Pinball Wizard Tommy had nothing on me when it came to baseball!
Heading toward Christmas in this high tech era of highly sophisticated and extremely realistic sports game toys, I am blown away by their contrast to the things we used to purchase and improvise as games and means to the same competitive ends back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Our games required our use, either or both, of those fine old qualities known as imagination and/or skill – and I mean skill that went beyond our dexterity with finger manipulations of a control device attached to a TV, computer, or game box screen.
As most of you older kindred spirits already know, we didn’t have that kind of game set-up help back in the day. We had to imagine what we were doing and we had to visualize all the pictures that now appear graphically on the digital game screen. Our screens were, for the most part, simply rolling through our brains as we escaped into our own little game trips away frm the mundane of everyday reality.
The baseball pinball game shown here is an exact replica of my chldhood buddy from way, way back. My brother found it in a flea market and gave it to me as a Christmas present a few years back. I’m not sure what happened to my original game, but it most likely suffered the same fate as all my other childho0d things. Whenever we stopped using anything back then for very long, our dad quietly just threw these things away without uttering a word to anyone. As a result, I have few things, other than books, that remain from childhood. Dad didn’t dare throw out my books. He knew I always came back to them.
I got pretty skilled at the pinball game. I can still play it pretty well too, but nothing like I did at age 10 to 12. Back then I could almost will that little metal ball into the home run pocket when when I needed it to go there.
Another low tech game held my interest for a short while, but its lack of improvisational opportunity soon put it on the boring shelf. It was called “Foto Electric Football”, a game which allowed you to insert offense and defense pages into an upward shining light box that illuminated how certain plays turned out against certain defenses.
The big game back then was that vibrating football contest by Tudor that came out in 1947. Little metal players lined up and vibrated down a metal field until contact with an enemy player tackled them at the new yard line of progress. It was fun for a while. You could bend the little vibrator reeds under your running backs to make them turn at the line of scrimmage, but that was about it. Sometimes your runner would get turned around and run toward your own goal line for a safety. That sucked. Plus, it was too much of a hassle to keep setting up twenty-two players at the line of scrimmage after each completed play. That being said, it made my Christmas one year as a gift I knew was coming. My anticipation of that game was far greater than the playing of it could ever hope to be. Sort of like marriage.
Finally, a game came along that remains with me to this day in computer form. In 1951, the APBA Game Company opened shop in Lancaster, PA with a card and dice baseball game based upon actual major league teams and players. It was totally structured upon realistuc probabilities in a complex array of actual game situations. You had to bring your own theatre of the mind to get a good picture, but that was never a problem for a lot of us back in the day. We lived in our dreams. Besides, with APBA, the heart of the game was then, and is now, its dynamic similarity by play outcome to what actually happens in a real baseball game. Because of APBA, I never got lost in the Stratomatic Baseball Game of similar, but less complex probability roots.
APBA was just a high tech game waiting to happen. I’ve been playing its computer version of baseball since the mid-1980s. It’s simply a place I go whenever I need to take a vacation from this little, no-fun, no sense of humor world we’ve created all around us. It’s not my only mental retreat, but it is one of my most enjoyable destinations.
Merry Christmas Dreams, everybody!
The Pecan Park Eagle 
December 15, 2009 at 10:16 pm |
Jim Montgomery of my St. Thomas High School Class of 1956 wrote the following:
“Merry Christmas, Bill.
“I really do enjoy your writings. The one about Christmas toys got me remembering so much about Christmas Past. I didn’t get Foto Football, but my brother did. That game lasted forever because, as you recall, it had only one moving part: the slide that shielded the light bulb.
“One thing that does stand out is the year that I was allowed to go to Midnight Mass by myself. It seemed to be a rite of passage for the boys in the neighborhood.To get to All Saints, it was thirteen blocks down 11th street. I rode my bike and parked it next to the school like the other first timers. The girls went with their parents, as usual, and would continue to do so until they had a fella to escort them to Midnight Mass.
“Life seemed to change dramatically that night. We all felt growed up, and we seemed to understand that we were beginning to end our childhood, that we were going to have to start setting the things of a child aside (for the most part), and that we couldn’t go back.
“But that only applies to some of y’all. Sometimes I’ll retreat to my office with the dog, close the door and listen to the radio. I’ll tune in The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Fibber McGee and Molly or whatever suits my fancy. It is a good evening’s listening…even to the commercials for products long gone or since changed. The programs are all on CD now. All digitally remastered and do not require straining to hear through the static of a thunderstorm or accidentally going off frequency.
“Ah, well. Perhaps we can compare notes another time.
“Thanks again for your emails. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
“Jim Montgomery”
December 17, 2009 at 2:54 pm |
Bill: One of the very best Christmas gifts I received when only a lad was an early edition of the “Encyclopedia of Baseball’, published in the early 1950’s. Today, of course, all of the importants facts and figures are immediately available on the internet; then, the Encyclopedia was something new and different, even if the players’ records were rather abbreviated. At the time, there was nothing like it, even from the Sporting News.