Click the Picture and See the Old Commercial
Polyvinylchloride, acetone and red dye #2 were a daily occurrence when I was a kid. My friends and I came of age when the EPA was founded too late. Prior to that, DuPont and Dow substances, which nature never thought to make, were making their way into our lives. I sometimes goof on various news stories about the latest cancer scare. “Drinking anything out of plastic bottles has been proven to give rats toe cancer!” I think to myself: “Well, so what, it's too late now, not with the exposure to all the crap I came in contact with as a kid.”
My friends and I, for about a week, played with the substance you see in the video I posted above. I'll tell you something though, even as seven year olds, we suspected something was amiss because Bubble Plastic gave off such a powerful odor that we all thought it was made by the chemical plant near our homes, Teknor Apex. It wasn't but we weren't too far off in our suspicions that it was no good. I can remember trying to blow a bubble with the stuff, it wasn't easy. Not only that, you held it two inches from your mouth and couldn't help but inhale the weird smelling stuff. If you let it dry somewhat, there were some kids who chewed a drop of it like bubble gum.
Snakes. During of Fourth of July there was this firework that looked like a large, black Tums tablet. You placed a lit match near it for a few seconds when it started to fizzle and this long, strange lava-like ash would grow out of it. While it did this, a huge cloud of acrid smoke would be produced that enveloped us kids and we breathed it in. That too stunk of Teknor Apex. I suspect we may have lit 100 of these things due to their being very cheap to buy.
I once nearly ate one. In our TV room, there was this cheezy, TV table tray that I had a pile of M&M's on. I had filled up my pockets with them and followed my brother outside to see what he was up to. I would place the M&M's into my mouth by the score and when I had bit down on one, there was this odd crunch and mouth feel. It was like I had bit down on a Kingsford briquet. I then realized what I was chomping on and spit the entire chocolate mess onto the driveway. My brother gave me a disgusted look as he had no idea why I would spit out a mouthful of brown goo and saliva. I ran inside to brush my teeth. I had foolishly laid my collection of fireworks on the same table as the M&Ms.
Being young boys meant we had a sometimes natural cruel steak. I can remember one hot summer afternoon we watched as John snuck a can of Raid from under his mother's eyes out of the kitchen cabinet. He sprayed ant hills, anything moving under flat stones and spiders with the stuff. We'd have our heads up close to watch the final death agonies of beetles, earwigs and flies. Of course, we'd be so close as to breathe in that other worldly smell. God knows what Johnson & Johnson made Raid out of in 1970. It probably wasn't too far off from the stuff they sold to the Pentagon during the Viet Nam war.
There were probably a hundred other substances we came in contact then and we'll never know about. Oh well. I don't remember any of us having suddenly occurring childhood cancers though. I can't say how many of us, at our age now, have come down with strange maladies.
The world was safer then? Our parents left us to our own devices a lot of the time and we found trouble as a means of fun, even chemical fun. Today the world seems unsafe and kids today are in virtual CDC environmental suits and monitored through their own cell phones. You choose.
This isn't a Dow Chemical story but it illustrates how we lived back then. Every kid had a bike. We all rode them w/o helmets and in the street as we wished. We used to make ramps to jump the bikes into the air as well.
It was late August in '73, I was riding my bike down the sidewalk as fast as I could when I lurched onto the street I lived on from behind a parked car, without looking of course. We rarely looked. I made it out ten feet into the road when suddenly a car came at me. I swerved in just enough time to miss the steel bumper but caught the headlight assembly and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back, looking at the sky, with the sounds of neighborhood wives screaming. I stood up and found myself with just a forehead abrasion that wasn't that painful at all. In less than a minute, a lynch mob had formed around the shaking driver who had stepped out of his car to see if I was dead or not.
I admitted what I had done, which was to shoot into the street without looking. I too was scared silly and I couldn't come up with any reason to lie. Also, I and my bike were pretty much safe. The guy's headlight was smashed though. The crowd calmed down and left the poor guy alone. Thinking of this now, I feel sorry for him. That guy thought he killed an eight year old from the looks of him.
Twenty minutes later, us kids were riding our bikes again, in the street, up and down curbs and playing like we always did, in the street.
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