The early to mid 1950s were influenced tremendously by the atomic bomb. No so much in the sense of destruction and desolation, although we did practice hiding under desks at school, but rather in the marketing sense. As we kids drew pictures of war and battles, the landscape now included mushroom clouds and advertising went the same way along with drawings of the atom with neutrons spinning around to sell a modern marvel of the age.
There were atomic sandwiches, atomic milkshakes, atomic bubble gum and comic books, followed by movies with giant ants and grasshoppers mutated by atomic radiation. And, out of the atomic age came the prolific use of another marketing ploy, the X-ray. If atomic bombs didn’t get you, the use of X-rays would.
Even as a kid I wondered when I went to get my teeth checked, why the assistant, after placing a heavy lead vest on my chest, would leave the room while they zapped my skull in order to see my teeth. I guess they were saving my chest for the doctor when I got my lungs zapped on another trip.
If that wasn’t enough, when you went to get a pair of shoes, they stuck your feet in this machine so that your parents could see your foot bones and how the shoe fit. I suppose this was okay if you bought shoes maybe once a year or so but I bet the innovators of that machine never thought about the fact that kids would see it as a fun contraption to play with.
The machine was a large, tall wooden box and you stood on a platform while sticking your feet inside this rectangle opening. The salesman then flipped a toggle switch, you looked into the viewer and there were your bones! My friends and I would take a Saturday walk to the shopping district called six-corners by most folks, and go to Sears where they sold Red Goose and Buster Brown Shoes. We would wait until the salesman was busy with a customer and then go up to the machine, stick our feet in and throw the switch. Also, one of us would stick their hands in there while the others took turns looking. We would do it a few times until we got shagged out of the store.
As a pre-teen, with all the different forms of X-ray equipment used on us at the time, it is no wonder we did not glow in the dark or become mutated like those giant ants and grasshoppers. But I sort of figured out, perhaps, where my foot problems came from.
