SHAVE ICE

By TOM STEVENS, For The Maui News
And on the pedestal

these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias,

king of kings!

Look on my works,

ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay

of that colossal wreck,

the lone and level

sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley

“Ozymandias”



My old volleyball partner Jim from Navy days on Guam was on the island last week, so we arranged to meet for lunch at a local bakery.

While a display case of pies, tarts, custards and eclairs tried its best to distract us, our talk turned to what might be called “vanished technologies.”

“When I met you in ’72, you were working at that Armed Forces Radio Station,” Jim recalled. “Typing.”

“That’s right,” I grinned. “I sat there with headphones on all day, listening to LPs and typing file cards of all the station’s music.”

“I think only the lifeguard had a softer job on that base.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You weren’t exactly swinging a pick, as I recall. You were sitting under the swamp coolers, listening to Morse Code and cutting paper tape.”

The more we talked, the more I realized how archaic our references sounded. LPs? Typewriters? Morse Code? Paper tape? In a mere 36 years, that entire generation of technology had gone the way of the swamp cooler.

Vanished!

The weird thing is, it doesn’t seem enough time has elapsed to justify all that change. Shouldn’t the transition from scratchy vinyl records to invisible streams of gigabytes take longer than 36 years? Shouldn’t it take at least a century to go from Morse Code to instant messaging by satellite?

“And we thought we were so cutting edge,” I laughed. “Remember ‘four-channel sound?’”

“Quadraphonic,” Jim nodded. “A must-have.”

Being relatively close to Asia, Guam was on the pipeline for all the groovy, pace-setting consumer electronics then rolling out of Japan. Nikon cameras. Yamaha electric pianos. Canon super-8 movie projectors. Panasonic color TVs.

But Navymen who listened all day — whether to vinyl records or to Morse Code — were drawn first to the lavish sound systems on display in the military “exchanges.” These jumbo, on-base discount department stores were the military forerunners of Wal-Mart and Costco, carrying all a servicemember might need, and much we didn’t.

Into that latter bracket fell the immense, costly and complicated “home music systems” then cranking out of Japanese firms like Akai, Teac, Pioneer, Sony and Sansui. Promising to deliver impeccable purity — and unsurpassed volume! — these units were the Cadillac El Dorados of sound reproduction.

It wasn’t enough to have two speakers. You needed at least four 80-watt monsters. You also needed a massive reel-to-reel tape deck, a cassette deck, an exquisitely balanced turntable with a diamond stylus, an AM/FM radio tuner, a signal pre-amplifier, and a whole raft of antennas, modulators, boosters, microphones, mixers and compressors.

If you didn’t get a hernia moving it, you still faced the daunting task of wiring all this stuff together, custom-building a cabinet for it, and getting it to function as promised. Was that sound truly quadraphonic? Or did you get the plus and minus polarities switched again?

Flash forward to the military exchanges of today. For a fraction of the cost, you can buy a palm-sized unit that stores thousands of tunes, shoots movies, delivers your e-mail, communicates with your friends, navigates your journeys, and does your shopping online. And it’s hernia-free.

As I think back to the Navy Exchange showrooms of 1972, I’m chagrined at how much that seemed “modern” is now obsolete. Not just electric typewriters and turntable tone arms, but crazy little accessories like “carbon paper” and “stylus-cleaning fluid.”

I even bought from the Guam exchange a “home photo lab” for developing and printing black-and-white photos. It filled a bathroom with its enlargers, trays, film spools, chemicals, dark lights, drying drums and special papers. These days, all you need is a cell phone camera and a pocket to put it in.

I suppose the greatest tribute to the inventiveness of the past 36 years would be to name some consumer electronics not found on those Navy Exchange shelves. There were no computers, smart phones, MP3 units or DVD players. No flat-screen TVs, hand-held remotes or microwave ovens. No laser pointers, video games or car-alarm keys.

As we got up to leave the bakery, Jim tapped my phone number into his Blackberry. I took out a pen and wrote his number on my hand.

Some things don’t change.

• Tom Stevens is a freelance writer whose “Shave Ice” column appears each Wednesday. He can be reached at shaveice@maui.net.