I shouldn't be keeping a book of matches in my junk box or my button box. What if it ignites? Then I wont have the wonderment of the condom keychain or earplug case or even the cooling headband that the magic junk provides. I should have ripped out the matches and just kept the wrapper. However, this is yellow. Plain wee yellow. That's it. That's all. I should have some reason for keeping a piece of junk. Was this a match book I found when I took a whiz at the first concert I ever attended? (It was the mid 80's Heart. I had a Monza but didn't care about Heart. My friend had money for an extra ticket and no car. Get the picture? I did know and like the 70's Heart. Barracuda and all that rock-n-roll. No this was 80's Heart. The "What About Love" Heart. I really didn't care, but it was a chance for my first rock concert and the now gone Richfield Coliseum. I wouldn't realize that I saw the bass player from Spirit playing with the band until a few years ago. So maybe that's why I saved this match book.) Nope. Not from there.
The striking surface. That teensy bit of synthetic brown crap that you rub a match on to light your joint while you're watching the fat chick from Heart belt out "What About Love" while paying scale to the other members in the band. Didn't she realize she had the earth shattering dress wearing bass player from late 60's rock and roll pioneers Spirit??? What about his turn as a founding member of Jo Jo Gunne and a scale player in the soft pop outfit Firefall. Here was a guy that played bass with some of the best one hit wonder bands. Mark Andes, picking up a paycheck and a meal from the well catered dressing room. He wasn't pushed. Neither was this book of matches with an unstruck lighting strip.
Hey! Wait! It's no pack of matches! Woweeeeeeee. Psyche! Those won't light unless you melted the plastic into drippy little toxic hot bombs like the straps they used to use for bundling newspapers. It's got an LCD screen. Wait a minute..it's...it's...
A calculator that looks like a pack of matches! Nooo.. Where's the condom? Would it fit where you could insert a battery? Who is the bright MF that thought to make a calculator look like a book of matches! You can touch it and it will solve your simple match problems. Maybe you're trying to quit smoking and you keep this pack of matches to calculate how much you save when you don't buy a carton! Yeah. That was it. What a great idea. Small and efficient. It even has a memory function. Damn what a help this would be in the super market. I can throw away my plastic mechanical calculator I got it from the back of a 70's comic book when I sold twelve boxes of crappy greeting cards. How handy. It even comes with genuine metal staples! Wooohooo.
Close up Ms. Deville! Actually, this is a strong reminder of when I sold personal electronics at the chain spawned from the closing of the Clarkins discount chain. It was at Tokyo Shapiro. (Tag line: Tokyo Tech at Shapiro Prices. Yes a really un-PC borderline SIEG HEIL 70's business name.) They actually were the better place to buy stuff in the 70's and 80's. The company I would work for after Toke had been in a "bait and switch" scandal that tainted them until the memories of the consumer that wanted more than the Gold Star VCR or Soundesign stereo at Zayre had faded. As mentioned, I started in "PE SALES", meaning I was a cashier that helped ring the salespeople's sales up and I got to sell personal stereo radios, boom boxes, musical keyboards, video games and vacuums. The salespeople didn't like it if I'd sold a boombox to someone who also wanted a TV and sold them the TV as well.
We had these little "matchbook calculators" in a plain cardboard box and I believe we sold them for $2-4 bucks. We also had several laying in the debris hiding behind the counter, mostly with dead batteries. The ribbon cable in these usually broke before the battery died, and they were hard press on and get an accurate calc motion going. We were supposed to suggest these as add ons, or the pen's with a watch in them. We never did. I bought one as a memento of my life there. I worked my way up to the salesperson side because I was a whiz when it came to selling $300 boom boxes. (Yes, we had one that was the best sounding boom box I've ever heard. It was a JVC with a sub-woofer built in. Single CD and tape with 5 band EQ. They came out with other models, but nothing sounded as good. I can't even find them on the 'Bay to show to you.) I helped to close the 4 Tokyo Shapiro stores in Cleveland and here's a memory time line... I have a copy of the local SUN newspapers TV Listings booklet from those weeks when we were packing the trucks by setting the radio boards on their faces for the bent shaft sale they would have when they got to where they were going. That magazine announced a NEW prime time cartoon show was starting on the fledgeling "Fox" network. (That's a NETWORK?) It was spun off from the Tracey Ullman show and employed most of her cast as voices. A little show called "The Simpsons". Electronics stores come and go, but the Simpsons outlived them all. "Eat My Shorts!"
P.S. I looked for said "Simpsons" TV Listings book in my "Trunk Of Sorrows" which is a ton of stuff I've saved for one reason or another. In just two envelopes full, I was transported back as early at the mid 70's and somewhere in the 80's and even the 90's. I did find this, so why not. Proof of concept :) Now I have an huge trunk to document for you the blog viewer as well as every little shred of printed material from the stupid stuff I wrote for the poorly assembled rah-rah newsletter for the DialAmerica office I worked for to the issues of Baldwin Wallace College's PUD. From a letter I have from a dear friend written on his IBM Computer with 256K that he got a real bargain on to the genuine old style mesh top McDonald's paper crew hats to even phone book ads with logos from Tokyo Shapiro and Gray Drug. More crap I can wax pathetic upon. First rock concert ever, and how lame and pathetic it is:
I miss that big hard to reach barn in the middle of nowhere.... now a nature preserve. Nary a tear from losing Cavs seasons or tab of LSD from the Grateful Dead concert parking lot "Shakedown Streets" remains on the site. I sang there with my high school choir for two graduations and I really wanted to graduate there... but mine was held in downtown Cleveland. Ahhhh Memmmorieeeeees. "These Dreams" ain't worth "Nothin' At All" .
-Ric
Boomer
Now that matchbook calculator, I've never seen anything like that before, it's unique!
My first LCD calculator was bought in the early 1980s from K-Mart in the Crafton-Ingram Shopping Center. It was a credit card style slim aluminum cased one with countersunk phillips screws that you'd remove and the back would come off so you could get to the button batteries. It cost $8 then, which was a breakthrough price for LCD.
Somewhere in there I had a red LED calc, it might have been after the LCD even. My first calculator ever was a Lloyd's Accumatic 341, with blue fluorescent display, a mid-1970s thicker, but still pocket, calculator. My aunt bought that for me as a gift, and I used it regularly, even though the batteries didn't last all that long, and that was the problem, any pup trying to buy batteries, they can be few and far between to get, especially heavy duty or alkaline at the time.
Now I only use a stand-alone calculator occasionally, a Lillian Vernon solar calculator I got somewhere, and I have several others, including promos my dad got from drug companies, but the batteries are dead. My credit card calculator today doesn't even have buttons, the front is just a membrane plastic sheet with the numbers printed on it, so it really is like a credit card. Now I just go to the Windows calculator in my computer more often, it's always right there and I don't have to worry if the batteries are good.
Boomer
Ricochet replied to comment from Boomer
Matchbook: We had tons of them laying around behind the counter. One time I cleaned up back there and there was a ton of forgotten "defective" merchandise.
LCD: I remember when the solar credit card calcs came out and they were the bee's knees. I even got one for my mom for X-Mas. I love the LED calcs as well.
As far as using the windows calc, I don't. When all you want is a simple, quick calc to figure out bills , it goes where I want it and uses no power. I had a Casio teensy, but it finally gave up the ghost. So, I use a Sentry bought at Big Lots for a buck. It does have a battery as well, but solar is where it's at.