A Childhood Memories

Norman Sas, a inventor, died June 28th. Mr. Sas death notice brought back one of my childhood memories because Sas was the inventor of The Electronic Football game.

 My best friend at the time Leonard, who lived across the street had the game. We only played it a couple of times and the reason was that it was a pain in the ass to play.

 The game was played on a one and a half by two and a half foot metal sheet that was painted to look like a football field. You had the two teams, I think they were the red team and the yellow team. Eleven players on each team with one player who could kick a field goal. The ball was a round piece of cotton.

 Thinking back now I don't think we read the rules we just made up our own. The way the game is played was that you would kick off, with the cotton ball, the closest played to the cotton ball is the returner. And that is where the fun begins or if you were a 8 year old in Iselin New Jersey, the interestwas lost. This is when you hit the switch to turn on the action. The field would start to vibrate and the players start to move. And they would move not forward but all over the place. The way your player is tackled is that it is touched by one of the opposition players. Now this could take 2 seconds or it could take a hour as the players were jumping all over the place. Once the player is tackled you would set your players up and hit the button again and wait till the ball carrier is touched, and start all over again setting up your team. And for us this was the downfall of the game because it would take so much time. We would lose interest and start to adjust the vibration so high so the players would just jump around like a pot of popcorn. I think the later versions were a little bit better, with actual professional football teams as your players unlike the solid yellow and red players of our game.

 A memories of my time as a kid is always welcomed by me as I had what I think was a special and wonderful childhood