On Christmas Eve I watched Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbit the moon on a grainy black and white RCA with mom, dad my brother and my sister. This was fantastically huge! Apollo 8 amazed and awed the whole world. This JFK moon thing might happen after all! Science could solve any problem, or so I naively thought that Christmas.
The coolest car ever designed by Detroit (IMHO) was now a fastback... I could pick out this car just by it's sound. What a kooky car nut of a kid - the long pipe run gave it the mellow growl of a beautiful set of harmonics as compared to the Camaro's "good citizen" exhaust note. Or maybe it was just displacement. You could get this thing with a 7L V-8 and a 4 speed transmission. Lemme see, something like a tic over 400 HP stock in a 2700 lb chassis and you could squeeze 600 HP out of this mill. That sounds like crazy fun to me, but I digress...
 |
| The 1968 Mustang... I was in love. I still think the Mach-I is the prettiest sheet metal to come off the clay in Detroit. |
Richard Nixon had just won the presidential election in November...
President Johnson had earlier in '68 signed the Civil Rights Act...
Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King was slain on April 4th...
Robert Kennedy was gunned down on June 6th...
These tragedies were the inspiration for the song "Abraham, Martin and John," Bobby K. is in the 4th verse. God Bless the peace makers... sadly much work remains...
CKLW was blasting out 50kW from an antenna in Windsor Canada hitting 28 states and 8 provinces now in the second year of the new format. The 'Big 8' changed radio broadcasting forever... this was THEE rock station that WKRP in Cincinnati was later to spoof on TV and the model for rock and roll radio for the next 40 years and counting. Incidentally it was a CKLW DJ that programmed M-TV in the early days... Bob Seger sang a tribute to the CKLW secretary with the golden ear for on air talent - Rosalie Trombley. What a phenomenally creative era and at the same time what a painful and violent era. By the way, CKLW never spun Seger's single, it went to the top without the flame thrower playing it.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Steppenwolf were blaring through the 'new' transistor radio speakers, and on more than a few of the old tube sets...
Need to write a letter? Well either you used this or that to do it. CC literally meant a sheet of carbon coated paper LOL... you put that in between two pieces of paper when you typed to get a "carbon copy." (for the benefit of those readers born in the last 20 years!)
Lockheed rolled out the C5A... what can't we do? What a time to be a kid...
The first SR-71 Blackbird arrives at Okinawa... and Kelly Johnson, a yooper from Ishpeming, was Lockheed's Chief Engineer!
Irwin Allen's "Lost in Space" was in it's last year of production... gosh who didn't want to be part of Robinson family? Pure gold... the talking carrot episode... as Greg Kihn says "they don't write 'em like that anymore!"
The Vietnam war was in the news every night, with Walter Cronkite and the Huntley/Brinkley team reporting. I remember the Huey's and the model 209 Gunships on TV... My first job as an engineer was at Bell Helicopter, gosh you never know where the next turn in the road will bring you...
Bell bottom pants were ' in ' - I absolutely refused to wear them prompting my mom the hipster to say; " you were born old! " Yeah she had something in common with Dilbert's mom. As explained by Dilbert's pediatrician... sorry mom -God rest her soul!
And that Christmas this was under tree! The UM-1...
 |
| I fixed a short in a corroded cold solder lug... back in whack! |
 |
| Last time I pried open this case I didn't need 'reading' glasses! |
 |
| Ahh there you are... now cleaned, tinned and re-soldered. |
So here now... and never before seen on the world wide web (I think, but who really knows...) the UM-1 in action! There is a lighted scrolling panorama of some astronauts on some planet with a 50's sort of take on a space station in orbit and another on the ground that loops around and around. Oh the cosmic implications... This thing had linkages! Gears and springs that rotated... a pawl type ratchet on it's foot mounted wheels... AND the arms moved! I had to figure all of this out, and I did so in time. I puzzled about how this all worked for months. When that first light bulb burned out, that was it - time to very carefully open that case and see the magic for myself. What a cool Christmas that was for one little yooper kid growing up in Marquette, Michigan in December of 1968. God Bless you Jessie W, I think about you every now and then.
On this 45th anniversary of the Apollo 8 moon orbit, a fitting reflection - me thinks.
Thanks for watching. I hope everyone has a safe and wondrous holiday! -Lee
No comments:
Post a Comment