Memories, collage, felt and antique jewelry, by Rosannne Ehrlich

 
“It’s heavy,” he warned, lifting it from his trunk.

“I can carry it,” I said, grabbing the handle to prove a woman can do anything a man can do. Then I needed to hide my struggle as I lugged it across the parking lot to my Corolla.

Driving home, I couldn’t help but wonder: Would my longing for the toy be satisfied? I’d always suspected earning a degree in physics would have been far easier if I’d grown up playing with the toys the men in my classes grew up playing with. Surely, I would have developed my intuition about how pulleys, levers, gears, and engines did whatever it was they did, and I wouldn’t have been so clueless about building whatever we were called upon to build in all those physics labs.

I hated dolls. What could you do with a doll except pretend you were its mother? What I longed to do was make things. Discover things. Control things. I loved my Easy-Bake Oven: you mixed the ingredients that came in the tiny box, poured the batter into the tiny pan, slid the pan in the oven, and the bulb would bake the cake and you could eat it! I loved to create paint-by-number paintings, weave potholders, etch cowboys and clowns with my older siblings’ wood- and leather-burning kits.

But nothing intrigued me more than my brother’s chemistry set, microscope, gyroscope, baking-soda rocket, dry-cell battery, and electric train set, all of which I messed around with after he’d abandoned them. The allure was the ability to see things even the adults couldn’t see, to master powers even the adults didn’t have. No one prohibited me from playing with my brother’s toys. I could build whatever I wanted to build with Legos, Tinker Toys, or Lincoln Logs. But my parents weren’t about to buy me an Erector Set. In those days, all you got with Legos were plastic blocks. Basically, you could build a house, a school, a castle. With an Erector set, you got pulleys, gears, cranes, girders, a gazillion nuts and bolts, and an actual working motor, which allowed you to build a car, a train, a Ferris wheel, or a robot, all of which could move under their own power. (Grown-ups even used Erector Sets to design the George Washington Bridge and the first artificial heart, while Dr. Jack Kevorkian constructed his infamous euthanasia machine, the Thanatron, from pieces of an Erector Set.)

There were plenty of subtle reasons most ‘50s parents wouldn’t buy Erector Sets for their daughters. The parts were made of steel, and the set came in a metal toolbox like the one a greasy, overalled mechanic might haul to work. Worst of all, the name of the toy sounded like a smutty joke. But even women my age have a hard time remembering exactly how blatant the messaging really was. I wasn’t shocked that the exterior of my Erector Set shows a boy playing with the toy inside. Or that the interior cover includes a photo of the toy’s inventor, A. C. Gilbert, greeting the set’s new owner: “Hello, boys!” Nor was I surprised that a disembodied boy’s hand grips a phallic square girder, with the words “STURDY RIGID” boldly inscribed beneath. Or that the cover of the instruction book is illustrated with two freckle-faced white boys grinning above the radar tower they’ve just constructed.

But even I began to squirm when I opened the manual and read this PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM THE INVENTOR OF ERECTOR: “…I am proud to have you as one of my boy friends. I know what boys like because I am still a boy at heart myself.” That Erector Sets were meant for boys blared even more inescapably from the advertisements of the day. “Hello, Boys! Make Lots of Toys!” proclaimed an ad in the Saturday Evening Post in 1913. “BOYS TODAY—MEN TOMORROW!” Gilbert promised ten years later, boasting that “[t]housands of young men … who are today making great strides in engineering, chemistry, and other sciences were Gilbert Toy boys just a few years ago.”

As the United States entered the increasingly industrial twentieth century, the perceived need for inventors and engineers intensified. Females were rarely seen as a source for either. “Genuine Toys for Genuine Boys” read an ad in 1918, making clear that Erector Sets weren’t intended for girls or sissies.But even “genuine boys” began to need a boost in their scientific competence. Unlike those sturdy American males who’d grown up on farms, most twentieth-century boys lived in cities and didn’t know how a pump or an engine worked, let alone how to fix one. As competition with the Soviet Union grew more frenzied in the 1950s, Gilbert touted the ability of his company’s toys to turn “average boys” into engineers, architects, and “master builders.”

Gilbert also envisioned his product as a way to bring fathers and sons together. A photo in the manual that came with my set shows a father and son playing with an electric train (Gilbert having purchased the American Flyer company in the 1930s). The father lies on the floor, beaming at an oncoming engine, while his son lies atop him, chin on his father’s crown, to form a two-headed, four-handed totem of father-son bonding.

Yet the boy who once owned the Erector Set my friend gave me seems not to have had anyone to advise him. Barely any of the parts had ever been attached to one another. On a page for “recording models you have invented,” the boy laboriously printed in pencil “A train bridge with or without V moter [sic],” then left the remainder of the spaces blank.  (When I came across ancient bits of thread wrapped around two gears, a dried-up rubber band, and a flimsy wood dowel that wouldn’t have been included with the all-metal set, I couldn’t help but wonder whether that boy was still alive; if he was, he must have been in his late seventies.) I disassembled the wagon the boy had built, then felt compelled to replace the bolts and nuts in the neat cylindrical containers labeled PARTS, sort the girders by size and shape, and lay out all the axles, wheels, gears, and other thingamabobs. Did I do this because girls tend to be neat and organized? Or because my father, 15 years in his grave, kept everything in his workshop in perfect order?

Then came the moment of truth: Did I want to play with this toy or not? I was an adult with a degree in physics who had owned and maintained a house for decades, and yet here I was, overwhelmed by the prospect of building anything with an Erector set. The manual suggested dozens of structures, from the relatively simple Dog Sled to the magnificent Ferris wheel pictured on the box to the dauntingly complex Hammerhead Crane with Lifting Magnet. But not a single diagram provided the steps required to build it. Imagine if you’d brought home an entire living-room set from IKEA, but the gazillion parts came with nothing but drawings of the completed furniture.

Stymied, I did what any of us do to access the accumulated wisdom of our tribe: I went on YouTube. There, I found a virtual Old Boys Network of middle-aged mechanics and wizened engineers waxing nostalgic about the awe-inspiring gizmos they’d built when they were kids, collectors showing off the vintage sets they’d acquired and restored, and historians documenting every Erector Set A.C. Gilbert ever patented. A guy named David Goodsell displayed the Ferris wheel he’d constructed, complete with flashing colored lights, a carnival soundtrack, and a ticket booth. Dave Schlitter, an expert on manufacturing and the founder of a company called Maker Pipe, seemed as intimidated by his Erector Set as I was by mine. Instead of attempting to build anything in the instruction book, he and a friend improvised a silo for a rocket, then playacted a countdown and launch—ten, nine, eight … liftoff!—the way my son and his friends might have done when they were ten. I gained no insights into how to get started with my own Erector Set, but I was struck that nearly every video and blog included a heartfelt reminiscence about a boy opening his new Erector Set and watching his father take over the toy, after which father and son played with the set together.

I turned back to the manual, which advised me that my worst mistake would be to start with the “spectacular action models.” Rather, I should master the basic building methods and advance from there. (This reminded me of the time my friend Meg Urry, the former chair of the Yale physics department, confided that as a graduate student she had often outperformed the boys in her labs because they refused to read the manuals and she’d suffered no such embarrassment.)

Dutifully, I set out to teach myself the “standard details of erector construction” … only to discover that inserting the tiny bolts through the girders’ tiny holes and tightening the even tinier nuts was so maddening that I wanted to jam the tiny screwdriver/wrench through my eye. I needed a full hour to assemble the laughably simple Parallel Beam, which consists of two metal girders joined by a three-sided thingamajig at either end, in part because my fingers were so clumsy and mostly because I didn’t have the mechanical equivalent of common sense. I imagined a host of male companions laughing at how pathetic I was; if I had been given this Erector Set as a kid and no one had helped me use it, I would have given up.

But I wasn’t a kid. And no one was really laughing.

I studied the diagrams. I turned the pieces around and around and tried to visualize how everything might fit together. And sure enough, I found myself admiring the sturdy, rigid parallel beam I’d constructed! Hours later, I’d mastered “Fastening Strips to Pierced Gear,” “Method of locking nuts to permit strips to swivel,” “Method of fastening Double Angles to Pierced Disc,” “Flooring Construction,” and most gratifying of all, the devilishly difficult four-sided square girder. In one morning, I had gone from not knowing the handy mnemonic “righty tighty, lefty loosey” to having graduated from the equivalent of a voc-tech apprenticeship.

I didn’t grow up wanting to be an engineer. I wanted to understand how gravity works, how light can behave as both a particle and a wave, how all this Something in our universe could arise from Nothing. But I almost didn’t make it past freshman physics because I seemed to lack the most basic intuition about how levers, pulleys, gears, and motors work. I turned out to be a whiz at quantum mechanics, abstract math, and General Relativity.  But I never felt at home with all the guys who seemed to know how to build a bookcase, a stereo, or a cyclotron from scratch.

Gaining the required confidence might have been easier if my parents had given me an Erector Set. But if I was this frustrated as a woman in my sixties, how could I have mastered the four-sided girder as a child? My father was handy around the house; a dentist, he prided himself on his manual dexterity. But he didn’t believe his job required playing with his kids, let alone teaching his daughter to construct a robot. I would have loved to take shop in junior high, but girls were confined to Home Economics.

Not every child needs to be given an Erector Set and required to take lessons on how to use it. My architect friend said he much preferred playing with a set of stone blocks. Other male friends needed to hide their dolls. I coveted my classmate Jeffrey’s Erector Set, but he tells me now that he didn’t like playing with it because of the weird smell, “sort of a combination of rust and steel.” (Jeff grew up to be an engineer, but the kind that loves messing around with computers.) My guess is, my brother didn’t mind my touching his chemistry set or microscope because he resented our father’s pressure that he become a dentist instead of the political scientist he grew up to be.

Ideally, each child would be provided with a range of toys to play with. Some of those toys the child would be able to play with on their own. Other toys would require a patient adult assistant. The toys themselves aren’t important. Most of us grow up wanting to do what our parents do—learn from them, spend time with them, earn their approval. My father taught me to play tennis and golf, so I became an avid tennis player. (I only played golf so I could spend time with my dad; I haven’t picked up a golf club since he died.) He taught me to prepare and roast chestnuts, and so, every autumn, I buy a bag and think of him lovingly as I enjoy each golden nut. I don’t wish my parents had given me an Erector Set as much as I wish they’d given me more of their time, doing whatever they wanted us to do, together.

After lunch, I decided what else to build. I had no desire to construct the Machine Gun, Cannon, Army Scout Car, Pit Head Gear, or Portable Jib Crane. Maybe I should try the Robot? Would the ancient motor that came with the set blow up in my hand? Short-circuit my apartment? Gingerly, I plugged it in. The motor worked! But I quailed before the dedication required to build an actual working robot. (When my son was in elementary school, I bought him Lego Mindstorms; he played with it for a day, then let the hundred-dollar toy gather dust. Maybe I was too busy to help him. Or I was afraid the computerized robot would be too difficult to build and program, even for me.)

Finally, I chose to build the See Saw, which was harder than it appeared. The diagram involved constructing a double arch for the base and an axle on which the board could rotate. But I didn’t give up. Rather, I tried to understand how all the pieces might fit together.I started with the base. Then I moved on to the arch. No. That wasn’t right. If I put the bolts on that side, they would jam against each other. I took everything apart and started over. Then I needed to find the patience to perform the same few actions again and again, fitting a tiny bolt through a tiny hole and securing it with a nut, on this side, then that side, then the other side, then the fourth side.

Every skill takes practice. I didn’t always understand how to construct an essay. Someone taught me the basics and praised my earliest, clumsiest efforts. I started modestly, then practiced, practiced, practiced. If an essay’s structure didn’t seem right, I took it apart and started over.

I finished the See Saw—except for one final bolt that seemed too difficult to secure with its tiny nut. I was tempted to leave the structure as it was. Except that, even though I chose not to become a physicist, I did become a mother, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave my See Saw in a state in which the board might slip off its axle. I tried, and tried again, and finally I managed to tighten the nut and complete a See Saw that any two miniature children might enjoy without the slightest chance of getting hurt.