Rocket Boy

At one point in Raideers of the Lost Ark, the villain, Belloq, holds up his watch to our hero, Indiana Jones.

“Look at this,” he says. “It’s worthless…but I take it and bury it in the sand for a thousand years,it becomes priceless.”

I’ve always thought that was a great line and it came bouncing back to me last week during my most wonderful writing class.

Our fabulous teacher Rosemary always starts things off with a writing prompt to get things flowing.

On this evening she asked us to list articles of clothing we owned before we turned 20 years old.

As usual I stared at the screen and thought, “what the hell is this woman talking about?”

And then, as usual, I started writing and soon came up with a list of items, including an atrocious short-sleeve paisley dress shirt that I owned when I was a teenager.

At the time I actually thought that thing looked cool, but now the very thought of it makes me shudder. Wherever you are, paisley shirt…stay there.

After making our respective lists, we broke off to write for about 45 minutes and I got some great ideas from the prompt, which I'm going to include in my next book.

I also got plenty of encouragement and insightful analysis from Rosemary and my classmates. I love these people!

One of the items on my list was my old Keds sneakers, which was required footwear when I was going up.

And from there I recalled a plastic whistle that had come free when my parents bought me a new pair of sneakers.

‘It's Not the Years, Honey, it's the Mileage!’

The thing was shaped like the Gemini capsule and, at the time, I thought it was the coolest thing in creation.

Bear in mind this was the Sixties, back when the space program dominated the news and Americans idolized astronauts.

Children didn’t go around with computers in their back pockets when I was growing up, so a whistle shaped like a spaceship was a pretty big deal.

The memory of that whistle was so vague, but so real. After class I jumped onto Google to see if I could track the thing down.

I typed in “whistle shaped like Gemini capsule + Keds,” convinced I’d never find any trace of the thing.

I was wrong.

I actually got several hits and when I clicked on the image tab, there it was: the Supersonic Space Whistle.

The whistle blue and white with a K in the middle and what looks like a portion of the lunar service as a background—just as I remembered.

Keds apparently went full blast on the space program back then as I came across a Kolonel Keds Space Club membership card, which featured an image of jetpack-packing astronaut type wearing, of course, a pair of Keds.

I have no memory of the Kolonel or his klub but it looks pretty kool, which was also a cigarette, but let’s not go krazy here.

So, a writing assignment triggered a recollection of a cheap giveaway whistle from the LBJ Administration.

It just amazes me how the mind works; what we recall, and why these things stay in our memory.

I had a nice little voyage through time, but I won’t be bringing back the Supersonic Space Whistle as a souvenir.

But I am starting to think about a short-sleeved paisley shirt…