History – Page 9 – Robot Claw

Gorgeous Boy

October 5, 2021

When we were in Salem back in the summer, we visited a tiny shop selling collectibles and rare toys and in a basket found two 1980s Boy George scrapbooks. They contained original cuttings from magazines and newspapers glued onto the pages with occasional comments. They looked a bit like this (although were much more impressive):

We were both quite taken by these since they were so well made and the creator obviously loved Boy George. I asked the shop owner if she knew anything about the person who had sold them and to our surprise she said they were hers!

Even more astonishingly, she told us an incredible story about how she, as a teenager (she was about our age), actually met Boy George! I forget the details but she went into a ladies bathroom (at a hotel? Restaurant?) in a major US city (New York?) and he was in there. She was starstruck and asked him what he was doing in the ladies bathroom and he replied “The same thing you’re doing!” 🙂

I felt very strongly that she shouldn’t sell the scrapbooks, and told her as much. My opinion is that they were an important part of her personal history, and the short-term gain of a few dollars would never be worth their loss.

She said no one in her family cared about them (including her kids) but admitted she herself had never even looked through them in years. I dared her to look through them and not be overcome with happy memories and nostalgia, and I think she got my message. Before we left, she said she was going to remove them from sale at least long enough to read them again.

I hope she kept them, because they were both amazing. If I had made those scrapbooks, I would have liked to still have them today.

The Sky Is Falling

May 14, 2021

Back in July 1979, I feared that I might die because of Skylab falling on me.

Skylab was the first ‘space station’, built and operated by the USA for 10 months from mid 1973 until early 1974. When the final crew departed they put Skylab into a higher orbit with the intention of leaving it in space until 1983 when the (in development) Space Shuttles could service it. Ultimately nature had other ideas and by 1979 it was clear Skylab would fall to Earth.

NASA’s calculations suggested it would land in the eastern Indian Ocean somewhere. But they didn’t know precisely where or when, and in Australia we were very aware there was a chance it would land smack on us! I can still recall schoolyard doomsayers predicting it could land on someone’s house, and to 7-year old me this was (very briefly) the new big scare to replace King Kong snatching me out of a window one night.

On July 11, 1979, during its 34,981st orbit, NASA made a last minute adjustment to prevent Skylab from falling on the USA. Later that night it entered the atmosphere and while most of it burned up as it fell some parts eventually rained down on remote areas of the western Australian outback.

It didn’t fall on our house, or anyone’s house for that matter. At best it may have given a kangaroo a bit of a start.

The madness quickly transitioned from ‘Skylab will fall on you!’ to ‘If you find Skylab pieces you’ll be a millionaire!’ and treasure hunters of all stripes descended on the outback to find what remained of the space station.

Some were successful, finding many pieces including some very large ones. Much of it is on display now in a museum in the town of Esperance, but some made its way into private collections. While the USA claimed that Skylab was still its property, it never made any attempt to claim debris. Quite the opposite actually: president Carter apologized to Australia and NASA gave memorial plaques to those that found the first pieces of debris!

In the end Skylab was a successful mission, the falling to earth didn’t hurt anyone, and everyone emerged smiling. The world moved on.

There have been many more cases of spacecraft raining down in the years since, and every time it happens (as recently as last week) the media reminds us once again that they might land on our houses! Let’s hope, like Skylab, that when our space trash does fall back to Earth it’s careful enough to land far away from any of us 🙂

Crimes I Have Committed

March 11, 2021

As we grow older we tend to spend more time in self-reflection and invariably our thoughts end up turning to the moments we gave in to temptation and ‘obtained’ items that were perhaps not ours for the taking. This post describes two such incidents in my life.

Operation Tuck Shop

This happened in 198X. Bernard, myself and two brothers of a certain family we were friends with were bushwhacking around the wilds of Kahibah. We stride through a sports field and came upon an old brick tuck shop at the edge of the car park. It was closed up since the field wasn’t being used, but it was one of those very old buildings with sturdy iron grates in place of doors and windows which allowed anyone to look inside.

And look we did, and to our astonishment we saw delicious vittles just sitting on a counter inside! These were lollies no doubt intended for sale during an event, but to us – young teenage lads – they were the devils own temptation. Alas we couldn’t open the door, and we weren’t the sorts who would consider breaking and entering. But there was no one around except us, and it seemed wasteful to simply ignore the lollies we could see only a few feet away.

At this point we noticed there was a sizable gap under the iron grated door and that one of our company – let’s call him Hurdy Gurdy Boy (HGB) – could fit underneath. I recall he was opposed to the idea but he was a) younger and b) smaller than us and therefore easily ~~coerced~~ persuaded.

So HGB squirmed under the grate like a criminal worm until he was inside, and then he hastily handed us vittles and – as I recall – even ice cream (!) through the grate! The three of us remaining outside stuffed our pockets and ran away gibbering in terror that we’d be caught and incarcerated! I seem to recall HGB shrieking from inside as we fled since he thought he was trapped, but he obviously extricated himself and caught up with us quickly.

We didn’t take much since we were worried about being caught; maybe only a few lolly bars and an ice cream each. And we ate them all quickly on the way home lest our parents find out. It was a small heist, but a successful one.

Operation Bingo

This was a few years before the previous incident. A friend of mine – let’s call him Bingo Boy (BB) – regularly hosted slumber parties at his (large) house at which a good amount of ‘the guys’ in my year would attend. We were all cool dudes, and spent the time in his (gigantic) pool, or playing darts or Atari 2600 or watching horror flicks on VHS.

I was good friends with BB, and more than once I went to bingo nights with him since his mum was one of the organizers. (As an aside this was held at Charlestown, not too far from the library, in a building that also contained the first RPG game shop I ever visited and eventually bought D&D at!) One of his mum’s responsibilities at Bingo was running the lolly shop, where drinks and lollies would be sold to gamblers for some extra cash.

At one of the slumber parties, BB just happened to mention to a room full of teenage boys that he knew where his mum stored the bingo lollies! They were ‘hidden’ in a high cupboard in a sort of storage room in their (massive) house. I think he told us this without considering the implications.

You can imagine what happened! The above image shows me in my purple with sky-blue-trim dungarees and matching flame-orange tank top (neither of which probably existed) commandeering full boxes of Mars Bars from the aforementioned ‘hidden’ closet. We found entire boxes of Wagon Wheels, Smarties, Snakes Alive and all sorts of other lollies. We had found the storage closet of our dreams!

There were maybe a dozen of us and we ate like demons. We weren’t caught during that stay, but eventually his mum discovered the theft, and BB got in a good deal of trouble for it since the lollies actually belonged to the church and she had to pay for replacements herself. Naturally the rest of us got off scot-free, and had a good laugh at his expense as teenage boys do!

So there you have it. Two confessions of incidents where crime did pay. Am I proud of these? No I’m not. But at the same time the guilt (if it ever existed) has long since been replaced by the happiness of these memories 🙂