I previously wrote about the tumultuous years when things in my life went bad, but it’s not fair to say that fully describes my life from age 7 to 13. There were some good things too, and I should honor them by writing about them, too. I mentioned them in brief here, but I’d like to expand on them some.
First of all, from 3rd through 6th grade, I went to an absolutely awesome primary school, Susitna Elementary. Even better, I was enrolled in the “optional” program, which was designed for gifted and talented students (and students who needed extra support for a variety of reasons.) The classrooms did have a desk for each of us, but they weren’t lined up in neat rows, and there were lots of other furniture: couches, lofts, comfy chairs, pillows. We would get a packet of schoolwork at the start of every week and were expected to complete and return it by the end of the week. Aside from that and a few hours of group learning/discussion each day, we were free to do whatever we wanted. Some of us played chess.
We were also encouraged to participate in a sort of faux society. There was a currency, the “Wonka”, that we could use to buy and sell things. Every year, artistic students would be invited to design the new Wonka for the year, and the winner of that contest got to see their art printed (aka photocopied) onto all of the currency for the year. We could store our Wonkas in bank accounts, and even had little checkbooks we could use. We could buy and sell things (scratch and sniff stickers were popular), and even buy stocks! (Of course, we didn’t REALLY have stocks, but the value of the virtual stocks would change based on the real stock market.) At the end of the year, there would be a giant bake sale where we could use all of the Wonkas we hoarded over the last year.
In 1984, my family used my Permanent Fund Dividend check to buy my first computer, an Apple IIe. I taught myself programming in BASIC, first by modifying a silly adventure game to generate magic swords that went up to +100 instead of +5. I played a lot of old adventure games, such as Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. I was particularly fond of the Ultima series, and one game in particular captured my imagination: Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (released in 1985).
At the start of the game, the player would meet a Roma fortune teller (referred to as a “gypsy” in the original game) who would start a “minigame” by asking the player a series of moral questions. Your answers to these questions would determine both your starting location and the class of your player character. These questions fascinated me (I was not the only one), and I became somewhat obsessed with the goal of becoming the Avatar, the embodiment of the 8 virtues (Compassion, Honesty, Honor, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Valor) espoused in the game. You can answer these questions yourself, if you want.
For my part, I tended to always favor these four: Compassion, Honesty, Humility and Sacrifice. For readers who know me personally, these will probably not surprise you — they’ve gone on to become some of the core beliefs in my personality. Incidentally, when I retook this test today, I scored 7/7 on Sacrifice; 5/7 on Valor, Compassion and Humility; and 3/7 on Honesty.
Actions that you took during the course of the game would impact your character’s rating in each of the virtues, and only by mastering all eight could you become the Avatar. (Later video games, like Fable, would build on this concept.) As a young boy steeped in fantasy stories, this was absolutely my jam.
Also in 1984, my grandmother (my father’s mother) bought my cousin Billy and I our first Transformers. (Mine were Ratchet and Huffer.) These became one of the great passions of my life. Billy was not as into them as I was; he preferred GI Joe (which actually explains a lot.) Something about the engineering of the figures and the science fiction background combined to really take hold in my imagination.
Ultimately, I had a ton of Transformers. I remember sneaking out of the playground at Susitna Elementary during recess to go look at the toy aisle in Carrs and dreaming of buying some of the ones I saw there. I saved all of my allowances for Transformers from the years of 1984-1987 or so. Unfortunately, there were no channels showing the Transformers cartoon in Alaska back then, but I could catch it on WGN every once in a while (on the Bozo the Clown show, of all things.) Unfortunately, that showed in the afternoon Chicago time, which was midday for me in Anchorage, so I either had to skip school or figure out how to program the VCR to record it. (We were allotted 10 sick days a year. I used them all those years.)
I also read the comics, starting first with the Marvel series. (I still have copies of a lot of them.) The fact that Ratchet, one of my first transformers, was a substantial character in the early Marvel series probably helped. Also, an absolutely epic cover for Transformers issue #5.
In hindsight, the time I was collecting Transformers looms much larger in my memory than it actually was. Really it was only about four years of my life, but it feels like my entire childhood. Optimus Prime became a surrogate father figure for me, a strong male-coded role model who fought for freedom and justice and equality. (I’m not going to lie: in 1986, when — spoiler alert — Optimus died during The Transformers: The Movie, I sobbed like a baby in the movie theatre.)
I did have a few friends (not as many as I had Transformers), but I wasn’t especially popular. My friend Bobby across the street grew apart from me some during this time. My friends Lael and Chris, whom I met at Susitna, would stay close to me during this time, but Lael wound up attending a different set of junior and high schools than I did. Chris was a great friend… outside school. In school, he became more image obsessed and wouldn’t associate with me because I was a nerd. There were a few others: Niall, Steve, Rich, Ray, most of whom I knew from the neighborhood or from the after-school program I went to for a few years. I wasn’t very popular and didn’t have a large friend group. My computer and Nintendo Entertainment System occupied a lot of my time.
Speaking of, just to name a few games that I played heavily, in no particular order: Legend of Zelda I & II, Metroid, Super Mario Bros I & II, Mega-man I-III, Super Dodge Ball, Dr. Mario, Castlevania, Bionic Commando, RC Pro-Am, Kid Icarus and Gradius. All of those games will live on in my heart for a long time.
In the next chapter, I’ll talk about high school in the 80s and getting online for the first time.
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