Me & Elaine's spaceship

I was thinking the other day about a friend of mine from way back in Elementary school....in fact it was 3rd grade. I was one of the shortest kids in the school, sporting a Carol Brady shag haircut and a pair of glasses....the true picture of ultra cool.....not really. We had moved over the summer and I was starting a new school....Frederick Douglas Elementary School, in St. Michaels Maryland. The school was so small that we had our gym classes in our classroom on days that it rained. We didn't have a gym. We also didn't have a cafeteria so lunch was always eaten in the classroom. They trucked the hot lunches in from the middle school further in town. I remember vividly playing 7-up at our desk and how at the end of the day we had to put our heads down on our desk to be quiet before getting called to the cloakroom to get our stuff to go home.

It was in Frederick Douglas Elementary school that I met Elaine. Elaine was one of the tallest in my class. She looked clearly two years older then the rest of us and was a sweet, soft spoken and as nice as any child could possibly be. It was so easy being her friend, and I was so happy that she let me be.

On days that it rained and we could not go outside for recess I can remember Elaine and I planning our spaceship. She was quite the talented artist...thankfully otherwise the spaceship would have looked like a lopsided teacup. The interesting thing about the spaceship was that we really weren't that concerned about whether it could fly or not but what it looked like on the inside and what we could do inside of it.

The basic ideas for the spaceship came from Gazoo's spaceship from the Flintstones. It had a simple ramp that went from the ground up into the center of the ship on it's under belly. Once inside it had a lot of the same amazing features that the Jetzon's were lucky enough to have living in the future. Our design was created in the fall of 1976....well before the home computer, before microwaves were cheap, before VHS or DVS, CD, or DVRs....before cable tv and satellite tv.....what we designs we weren't able to get from the Flinstones or the Jetzon's we got from our own imaginations.

When I look back now on what we put inside the spaceship for us to do, really isn't much different then real life now. We had computers of course, but at that time there was no internet so I am not really sure what we were going to do with them anyway. We also had a ping pong table, a pinball machine and air hockey. We could roller skate inside on a track that went around and around the outer wall of the inside of the ship. We had lots of TVs that we could watch whatever we wanted to watch even if it was cartoons non-stop....remember we didn't have cartoon network, Disney or nick back then....cartoons only came on Saturday mornings.....much to my parents dismay. The thing I remember the most was having amazing comfy chairs that reclined and were like hover crafts.....plus I could have all the pop-tarts I wanted. My mother had this really strange view on Pop-tarts....I think she thought they really were an evil plot to ruin the family breakfast. She refused....and I mean refused to allow Pop-tarts in the house. Now mind you it was perfectly acceptable to have chocolate cake with chocolate icing and full strength coke for breakfast but there was no way we were allowed to have one of those sugar coated pastries.......there was nothing I wanted more then to sink my teeth into a cherry Pop-tart.

When I look back now we really weren't looking for much in our spaceship. Junk food, cartoon TV and the ability to roller skate in the house....I mean the spaceship. Lets not forget it was kids only. Sometimes when I am feeling stressed I think about that little spaceship in the fall of 1976. I can see Elaine wielding her pencil sketching as fast as I could describe it and can hear Gazoo whispering in my ear reminding me that we need to make sure the antennas were large enough....just in case we got the chance to talk to some really martians.