In the house, while my wet socks are somersaulting in the dryer—the snow having penetrated the protective layer of Wonder Bread bags—I lob a ball at the mini hoop hanging from the back of the bedroom door, counting down the final seconds of a game before the buzzer beater goes in, and the ball rebounds off the door and rolls back to my feet like an obedient dog.
This miraculous ball—made of an orange wonder substance I can’t identify—was conceived just a few miles from this bedroom, by a Saint Paul native named Reyn Guyer. In the auspicious year of 1969, when my father was summoned to Saint Paul by his benevolent masters at Mickey Mining, Reyn Guyer invented a retort to all the American mothers who said “Don’t play ball in the house,” as Carol Brady would famously do in an episode of The Brady Bunch. He gave the children of America non-expanding recreational foam, whose acronym—Nerf—was almost as fun as the ball itself.
Parker Brothers sold four million Nerf balls in 1970, its first year on sale. As with the BIC Cristal, the Nerf was easily and instantly weaponized. Tom likes to fart on the Nerf ball—something in its pockets of polyester resin retain the odor—and then clamp it over my face, as if chloroforming me.
Years earlier, Guyer invented Twister and pitched it to 3M, which had a games division. But, alas, the brain trust at Mickey Mining wasn’t interested. After Johnny Carson played Twister with Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show in 1966, the “game”—a polka-dotted plastic sheet and spinner—became a necessity in basement rec rooms.
This Chicago–Twin Cities corridor in which I am living out my childhood has become fertile soil for American home life, incubator of Nerf, Trix, Twister, Cheerios, Wheaties, Schwinn, Hamburger Helper, Mary Tyler Moore, the Spiegel catalogue—Chicago, Illinois, 60609—and me. Among the greatest of these is a direct collaboration between Chicago and the Twin Cities, the love child of General Mills in Minneapolis and Ferrara Candy Company, maker of Brach’s confections, in Chicago. It was at General Mills that a product developer named John Holahan, charged with repurposing the company’s existing products, paired Cheerios with a Brach’s marshmallow abomination called Circus Peanuts, a pairing that gave birth to Lucky Charms. Thus a banana-flavored “peanut” was cut into pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers and marketed—like every other cereal, no matter its contents—as “part of a healthy breakfast.”
And recently Vikings placekicker Fred Cox, known to all in Bloomington as “Freddy the Foot,” did what Parker Brothers couldn’t do: he invented the Nerf football. Parker Brothers had been trying to make a football the same way they make a basketball, by cutting the object from foam. But it didn’t feel or fly right, so they bought Freddy’s instead. Cox used injection molding to make a football that is heavier than the basketball, with a durable skin—the perfect size and weight and density for throwing and kicking in the backyard.
There is an irresistible impulse among the boys of suburban Minneapolis to kick a football as far as they possibly can. Even among the men. Mike McCollow’s dad will come home from his dental practice, having stopped at the VFW hall for a brandy Manhattan en route, and drop-kick a half-frozen football between the uprights of two barren tree branches without even setting down his briefcase. Then Mike and I will resume our field-goal-kicking contest. Perhaps it’s happening everywhere in America. In all these backyards that our backyard backs on to, the boys of South Brook want to put their gym shoes of varying stripe and quality through an oblong ball. Dad tells me the kids in Germany and Italy have the same compulsion to kick soccer balls, and I’ve been told—by older kids in the neighborhood whose knowledge is unimpeachable—that Adidas stands for All Day I Dream About Soccer.
Cox is not the only inventor who recognized this odd but undeniable desire in the youth of the Twin Cities. So did the W. H. Schaper Manufacturing Company, founded a few towns away in suburban Robbinsdale in 1949 by a mailman named William Herbert Schaper, who in his spare time invented a game called Cootie, which he sold to Dayton’s department stores, which in turn sold them to a grateful public. Schaper went on to create Ants in the Pants, Don’t Break the Ice, and other games that found novel use for plastics, but the greatest of these is Super Toe, which fills a need in the 1970s for a plastic placekicker figurine that kicks plastic footballs great distances through plastic uprights whenever I bash it over the head with my fist.
I can now kick footballs in my bedroom through my plastic proxy, Super Toe, or kick them in the backyard for real with the Nerf football. The Nerf football will become the bestselling football of all time and earn Fred Cox royalties for the rest of his natural existence. It has also earned him my undying admiration.
The Twin Cities in the 1970s is Florence in the High Renaissance, and I am lucky indeed to have begun life in the shadow of the Keebler elves’ hollow tree and to be growing up among all these Edisons of American childhood. As I continue to shoot bedroom buzzer beaters with my Nerf basketball, the real buzzer on the dryer signals that my socks are ready and that there is still life to be squeezed from a precious snow day.
It’s already midafternoon, and I’m desperate to make the most of what little daylight remains. So I pull the warm socks from the dryer, fire a hair dryer into the boots, and plunge my feet into first one and then the other. The warmth is an illicit pleasure, like wetting my pants without the shame. I pull my sled—a plastic tray in fire-engine red—to the crest of the tallest hill by Hillcrest Elementary. Standing atop that mountain of white, I imagine I’m looking down on the bobsled chute at the next Winter Olympics, in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1976.
Bombing downhill, my every nerve alive with feeling, I become certain of one thing: the thirty minutes spent getting dressed and ascending this hill is a pittance to pay for the breathtaking twenty seconds of descent.
When I finally heed Mom’s call to come inside at six o’clock, it has long been pitch-dark. My cheeks, reflected in the kitchen window, have grown red, like the Christmas lights strung above the garage, and I remove my purple toque with its Vikings patch, pom-pom, and built-in ski mask to find that every hair on my head is standing on end. Mom says it’s static electricity, but I know better.
Falling asleep on December nights is nearly impossible because Christmas is coming and every waking moment and many of the sleeping ones are spent in an agony of anticipation. Childhood hours are elastic, some passing in seconds, as this snow day has, while others stretch like Silly Putty, so that waiting in line with Mom at Community State Bank for five minutes is an entire geological epoch.