My good friend, Linda, called me this AM to talk a little about this and a little about that. Somewhere in our discourse, she happened to mention how much she liked my blog on my childhood invention, The Travel Genie. Little did Linda know she opened a Pandora’s box, as I began to delve among the workings of my personal inner space. And it reminded me that I was, indeed, a child of highly imaginative capabilities. Because, you see, TG wasn’t my only technology teaser.
No, indeedy. At the age of seven, I pondered the national capability of tube mail. So, as they would say today on Battlestar Galactica, what in the frac is tube mail?
When I was seven, we lived in Tulsa, OK. I lived just across the street from my elementary school, so the to-and-fro was an easy feat to accomplish. And because I could take a diagonal scoot home for lunch, I got to observe first hand the wonders of an institution which continues to devolve into bureaucratic inefficiency. I got to watch mail carriers work through rain and sleet and snow along their appointed rounds.
Now keep in mind: during the day, mail carriers – all of whom were men – walked the neighborhood beat, so to speak. They wore their steely gray uniforms, which were kinda kinky during the summer because they also wore knee socks. And their assemblage wasn’t complete without a steely gray pith helmet. Those of you old enough to remember will recall they pushed a cart of sorts, which had a long handle in the front, or they carried their missives in a large leather pouch (naugahide hadn’t been invented yet). All of this made them look like they were on safari looking for some unknown prey.
Mail carriers during that day were gods of a sort. For a few pennies for first class mail, they brought you news, good or bad. They brought you colorful stamps from your penpals from around the world. And occasionally, they gave you an ever-so-subtle tip of the pith helmet to acknowledge your existence.
OK, so that is my lead-in.
When I was seven, I saw my first-ever department store, Brown-Dunkin, in Tulsa. I don’t remember how many actual stories the store had, but it was a wonder to behold. It had an escalator, again the first-ever I’d seen and ridden. In fact, I can remember riding that thing between two floors incessantly one day, probably to the chagrin of the store manager. It was also the first-ever department store I had seen that had an x-ray machine in the shoe department. You could try on a new pair of shoes, stick your footsies inside the machine and see how your bones lined up inside the new shoes. We won’t talk about the fact that those machines were later pulled as a radiation hazard.
But the most novel thing I saw in that store, and the thing that made an incredible impression on me, was the pneumatic tube system at the cash register. Here’s the way it worked for you neophytes: Let’s say my mom and dad decided to purchase something – a jewelry box with a tiny dancer inside it. They would take the booty to the cash register, the cashier would write up the ticket, pop the ticket and cash payment inside a clear plastic tube, pop the small tube into a clear plastic pneumatic tube network which sucked things with the power of a black hole, and the smaller tube with its invoice and payment would careen along its merry way to that big accounts receivable office in the sky. I think it was the hamster habitat of its day. Then, and in no way less of a miracle, the small clear plastic missile would return to home base, complete with a signed copy of the invoice and change.
Now, folks, that was just too damn cool…
And so we returned home, with my head throbbing with possibilities. And foremost in my mind was the increased efficiencies of the Post Office (as it was called in those days) if they would only create an infrastructure of pneumatic tubes across these United States. My concept was simple and clear: each home would be equipped with a tube, and the minute the mail was sorted at your local PO, some magically intelligent person would sort the mail directly into your personal tube. Interesting, que no?
As I said of the Travel Genie, my concept was way ahead of its day on the environmental and ecological scale. No fuss, no muss.
Of course, I didn’t give much thought to actual infrastructure construction. C’mon people, I was only seven. Why let reality get in the way of a futuristic concept?
This was also the year I thought about a central vacuum system for houses, again way ahead of the time when this concept did, indeed, become a reality.
Incidentally, and FYI: I still have the jewelry box, which cost my parents $10.18. I know this because I also still have the receipt inside the box. And the dancer can still turn a pretty pirouette when I wind up the music box.
