a weekly paper run.

Every Wednesday we delivered a free newspaper called The Newcastle Star to a few hundred houses in a suburb called Redhead. Dad picked us up after school, we’d drive to a house in Gateshead to collect the papers, then drive to Redhead to deliver them. The three of us worked together and it usually took us several hours. I recall it was hard work, and not something any of us much enjoyed.

Redhead is an old sun-dried suburb known for its beach and looks very similar today to what I recall from then. We’d park our car with a bootfull of papers and each of us would pick a few blocks and walk around by ourselves delivering the papers.

The newspapers were big – both physically and by page count – and filling a shoulder bag with dozens of them made for quite a burden. They often came with a variety of additional advertising materials we had to combine with the papers ourselves, which increased the work time accordingly.

I believe we each settled on our parts of the suburb that we did every week, rather than switch it up. I myself walked the southeastern blocks closest to the beach, and my route included many of the lanes that run behind the houses. It was routine work: walk from house to house stuffing a rolled up paper into a mailbox or between fence slats or – if there was nowhere else to put it – putting a elastic band around it and tossing it into a yard.

I believe we ignored the – rare in those days – signs that said ‘no advertising materials’. Maybe due to some mechanism in place to verify the papers were actually delivered? At any rate the paper seemed quite popular in those days and even though I didn’t like delivering it I looked forward to reading it 🙂

It was tough work in summer, sweaty and tiring and I’m sure sunburn was common! But the truly wretched times were when it rained. We experimented with ponchos and other means to stay dry but nothing worked well and mostly we just got very wet while doing our best to keep the papers dry. Heavy rain often delayed our ability to deliver, but there was a deadline so sometimes we had to do it regardless.

Some other memories:
– There were several houses with evil, ravenous dogs! I hated these, and even sometimes ran past them in fear of my life 🙂
– We used to leave the car unlocked and the boot wide open so we could restock as necessary. In those days I suppose we didn’t consider thieves being a problem.
– I witnessed a dramatic car collision once at an intersection (near the church in the photo below) and was momentarily confounded as to what to do. But when the drivers got out and both seemed ok I walked on.
– A few times we were given actual product samples to deliver with the paper. These included washing machine detergent and some type of powdered drink. I think we just kept them ourselves – boxes of them! – rather than deal with the nightmare of carrying them 🙂
– One time the paper included a game piece for a McDonalds game that awarded actual prizes. Naturally we kept most of these ourselves and I recall eating free fries and hamburgers for some time…

If we didn’t enjoy it and it was difficult, physical work then why did we do it? The pay was good! Although dad drove us and did at least a third of the work he let Bernard and I split all the pay, and we got $30 or more each every week, which is close to $100 today. For a 13 or 14 year old this was amazing money in 1985 and I still remember using my first paycheque to buy two records (amongst other things) which were the first I ever bought ‘with my own money’.

My pay funded my video game, gamebook and music purchases for several years. It enabled weekly trips into Newcastle for movies/arcades/shopping and bought me more lollies and McDonald’s than I ever thought possible! I still own some of the things I bought with those wages to this day 🙂

In 1987 Bernard entered year 11 and chose to end the run. Dad and I continued alone for a while, but soon the Australian government started giving money to school kids (Austudy) and there was simply no need for us to work any more. I’m sure I sighed with relief after that final paper was delivered!

I would receive Austudy until just before leaving Australia and never worked again until I moved here. My first and last Australian career then: a paperboy. Hell in it’s day, but somewhat fondly remembered now.

Next time I visit I’ll go to Redhead and walk my route again for old times sake. I hope it triggers memories I haven’t even been able to remember for this post…

Posted in Australia, Blog, Family, History, Time | 2 Comments »

Wildlife XVI: The Dead Of Night

Saturday, April 25th, 2020

Maybe you’ve heard the stories of nature encroaching as man stays home? I was wondering if that was happening even in our own backyard, and dragged out the (old, borderline obsolete) wildlife camera for another bout of surveilling. Here’s what I found…

The usual suspects were of course represented. As you know by know squirrels are so abundant I sometimes wonder if they own this house and we just rent. The deer (with baby) photo I had to adjust since it was near pitch black. The nights have been dark recently and the animals have skulked with abandon.

KLS and I were just debating the difference between doves and pigeons but we’re 99% sure this dude is a dove since we’ve recently had one lurking. When they sing – or rather make their dove noises – it really carries and it can be difficult to tell where they are. Yesterday there was one on our roof (I think?) and his cooing filled the house.

We’ve had rabbits living in our backyard for years and they’re a common sight during the day nibbling at the edge of our lawn. Sometimes they’ll come up onto the patio in the middle of the day and make good viewing for the kitties. Apparently they hop around at night as well.

So with the expected visitors out of the way, time for some not-so-common ones:

A racoon! There were several shots of this guy over a few nights. Aside from some rock-hard break (see below) we hadn’t put food out so he was probably just exploring. In a few photos it looked like he was even grooming. I guess he’s comfortable on our patio.

There were only a couple of shots of this possum, and they were separated by over a week. He’s decently sized (about as big as a small cat). I wonder where he lives?

This one is a mystery. See that black thing at the edge of the yard? We’re not sure what it is! The likely culprit is a fat dog with a tiny tail looking away from us, but in all the aeons we have lived here we have never seen a dog running wild (which is not allowed in NY State). Therefore I’m inclined to think it’s either a giant unidentified black cat like the Beast of Exmoor. What do you think?

This last pic is even more mysterious! See that half-blurred thing flying by? Is it a bumblebee? A wasp? A hummingbird? A goldfinch? The camera doesn’t have a super-fast shutter speed so whatever it was is flying somewhat slowly, but the size seems to preclude an insect since it isn’t that close to the lens. A genuine mystery. What do you think?

Incidentally you can see one of our doorstop-breadrolls in the above pic, just at the edge of the patio on the right. I was hoping for some evidence of who took them but there was none. Between two empty daytime photos separated by 23 minutes the roll had just disappeared. The rolls were (we think) too big and heavy for a squirrel, so whatever took them was too fast for the camera! Another mystery unsolved…

Posted in Animals, Blog, Home, Nature | Comments Closed

The PEZ Factory

Saturday, March 7th, 2020

We went for a day trip today to here:

The PEZ factory! In case this is a mystery PEZ candies are those little sugar bullets that are sold in special dispensers. You flip back the head and a candy comes out. I’ve amassed a collection of Star Wars dispensers that I’m not proud of but I hate the candies and never eat them!

It was a bit of a drive away: over two hours and two states, but it was worth it.

It’s where they make the candies and package them (the dispensers are made in Europe). They have a factory and museum, but since it was a Saturday the factory wasn’t on. But the museum was fantastic.

They have an incredible amount of dispensers on display. Thousands I’m sure, in every category imaginable. Although I secretly hate them I was fascinated by the displays.

The older ones are quite crude (Peter Pan here was from 1969) but the modern ones – almost all licensed – are much more sophisticated.

They had an astonishing amount of slight variants of some of them…

Strange old foreign versions…

Super rare dispensers…

And some very old ones that predate the current ‘head-on-a-stick’ style…

They also had – to our amazement – licensed Japanese ones including Gundam and Ultraman!

But there was so much more than just the dispensers! PEZ is after all a candy (invented in Germany in the 1930s) and they also had an incredible amount of packaging and marketing ephemera on display:

And advertising posters (many featuring the ‘PEZ girls’ used heavily in European advertising):

Bizarre items such as vinyl records:

And then truly strange stuff like a calculator, CCG pack, electronic game and very old sticker:

I loved this museum! It was basically PEZ otaku paradise. I hate PEZ’s (surely they’re the worst ‘candy’ ever made?) but I really loved looking through the small but jam-packed museum.

They even had a treasure hunt going on that we completed and won a prize from:

It was absolutely worth the trip: this place was PEZ-tastic!

But I still hate the candies 🙂

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Otaku, Retro, Toys | 1 Comment »

Long Time Man

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020

I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…

I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.

I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.

The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!

There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂

A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.

Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.

Over 40 years… where did all that time go?

Posted in Blog, Family, Miscellaneous, Time | 4 Comments »

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