All the experiments proved to be more or less like this. The only one that worked even slightly was one of my own devising, which involved mixing together all the chemicals in the set with Babbo cleaning powder, turpentine, some baking soda, two spoonfuls of white pepper, a dab of horseradish of a good age, and a generous splash of Lectric Shave shaving lotion. These when combined instantly expanded about a thousandfold in volume, and ran over the sides of the beaker and onto our brand-new kitchen counter, where they began at once to hiss and crinkle and smoke, leaving a pinkish red welt along the Formica join that would forever after be a matter of pain and mystification to my father. “I can’t understand it,” he would say, peering along the edge of the counter. “I must have mixed the adhesive wrong.”
However, the worst toy of the decade, possibly the worst toy ever built, was electric football. Electric football was a game that all boys were compelled to accept as a Christmas present at some point in the 1950s. It consisted of a box with the usual exciting and misleading illustrations containing a tinny metal board, about the size of a breakfast tray, painted to look like an American football field. This vibrated intensely when switched on, making twenty-two little men move around in a curiously stiff and frantic fashion. It took forever to set up each play because the men were so fiddly and kept falling over, and because you argued continuously with your opponent about what formations were legal and who got to position the final man, since clearly there was an advantage in waiting till the last possible instant and then abruptly moving your running back out to the sidelines where there were no defenders to trouble him. All this always ended in bitter arguments, punctuated by reaching across and knocking over your opponent’s favorite players, sometimes repeatedly, with a flicked finger.
It hardly mattered how they were set up because electric football players never went in the direction intended. In practice what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching violently as if suffering from some extreme gastric disorder, while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping together in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception to this was the running back who just trembled in place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned and went on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone until knocked over with a finger on the two-yard line by his distressed manager, occasioning more bickering.
At this point you switched off the power, righted all the fallen men, and painstakingly repeated the setting-up process. After three plays like this, one of you would say, “Hey, do you wanna go and hit Lumpy Kowalski with a stretched Slinky?” and you would push the game out of the way under the bed where it would never be touched again.
The one place where there was real excitement was comic books. This really was the golden age of comics. Nearly one hundred million of them were being produced every month by the middle of the decade. It is almost impossible to imagine how central a place they played in the lives of the nation’s youth—and indeed more than a few beyond youth.
A survey of that time revealed that no fewer than 12 percent of the nation’s teachers were devoted readers of comic books. (And that’s the ones who admitted it, of course.) As the Thunderbolt Kid, I read comic books the way doctors read The New England Journal of Medicine—to stay abreast of developments in the field. But I was a devoted follower anyway and would have devoured them even without the professional need to keep my supernatural skills honed and productive.
But just as we were getting into comic books, a crisis came. Sales began to falter, pinched between rising production costs and the competition of television. Quite a number of kids now felt that if you could watch Superman and Zorro on TV, why tax yourself with reading words on a page? We in the Kiddie Corral were happy to see such fickle supporters go, frankly, but it was a near-mortal blow for the industry. In two years, the number of comic-book titles fell from 650 to just 250.
The producers of comic books took some desperate steps to try to rekindle interest.
Heroines suddenly became unashamedly sexy. I remember feeling an unexpected but entirely agreeable hormonal warming at the first sight of Asbestos Lady, whose cannonball breasts and powerful loins were barely contained within the wisps of satin fabric with which some artistic genius portrayed her.
There was no space for sentiment in this new age. Captain America’s teenage companion, Bucky, was dispatched to the hospital with a gunshot wound in one issue and that was the last we ever heard of him. Whether he died or recovered weakly, passing his remaining years in a wheelchair, we didn’t know and frankly didn’t care. Instead thereafter Captain America was helped by a leggy sylph named Golden Girl, soon augmented by Sun Girl, Lady Lotus, the raven-haired Phantom Lady, and other femmes of sleek allure.
Nothing so good could last. Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-born psychiatrist in New York, began an outspoken campaign to rid the world of the baleful influence of comics.
In an extremely popular, dismayingly influential book called Seduction of the Innocent, he argued that comics promoted violence, torture, criminality, drug-taking, and rampant masturbation, though not presumably all at once. Grimly he noted how one boy he interviewed confessed that after reading comic books he “wanted to be a sex maniac,”
overlooking that for most boys “sex,” “mania,” and “want” were words that went together very comfortably with or without comic books.
Wertham saw sex literally in every shadow. He pointed out how in one frame of an action comic the shading on a man’s shoulder, when turned at an angle and viewed with an imaginative squint, looked exactly like a woman’s pudenda. (In fact it did. There was no arguing the point.) Wertham also announced what most of us knew in our hearts but were reluctant to concede—that many of the superheroes were not fully men in the red-blooded, girl-kissing sense of the term. Batman and Robin in particular he singled out as
“a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” It was an unanswerable charge. You had only to look at their tights.
Wertham consolidated his fame and influence when he testified before a Senate committee that was looking into the scourge of juvenile delinquency. Just that year Robert Linder, a Baltimore psychologist, had suggested that modern teenagers were suffering from “a form of collective mental illness” because of rock ’n’ roll. Now here was Wertham blaming comics for their sad, zitty failings.
“By 1955,” according to James T. Patterson in the book Grand Expectations, “thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books.”
Alarmed and fearing further regulatory crackdown, the comic-book industry abandoned its infatuations with curvy babes, bloody carnage, squint-worthy shadows, and everything else that was thrilling. It was a savage blow.
To the dismay of purists, the Kiddie Corral began to fill with anodyne comic books featuring Archie and Jughead or Disney characters like Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who wore shirts and hats, but nothing at all below the waist, which didn’t seem quite right or terribly healthy either. The Kiddie Corral began to attract little girls, who sat chattering away over the latest issues of Little Lulu and Casper the Friendly Ghost as if they were at a tea party. Some perfect fool even put Classic Comic Books in there—the ones that recast famous works of literature in comic-book form. These were thrown straight out again, of course.