Surface

In 1972 when Dad worked for Bishman Manufacturing Company he hauled around a sample Tire Changer, model 880, on a trailer. It was big and odd and beautiful.

In the covered pickup itself there were all sorts of wonderful new, invariably sky blue machines for service stations, with dials like these.

I played submarine from Friday early evening, when he got home, until Sunday when he left for another week of traveling salesmanship. I'd come out all sweaty, craving fresh fruit and vegetables.

It was always just one battle, I never won the war, probably due to my vanishing imagination around age 11.

Next, Dad became a C.B. radio wholesale representative. Whoa! Our car now had a two-way radio. I'd sit in the car from Friday until Sunday. Locals in Okapalaka fooled me that they were calling from Alaska. My handle was "Zonker", after the Doonsbury character.

Then the company he worked for expanded into consumer electronics in general, in 1976 I believe (around the time we moved to Capital City). So we all got stereos for birthdays or Christmas. But I liked to blast my music and was embarrassed how often I played certain songs over and over, so I sat in the car and played the stereo in it.

Then the company began to sell video games wholesale. And finally, VHS movies. We didn't think that would work, people buying movies. They'd rent them, sure. So for awhile the customers were all those budding Mom and Pop video stores. (We even started one ourselves, combined with a pizzeria. A disaster. Pa Kettle has a video interview with me somewhere, during this time. He'd keep panning over to where the fly by night pizzeria USED to be, as I talked and smoked a doobie.)

Sometime in this time line I managed to read books. Not sure how. And it's strange I never got into the video games, except for one three month period where I crippled my thumb to the point I couldn't open a car door. I think we're in the '80s now. Well, yes, certainly. And how much am I leaving out.

Focus here on something...

Then Dad went to work for Thorn/EMI, as a factory rep., and his job was to travel the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada showing movies to wholesalers. "First Blood" and "Amadeus" payed for my first years pretending to go to college. (AH! That's when I read, when I was supposed to be in class! I read and I drank and took a lot of drugs.) Thorn/EMI was then bought out by HBO.
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Man I don't know how I got started here...OH. That photo above. The dials. Just like the Bishman 800 Tire Changer.

I miss my submarine, that's all.

And, oh yeah, Dad too.

Geez, he had it going, really apace with the 70's and 80's especially. The next step was obviously home computers and the internet but he died in 1991. (He must have seen it all coming though, attending the annual Consumer Electronics Convention in Las Vegas every year.)

I don't know how I feel suddenly.