Reflections on 4th-7th grade.

This one should be sub-titled: TSO has lost his ever loving mind, and this is the longest most boringest post in history.

 (*Editor’s Note: this will interest maybe 3 people in the entire world, but Jonn told me to post, so I am posting. Besides, I did kind of want to hear about a memory from 1979-83 that didn’t deal with Reagan or the Olympics.)

I don’t usually go through any serious bouts of melancholy, largely because my memory sucks.  But every now and again I remember something from my childhood and I end up googling the hell out of it and living the wonder years of 4^th-7^th grade, back when dopey blogs and Stolen Valor knuckleheads hadn’t become my daily grind.  In the past 2 months, all the things on this list have been brought up to me, and I almost wish I was 11 again.  So, without further ado, I give you the Top 5 things I loved about being in the 4^th-7^th grade.

In no particular order:
AVALON HILL GAMES

You remember board games?  Those were the things we played back before World of Warcraft and Diablo et al.  The only actual computer game I remember from back then was this dopey game called “Pillbox” where you had two artillery pieces on mountains and you shot at each other by putting in an azimuth and a correct amount of powder.  And you just kept bracketing until you hit the target, which is what I envision the 13 series guys doing now.

Anyway, in like the 6^th grade I joined the Mt Everett Regional High School Gaming Club (we were 5-12^th grade at my school), mostly for the chicks.  OK, mostly because they accepted me for the gigantic nerd/tool that I was.  And they had a ton of board games from Avalon Hill, and Mr Milukas (my math teacher) and Herr Kolmer (my German teacher) would administer the games.  My favorites were Magic Realm (pictured above), this game called “Origins of World War II” and Diplomacy.  I also loved Wooden Ships and Iron Men, although I lost every time, and Gladiator, but I always lost at that game too because I picked the dopey dude with a trident and a net.

But Magic Realm was boss.  I was always the White Knight and would go hire the “Order” which was some pseudo Templer Knight type organization.  In Diplomacy I always tried to get France, although now I question the wisdom of that.  I used to convince myself that “Diplomacy” was not nerdy because it was Henry Kissinger’s favorite game.  Now I realize I was a nerd for playing Henry Kissinger’s favorite game.

RETURN OF THE KING RECORD BY Rankin/Bass

UPDATE: Blackfive found this for me:

For Christmas of my 5^th grade year my Dad inexplicably bought me the book of The Return of the King, and I got the Rankin/Bass Record of the same to accompany it.  Now, ROTK is book 3 of the trilogy, and there are 15,000 characters (and again, I was like 10) so the thing almost could have been written in Cyrillic for all the good it did me following what was going on.  But I read every page about 14,000 times, and slept to the audio from the record player each night.  (NOTE: A record player was in the 70’s what a CD or iPod is now.)

In the 5^th grade my friend Chris and I got an opaque projector and we made this 6 foot square copy of the record (see above) and colored it in.  I was big fan of painting the hair on the Hobbit’s toes, because as mentioned above, I was a nerd.

Now, I would eventually go on to read the entire series to the point where I had the damn thing memorized.  I can still quote from the record, despite not having either heard that version or seen the movie in like 20+ years.  In fact, SuperBowl6Romeo and I were just singing the “Where there’s a whip [crack] there’s a way” song a minute ago, and I wonder why that never made it into a marching Jody.  In fact, I knew the story so well that I taught myself German outside of class by reading “Der Herr der Ringe” (“Grond” in German is spelled “Grond.”).  I also read Bored of the Rings which was a spoof.  And I bought the maps, everything.   I even found the entire Lord of the Rings on cassette (by the Mind’s Eye) one time when my Mom made me go apple picking in Upstate New York and we stopped in a book store near Saratoga, and to this day it remains the best thing I ever purchased. 

Even back then I hated the Elves and loved the Dwarves.  Which is why if I were to go to a Marine Corps ball and ask a celebrity I would be torn between Peter Dinklage and John Rhys Davies.  And if Orlando Bloom was there I would kick him in the scones.

MUCH BETTER CARTOONS – i.e. Herculoids and Laff-A-Lympics.

In 1981 the Herculoids was brought back from the 60’s to run on the Space Stars show.  Dude, those cartoons were money.  I still hold out hope that they will make a movie of it eventually, because if there was anything sweeter than a Brady to Gronkowski touchdown pass in the history of mankind then it was a ten-legged, four-horned rhino/triceratops hybrid named Tundro who could shoot explosive energy rocks from his cannon-horn who runs around with a rock simian named Igoo who is invulnerable to even molten lava. 

Forget this My Little Pony crap, give me the Herculoids, except Gloop and Gleep who I long suspected where the first attempt to mainstream homosexual protoplasmic creatures.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.

OK, not a Herculoids fan?  Fine, show me the rock hearted SOB who didn’t cheer for the Really Rottens to finally win a day’s competitions and I’ll show you someone who has no heart.  (For the record, 1979 came to Western Mass 2 years late, so I am counting this in my 1981-84 time frame.)  Dude, I wanted the Dread Baron and Mumbly to win so bad it would throw me into a funk every time they lost at the last minute.  It took until the second year before the Really Rottens (with Coach Belichick) won their first event, and they would only win one more.

But who among us can fail to break into tears when reminiscing about when in New York and Turkey the Really Rottens would win the cumulative events of Hansom Carriage Race, Crown the Statue of Liberty, Unicycle Race and Swimming Relay Race.  Even now I shed a tear.  Screw the Miracle on Ice, as a society we should be watching specials on that awesome day when the Really Rottens finally won.

INTELLIVISION

The fights between Atari 2600 folks and Intelivision owners was like the Crips and Bloods, the Hatfields and McCoys of the early 80’s in Berkshire County.  On the mean streets of New Marlborough where I grew up amidst the squalor and above-ground pools (and New Yorkers flocking on weekends to look at our trees) you were an Intelivision guy or you were dead.  Although now that I think about it, I don’t actually remember anyone fighting about this.

All I know is that my aforementioned buddy Chris would ride his bike down off his mountain (technically Brewer Hill, about 2.5 miles away, just before the Konkapot) and we would play Intellivision, unless Betsy [last name redacted] came over to swim with us, which was not often after she got her bikini bottom stuck on the inner tube air valve and we laughed.  (I still feel guilt over that one.)

Anyway, dude, they had this game called SNAFU, which was essentially just the game from Tron with the motorcycles.  You had 4 people and you started going in a direction and you just turned before you hit a wall.  When someone ran out of room to move they died.  That is the single worst explanation of an all time classic game in history, but I can’t describe it any better than that.

We also played a hella-lot of Utopia (which was the first SIMs game), Ice Trek (which I remember owning but not what the game was and Google isn’t helping) and later some Commando.
UPDATE: Dudes playing Utopia. a) This is probably NSFW because they swear a lot. b) wow, this game did not make the test of time.

If you didn’t own an Intelivision back in 1981, just give up, your life is devoid of any true meaning.

OZ BOOKS

(I would like to admit up front that Lucky looks like he might have caught the ghey at some point here, but back then not as much.)

In the basement at New Marlborough Central School there’s a library that can’t be bigger than my wife’s walk-in closet.  And there lies to this day (I would imagine anyway) the one thing of my neighbors that I covet; a huge collection of Oz books.  If you didn’t know that there are like 50 books after the Wizard of Oz, you might as well have owned an Atari 2600, because you missed out on the things that make life livable.  (As Conan once said, what is best in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women while you steal their Oz books.)

I discovered these things (and the library) during the 3^rd or 4^th grade, and I haven’t stopped reading since.  I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t reading a book.  Generally, like now, I am like 4 books deep.  (Mongoliad by Stephenson et al is what I am reading now, and will be shifting to John Adams next.)  But the Oz books were straight cash homey.  On one side they had the story, and the other page was a picture of what was going on. 

My two favorites were Lucky Bucky of Oz and the Giant Horse of Oz, which I didn’t realize until about 10 minutes ago weren’t even written by Frank L. Baum.   Lucky Bucky is rather sterily (apparently that is not a word, but it should mean “having the qualities of sterility”) described by Wiki:

Bucky Jones is aboard a tugboat in New York Harbor when the boiler blows up. He is soon blown into the Nonestic Ocean where he meets Davy Jones, a wooden whale.The pair take an undersea route to the Emerald City, and have many adventures along the way.

That description as analogous to saying Tom Brady and Kate Upton are kinda okay looking.  Dude, “many adventures”?  Hell yeah they did, dude was a wooden whale that could talk, and had a bedroom in his head that Bucky could live in.  Not a day goes by that I don’t wish Davy wouldn’t pick me up and swim me off to the Emerald City too, and then I realize that I am a good 1,000 miles from any water large enough to house a wooden whale with a bed in his head.

Purchasing a first edition copy of Lucky Bucky remains on my bucket list.  I think it is only about $300, but that’s a lot of money for a book I probably would never read again. 

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OK, how many of you actually read to the end of this?  I guarantee my wife didn’t make it.

OK, so give me your top 5 memories from 3^rd-7^th grade (roughly.)

Category: Politics