Popular Mechanics and Popular Science Magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s

 Since my father was an electrician who built homes and businesses along with other carpenters and plumbers and electricians etc. his hero was always Nicola Tesla, the inventor of Alternating Current and fluorescent lighting and the Tesla Coil Etc. Etc. Etc.

So, especially from about age 5 to 12 I always read Popular Science and Popular Electronics and Popular Mechanics Magazines to be able to have things to talk my father about and to seem more grown up than whatever age I was at the time. Boys were sort of expected to be emotional grown ups by age 4. For example, I had to endure having all my baby front teeth pulled without novocaine at age 4 without crying. I learned by age 2 that my father would ignore me completely if I cried at all, so I learned to never cry no matter how bad I was hurt physically around my father. I might cry around my mother so she would put butterfly bandages on my head or hands or legs or feet or knees when I got hurt bad enough to where people today would get stitches. But, mostly back then people did not have medical insurance that I knew and only went to the hospital if they had been in a car accident or something really serious. Something that just needed a few stitches or something could easily be solved by butterfly bandages to seal the would and some mercurochrome or iodine then. Though we also had hydrogen peroxide we didn't use it like we do today for cleaning and sterilizing wounds much then.

So, reading about the latest mechanical and electronic advances was one way I had things to talk about with my Dad and eventually this also paid off in that he "hired" me to work for cash starting around 10 or 12 years of age summers and weekends so I always had enough money for buying bicycles, minibikes (motorized two wheel vehicles) or eventually motorcycles or cars eventually too. So, I could buy my first car at age 16 for 800 dollars that I made working for my Dad then which was a 1956 Ford STation Wagon that I called my "Surfwagon" where we would drive to the beach with over 10 foot surfboards in then because the smaller ones hadn't fully been invented yet. We called them the "Big Guns" then and hanging 10 was the goal with a big board like that. "Hanging 10 meant having all 10 toes over the tip of the board and if you are a surfer you know that you really have to be moving fast in order to do this even for a second without nosing your board deep into the water and having it shoot up and possibly knock you out if you have made a mistake. And a 10 foot plus board was heavy enough to kill you if it knocked you out when it came down on top of you then and now.

So, it's interesting to me is studying electronics and mechanical engineering as a child led to me working as an electrician with my Dad from around age 10 or 12 to 17 and then for a short time when I was 21 when I wanted to take a break from Computer programming. But, by 21 I had bought a new 1968 Camaro which was a really great car that I kept in the family for around 10 years.