|
Page A3 The Joan De Arc Crusader / Saturday, May 1, 2010 Front Page A1 / Editorials A2 / Crossword A4
A peculiar lack of “Concentration” By J. Bueker I don’t remember spending much time watching “The Mickey Mouse Club” when I was a young child, despite its nearly universal supremacy at the time amongst my peer group. Didn’t care much for Bozo either, to be honest. Howdy Doody? Nuh uh. And Wall Boy and Ladmo were still years in the future. No, the TV programs that intrigued me the most during my earliest days of staring at the tube were unquestionably the game shows. I became steadily immersed in such daily fare as “The Jan Murray Show,” “The Match Game,” and “Concentration.” Sitting transfixed in our Livonia living room, I marveled at the spectacle of overly excited adults playing intriguing games that were nevertheless simple enough for the average rug rat to comprehend.
Concentration held a particularly
distinct fascination for me from a very early age. Everything about the game
play appealed to my pre-school mentality and the fundamentals I was absorbing
about language and numbers. Contestants would call out a pair of numbers between
1 and 30, which would then reveal words on the game board, which when matched
would ultimately lead to the exposure of two large rebus puzzle pieces.
Occasionally a “Wild Card” would appear, leading to an instant match, and
perhaps the taking or forfeiting of a prize. The sequence and scope of play were
strictly ordered and yet the results strangely unpredictable. By the time I was
3 or 4 years old, I was completely hooked. One of the first game shows introduced in the aftermath of the ‘50s quiz show scandals, Concentration originally aired on NBC in 1958 and remains one of the longest running game shows in the history of television. Hosted in its early years by the venerable Hugh Downs, the show quickly became one of the most-watched daytime series on the air and remained highly regarded by its audience until the run on NBC ended in 1973. Like nearly all TV game shows of the era, Concentration was promoted through the issuance of home editions of the game. Such was the popularity of these Concentration home games that a total of 24 separate editions would be issued, with the run ending only in 1982, nearly a full decade after the show went off the air. If you were a kid growing up in 1960s America, it is a virtual certainty that you are familiar with the Milton Bradley home editions of Concentration. They were ubiquitous. The Concentration home game was played on a plastic game board grid that was designed to hold the paper slab prize cards underneath thin plastic number slips. At the conclusion of each game, players would use the patented “Roll-o-Matic” scrolling mechanism to advance to the next game puzzle, which was visible underneath the transparent grid. A small retractable door on the side of the game board allowed players to peek at the puzzle solution. One unfortunate but inevitable aspect of the Concentration home game was the finite nature of the puzzles available in each edition. Once you had scrolled to puzzle #50, you had exhausted the puzzles for the game and would have to either start re-using them or abandon play altogether, hence the demand for a new edition of the game each year. Our mother, of all people, devised her own solution for this disturbing quandary. Though never much of a game player herself, she conceived the idea one summer evening of formulating and drawing her own rebus puzzles for our game, thus extending its lifetime significantly. They were actually pretty good puzzles, too. Interestingly, the powers that be at Milton Bradley bowed to superstitious convention and declined to issue a 13th edition of the Concentration home game, skipping over from the 12th edition directly to the 14th. This sort of silliness is almost comprehensible in the context of a high rise building, where people on a 13th floor are hundreds of feet up in the air, but one must wonder what misfortune could befall a group of people enjoying the 13th edition of a TV game show in the safety of their own living room. A paper cut from the play money perhaps? In any event, by the time the Buekers appeared on Joan De Arc Avenue, I had become irredeemably infatuated with these Concentration home games. Our family owned and regularly played a couple of the earlier sets, but I was always eyeing the latest editions in the department stores as they came out each year. This leads us to the ultimate Concentration home game version – the glorious and highly coveted Sixth Edition. Well, coveted highly by me, that is. How I came to revere this particular edition of the game requires a brief recounting of a bit of Phoenix history. And even then, I’m afraid it’s not going to make a great deal of sense. Once upon a time in Phoenix, there existed a cool pair of shopping centers called Hayden Plaza East and Hayden Plaza West. Plaza East was situated in Tempe at Scottsdale and Curry Roads, a distant location quite remote from Joan De Arc Avenue that I think we visited exactly once for a screening of “Gone with the Wind.” Hayden Plaza West on the other hand was on our side of town at Indian School Rd. and 33rd Ave., and we visited there fairly often – perhaps a half dozen times a year. Situated kitty corner to Grand Avenue and the railroad tracks, Hayden Plaza West was an interesting collection of businesses. Prominent among these was the Hayden Plaza West Cinema, where my father once famously took his brood for a surprise viewing of “A Hard Day’s Night” one evening in 1964. Eight long years later, I would see my final film at this movie house, an interesting but ponderous documentary called “The Hellstrom Chronicle,” which prophesizes the inevitable triumph of insects over humans in the struggle for survival. Despite its “GP” rating, there were no naked ladies in the film whatsoever, which disappointed me and Ricky Rose enormously. The anchor store of both Hayden Plazas was a large department store called Woolco. Woolcos were a discount retail chain started in 1962 by the Woolworth Company, famous of course for the five-and-dime stores they operated across America for many years. Woolco was conceived as a means of tapping into the rapidly expanding suburban market that could not be adequately reached by the traditional Woolworth five-and-dime model. Woolco was, in some sense, the Wal-Mart of the 1960s. Since Woolworth’s and Woolco were viewed by the company as different businesses addressing separate consumer profiles, the two stores were often paired at shopping centers like the Hayden Plazas. The Woolworth’s at Hayden Plaza West was located directly next door to the much larger Woolco, separated only by a very small parking area. Being already familiar with the wonderful Woolworth’s we knew so well at Chris-Town, I much preferred the Woolworth’s store at Hayden Plaza to its behemoth cousin, and tended to focus my time there whenever we visited the shopping center. One day in perhaps 1966, I was browsing in the toy section of the Hayden Woolworth’s when I made an astonishing discovery. Resting on a shelf nestled among various other Milton Bradley board games like “Stratego” and “Candy Land” was a Concentration game the likes of which I had never before contemplated, let alone encountered. I immediately perceived a startling, atypical feature of this new Sixth Edition of the game – the white game board numbers on the front of the box were situated upon a red background! My god. And sure enough, when I opened the box and looked inside, the plastic numbered slips for the game too reflected this extraordinary color scheme. I stood in Woolworth’s spellbound for several moments coming to grips with this revelation. So. Big deal, you say? Well yes. Yes indeed. For the fact is that all previous editions of the game had used the customary black slips with white numbering, the same pairing of colors used on the actual TV program. Some bright young marketing genius at Milton Bradley had evidently dreamed up this novel new color scheme as a gimmick to boost sales of the already popular game. It certainly worked like a charm on a certain eight-year-old living in Phoenix, Arizona, let me tell you. I was utterly fascinated. I knew there was zero chance that mom and dad would actually purchase this phenomenal item for me, since we already had those other Concentration home editions lying around back at 3219. And predictably enough, my ardent entreaties were cheerfully ignored. For the following year or so, I was drawn like a magnet to the Red Concentration Game at Woolworth’s every time we visited Hayden Plaza West, until the game finally disappeared from the store’s shelves forever. Oddly enough, this is only the beginning of the story. I began assembling a collection of old Concentration games a few years later in the late ‘60s, around the same time I developed an inexplicable appetite for vintage Monopoly sets. By this time, these old games were beginning to appear at our favorite Salvation Army and Goodwill thrift stores in Sunnyslope and Glendale. I easily located a number of the early Concentration sets, even the ancient First and Second Editions from the late ‘50s. Yet the holy grail Sixth Edition remained completely elusive. I never did find one. The next thing I knew, I was a young adult, and our family’s time on Joan De Arc Avenue had disappeared into the past. Yet I never entirely abandoned my hobby of collecting vintage games, and the search for the sacred Sixth Edition of Concentration began again in earnest during the 1980s. But that decade of combing through the thrift and antique stores also came and went with no Red Concentration Game in sight. Then the ‘90s began to pass, and still no luck. I started entertaining the notion that they just didn’t make many copies of this particular version of the game, and I gradually resigned myself to the star-crossed nature of our relationship.
The long trail came to a quite sudden and unexpected end in the year 1999, with my wife being the lucky charm to finally break the spell of the prize that had eluded my grasp for nearly 35 years. On one of our first dates together, we chose to dine in downtown Glendale and then stroll across the street to a popular collectibles emporium known as A Mad Hatter’s Antiques. It was on that day and in that place that I encountered not one, but two treasures of immeasurable sentimental significance: an old Ryan-Evans Drug Store wall calendar from 1965, and then, the ultimate prize: Concentration, Edition Six. Ecstasy. The summit at last. My future bride was somewhat taken aback by my unrestrained excitement at uncovering these two paragons of nostalgic import. Only then did the poor woman begin to perceive the true nature of her companion and his unusual obsessions. And still she married me. I imagine she felt that I could benefit from her expertise in the field of behavioral health. The Sixth Edition that I uncovered at Hatter’s was far from perfect. The box corners were torn and clumps of masking tape clumsily applied in several places. A few of the prize cards were missing. But I can assure that these were trifling details. Immediately I found a prominent place in my home to display the game. Because that’s what you do, you know. You display these things, you don’t actually play with them. Well that probably should have been the end of it, but the final chapter in this curious little story actually emerges a few years later, when I became initiated into the wonders of the mighty eBay. Suddenly at my disposal were the means to search the entire country, indeed the world itself, for any collectible item that I could possibly imagine, all from the comfort of my own home. In that seeming instant, all those years of driving across town and back again, to rummage endlessly through the stacks of toys and games in the antique and thrift stores, seemed as quaint and outdated as a smoke signal on a windy day. Once I had the vast scope of the eBay marketplace arrayed at my command, my ambition for the Red Concentration Game quickly accelerated to the ultimate prospect – owning a mint-in-the-box, never used copy of the game. Long a virtually unthinkable attainment, it was now distinctly within the realm of possibility. I might yet again hold that brand new, shiny red and white box in my hands, just as I had so many years before in the Woolworth’s toy department at Hayden West Plaza. After about a year and a half of running the automatic daily search feature on eBay, I struck gold. A woman in southern Ohio had up for auction precisely the object of my quest – a pristine, unused specimen of the Sixth Edition. It wasn’t cheap, as I had to outbid a pair of similarly deranged and determined baby boomers to secure the purchase, but a well-timed last second bid snagged the prize. Full circle at last. It can be amusing and perhaps enlightening to ponder those whimsical trivialities that seemed so vitally and wistfully important to us as children. The Red Concentration Game remains a definitive example of just such a youthful fixation in my own experience. I have no rational explanation for my lasting infatuation with this particular game, nor do I suppose that one is required or even possible. I recently took a walk through the parking lot where the old Hayden West Woolworth’s once stood, and I couldn’t help pondering whence that peculiar magic of childhood hopes and dreams comes, and to where it so quickly vanishes again without a trace. And how sometimes, if we’re very lucky, it endures. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________JDA
|
