Reelin' in the years...

I’m sure most of us can look back at our childhood and think of it as the ideal time to be a kid.
That’s certainly the case with me and I see the childhood worlds of kids since the 1950s as sterile and devoid of the kind of freedom my friends and I experienced growing up in a small town in the decade or so after World War II.
It seems to me that we’ve become increasingly frightened and protective of our kids, to the point where they’re content to be couch potatoes and video game addicts rather than riding bicycles all over town or tramping through the woods like we did.
Among my favorite things of childhood was Saturday morning TV. When I started watching, it was all black-and-white and included such staples as:
The Lone Ranger
Ruff ‘n Reddy – the first Hanna-Barbera cartoon series
Space Patrol – a pioneering science fiction series
Fury – a series about a boy and his horse
Sky King – an aviation-minded show in which Sky and his niece Penny flew around in a twin-engined Beechcraft called the Songbird and solved mysteries
And my personal fave: Captain Midnight
Captain Midnight had been around as a character since before World War II and kids had been joining his Secret Squadron since long before I was born in 1945.
The television series that ran from 1955 to 1957 was the final incarnation of the character and starred Richard Webb. It was easy to join. All you had to do was send in the wax paper seal from a jar of Ovaltine chocolate drink mix and $1 to:
Captain Midnight
Box P
Chicago, 7
Illinois
Yes, kids, that was before Zip Codes were implemented in the early 1960s and big cities like Chicago were divided into postal zones.
By return post – which seemed to take freaking forever – you got a membership card, manual and decoder badge. The decoder was used to communicate with fellow Secret Squadron members and to decipher a secret message given at the end of each week’s program. Not exactly the Enigma machine, but it was great fun for a boy.
Conspicuous in its absence was the “pocket locator” – a walkie-talkie-like communicator that the Captain used to enlist the help of Secret Squadron kids in various dramatic episodes. All of the kids on the show had them, but there was no mention of them in the membership literature, largely because they were beyond the technology of the day.
I thought of that the other day when I took a call on my Handspring Treo 300 cell phone, realizing we’ve taken the personal communication concept far beyond the wildest imagination of a 1950s TV show.
Everyone in the Secret Squadron had a membership number. Captain Midnight, being at the head of the food chain, was SQ 1 (notice they avoided the more obvious SS designation, no doubt because that letter combination had a very bad reputation from the recently deceased Third Reich). SQ 2 was the Captain’s comic sidekick, Ichabod Mudd, or Ikky as he preferred to be called. The Captain and Ikky lived in a mountaintop observatory/laboratory along with Aristotle Jones, nicknamed Tut and played by Olan Soule. Tut was the scientist and gadget maker. Accordingly, he wore glasses and a white lab coat and was obviously the brains of the organization. Tut was SQ 3.
Far far down the mountain in the real world were the actual Ovaltine-drinking, card-carrying, pocket-locator-deprived Secret Squadron kids. The card in my wallet identified me to all and sundry as SQ 24418. I made a point of memorizing the number, but this is quite possibly the first time since childhood that I’ve written it.
Along with the basic membership kit, you could also send off for a red plastic Captain Midnight Ovaltine mug and a red plastic Captain Midnight Ovaltine shaker cup with blue plastic top. Both were emblazoned with a decal showing a goggled previous incarnation of the Captain with some goofy winged midnight-indicating clock logo on his flight helmet and proclaiming, “Ovaltine – the heart of a hearty breakfast!” Naturally, I had both items and used them often.
A second version of the decoder badge, resembling the Captain’s jet plane – the Silver Dart – came out in 1957 and, of course, I had that too.
But one by one, over the years, all of those items save the Ovaltine mug, went missing and I found myself wishing I had them back.
Fortunately for nostalgia-ridden baby boomers, there’s Ebay and the chance to recapture the toys, touchstones and talismans of our childhood. In recent years, I’ve replaced my two decoder badges and now stand ready to decipher any message sent to me by a Secret Squadron member.
Fortunately, I realized early on that I couldn’t afford to buy all of the stuff I had as a child. Besides, where would I put it? My wife already thinks I’m a little nuts about hanging on to stuff and the last thing she would tolerate would be a museum of my childhood.
So, I do the next best thing. I snarf the photos of these items when I find them on Ebay, making it possible for me to look at them without actually having to find a place for them.
I’ll post a few of those pictures, just in case someone else remembers them.
But somehow a picture of the Buck Rogers Sonic Ray Gun, a pistol-shaped plastic flashlight with a buzzer, can’t reproduce the barf-like smell of the plastic that fascinated me when I was 9 years old.