Cool Stuff

For as long as I can remember, I have been a fan of cool stuff.  I’m not referring to popular status symbols.  I am talking about cool stuff.  When I find something cool, I buy it and I keep it forever.  It does not matter that no one else thinks that the stuff is cool.  If I do, I buy it and hold on to it eternally.

Perusing my massive storage unit, I have noted that a lot of my cool stuff was actually given to me when I was a child.  I think my appreciation for valuing cool things is genetic.  My parents were extremely skilled at identifying cool.  They gave a lot of cool to their four children and I kept all of mine. 

For example, in 1951 my parents gave me a Lionel train set for Christmas.  Very cool.  Seventy three years later, I still set up the Sante Fe engine and freight cars around my Christmas tree.  Every Christmas and birthday the cool collection of cool train stuff expanded.  By 1960, I had acquired hundreds of Lionel components.  Engines, train sets, fully operating logging stations, cattle unloading corrals, missile launching cars, railroad flagmen, etc.  I still have all of them.  At least all of them that survived the reckless behavior of ten year olds playing war games with model trains.  

Expanding on the toys and games category, I have three large boxes of metal trucks from the early fifties.  Fire Trucks, Graders, Steam Shovels, Dump Trucks, even a Coca Cola Delivery Truck. 

I have three complete Erector Sets.  What’s an Erector Set?  From 1913 to 1963 a fine company, AC Gilbert, made metal construction sets for kids.  They had tons of metal framing and electric engines. They came with instructions to create elevators, cars, trucks, trains, amusement park rides.  Anything you could think of.  In addition you could build your own designs.  These were kind of a crude forerunner to Lego sets.  Last Christmas, I encouraged my grandsons to get out the instruction booklet and build an elevator.  Somehow it was not as appealing as the most recent Grand Theft Auto release but they humored me and whipped up a fully functioning elevator that transported my small metal cars several stories into an imaginary garage.  How cool is that? 

How do you get three Erector Sets?  My parents, both having the cool gene, found two of them in the 70’s at garage sales.  Hard to believe but some people did not recognize the Gilbert products as cool and were actually emptying things out of their basements.  So now they are in my permanent collection of cool stuff.                

I have some great games, including the first five Jeopardy games ever sold and a nearly complete collection of Trivial Pursuit.    

I think old clocks are cool.  I’m talking about mechanical devices at least 100 years old.  When we lived in a big house, I had thirty of them banging away all around the place.  You had to love an 1860 Seth Thomas calendar clock that tracked the time, month, day, and date.  It knows which months have 30 days and which months have 31.  It knows that February has 28 days and every four years, it knows that February has 29 days.  The designers gave up at this point.  The mechanics did not account for the fact that leap year is eliminated at the turn of the century for four straight centuries and added back for the centuries divisible by five.  For example 1900 was not a leap year but 2000 was.  My British Tall Case clock, aka Grandfather, was hand crafted by Jonathan Handley in the 1830’s and is still accurate to less than a minute a week.  Tell me that old clocks are not cool.

Why is keeping cool stuff a problem?  High maintenance and low utility.  For example, a few years ago, I spent an entire day just organizing the erector sets.  I have had these beauties for forty years and the only time we have ever used them was to build the elevator last December.  We tried to play the 1960’s Jeopardy games.  For some reason none of us remembered that Sweden won the Gold in the 3×5 kilometer cross country skiing event at the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics.  My 23 year old grandson rarely asks to play with the toy trucks anymore. 

When I hire McKinsey to review the efficiency of my life, I am not going to get high ratings for keeping and organizing all the cool stuff.  Basically, weeks of maintenance for a few hours of use. 

So I should empty the 5,000 square foot warehouse that stores seven full sets of Christmas decorations (including 20 strings of Noma bubble lights), every set of golf clubs I have owned since 1963, 45 clocks, eight boxes of Lionel trains, and two red rider BB guns (one with a compass in the stock), and the complete set of my mother’s copper bottom Revere Ware made in Rome New York in the 1950’s (including two double boilers and an egg poaching pan).   

No way!  You never know when friends and relatives will come to spend a few days with you. They may have, in tow, a four year old and a six year old.  Very likely, the classic 1970 Fisher Price pull toys and the big metal trucks will provide hours of entertainment to the small fry. 

Strangely, the original owner may spend as much time with this stuff as the four year olds.