I ran across a skate key the other day. It was in the junk drawer, that small drawer in the kitchen where we toss items that don’t have a designated “home.” The junk drawer also has a year or two accumulation of rubber bands from The Tribune, a ball holding assorted pieces of twine tied together and a few marbles from bygone days.
Today’s families don’t have junk drawers. They have junk rooms, usually called “storage rooms,” where hundreds of items wait for the time when they will be rescued. (An unlikely event, as there’s a high probability that if any item in the storage room is needed, a newer and easier to locate replacement will show up on the family credit card.)
Such are these days of plenty, when even children of “poor” families carry electronic binkies (cell phones) wherever they go. The price of a cell phone will buy hundreds of skate keys.
There was a time when owning a skate key — and the roller skates it represented — was a sign of affluence. But in those days we didn’t need much. And we complained a lot less than most people do today. We also cared about one another a lot more than people do today. The kid without a skate key was not shunned or looked down upon; he or she was often invited to take a turn on the skates — even carry the skate key.
One wonders what it will take these days to convince us that we should share our skates with those who have none. In order to reach “those good old days,” it took a depression and a war to motivate social unity and concern for others. Can we do it again without those double tragedies — or something like them?
You see, those days of material scarcity and social abundance ushered in a period of personal growth and technological progress unmatched in history. We worked together to educate our young (and our not-so-young). We worked together to improve public and private health practices so we could increase average life span beyond what many thought possible. We encouraged and supported scientists and technologists to achieve goals never before considered feasible — space travel, organ transplants, supersonic air travel, artificial body parts, microwave ovens, super highways and super cars, computer chips, air conditioning ... and on and on.
We learned to feed not only ourselves but much of the world. We created cooperative international organizations to reduce the risk of war and famine. We paid for it by taxing ourselves — including the wealthiest among us — not by taxing our children through obscene borrowing and our elderly through inflation. Congress focused more on compromise than on obstruction. The same for state and local government bodies.
We believed in public service, not personal greed. In my high school class, alone, were two future U.S. senators, a congressman, several respected judges, many future teachers, research scientists, local government leaders, and so on.
As Thomas Wolfe reminded us, we can’t go home again. And we can’t repeat history. But we can certainly learn from an era that was more successful than today. We can certainly make sure that our children — all children — have access to quality education, including post-secondary education. We can certainly do a better job of sharing our “skate keys” and everything they symbolize.
By the way, for those who don’t remember, a skate key is a little gadget with two built-in wrenches. One fits a six-sided nut used to lengthen skates so they can fit any size shoes. The other is a much smaller four-sided hole used to fasten the skate’s toe clamp onto the hard sole of a shoe. We always wore shoes with hard soles so they could be re-soled when the original soles wore out. And so we could attach skates. No one even thought of wearing Keds to school.
Don Gale.
Don Gale remembers when skate keys and clamp-on skates were a lot more fun than cell phones and computer games can ever be ... and a whole lot more convivial.