I miss the Space Age

It’s hard to relate what it was like growing up in the ’60s, surrounded by the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and all that social unrest. We make fun of the air raid drills and “duck and cover” now, but at the time, going down to the elementary school basement and covering your head with your jacket, remaining in total silence, nuclear war seemed like a pretty scary thing. There was nothing to think about other than that if there were really an attack, my parents were somewhere far away from that school basement, and I might never see them again. There was so much gloom and doom in those days — the certainty (which I now know all places shared) that our town was a target for the Russians, the fear that race rioting could come to our rundown city, the talk that there would be some kind of revolution — all unsettling things to young ears that had no other context.

But in the midst of that, there was this bright, shining hope, this crazy human endeavor that sparked the imagination and gave the era a name — the Space Age. For a few years, the level of excitement and interest was incredible, and it was reflected in all aspects of our society — movies, TV, newspapers and magazines were filled with stories of space exploration. Astronauts were the greatest heroes imaginable (and who has taken their place?). And for kids, there were endless space-related toys — some cheesy, some awesome. Even food — the Rocket Pop, Space Food Sticks. It’s hard now to imagine a craze of that level centering around technology and exploration — there’s no one marketing Genome Food Sticks (and if they do, they’ll hear from my lawyers). But at the time, manned space flight served as inspiration, the thought that we would get through the terrible times, that the future would continue.

And sometime in the early or mid-’60s, even the Electric City got caught up in the space craze, and Schenectady built a marvelous space-themed playground in its Central Park. It had rocket swings you could ride, a couple of rocket/lander/space capsule constructions with ladders and slides, climbers shaped like Saturn. It was an absolutely magical place to a kid in the ’60s. It was too far from home to get there except by car, so it was an even more special treat when someone’s parents would load a bunch of us up in a car and drive us over there for an afternoon of being able to live out our space fantasies on real rocket ships instead of having to pretend cardboard boxes were rocketships and tricycles were lunar landers. (Now, children are driven absolutely everywhere. Back then, that wasn’t the case. Getting driven to a playground in another town was almost the same as getting driven to Disneyland.)

Although the fence that once enclosed it is gone, many of those playground toys are still there. Isn’t that cool?