Art Hill photography by Ed Meyer, St. Louis Star-Times, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis
The people of Snag, in the Yukon, weren’t happy. Scientists recorded a low there of –63 degrees Celsius. New York got 26 inches of snow in 16 hours. But in St. Louis, it was normal snow, normal cold. Somewhere, a kid in footie pajamas sat on a heat register, staring into the darkness of the living room. He could see a giant something behind the tree, wrapped in yards of red foil paper, Bubble-Lites shimmering over its surface. He knew what it was. For one thing, it was so damn big! And months before, his mother sat at the kitchen table with a fountain pen and a cup of black coffee, the Sears Wish Book marked up, inky blue circles drawn around floating hands wearing suede gloves, or a disembodied foot in a shearling house slipper. And (and!) she’d circled some sleds: the Flexible Flyer, the Flying Arrow, and best of all, the plastic-topped Silver Comet (“New! Soft ridin’…super strong”).
Yeah, an inner tube would do you. One kid’s dad nailed sheet metal to the bottom of a wooden box. Another kid’s brother fumbled wooden pallets together into something that looked like a giant, deformed catfish skeleton on runners. It flew down snowy hills, but when it tumbled, it threatened to gash open a hand or an eyeball. (The runners had strips of soda can nailed on.) And it gave you slivers through your mittens. Better the brand name, the curly script, the steel runners, the sturdiness of industrial assembly. Of course, he’d never want to replace actual snow with that white angel hair his mother swathed the Nativity set in (which gave him glass slivers). But like his mom, he preferred machine-made. Not earth tones, but primary colors. Not his grandmother’s lumpy beige scarves, but the perfectly knitted acrylic ones. And on cars, on tools, and especially on sleds, he loved that perfectly placed factory rivet no barehanded human could ever remove.
