As second grade sailed off into the sunset I received my perfect attendance award, we hard learned lessons and fallen in love with transforming robots. We were becoming a living thinking person. Now I already delved deeply into the spring of 1986 with school, which makes sense the way we break school years up in America, but I left out a major part of life for the last eight years for it’s proper place in 1986.

It’s February 1986, this year I am turning eight. Mom acts like every year is the best year to be a kid, and with eight had some little jingle about “when I was eight I was great.” But this birthday wasn’t about presents. I have not really explored this subject yet because family wise it might be the most controversial, but when I was little we went to church.

Which means I went to Sunday school. This is in fact is where I met Karl from. Karl wasn’t a Spanish immersion kid, he was around 1985 the only other boy in my specific aged Sunday school class. Which is what forced us into a quick friendship.

Now Karl may have a different take on things, but I remember him being a lot more, diligent, I guess is what I want to say, about doing what we were supposed to do there. Like school proper I enjoyed a little free styling with my Sunday schooling as well. But as a young Mormon nears the age of eight they are asked to choose to be baptized into the church as “official” members.

A little different then your chosen at birth thing, but still pretty young. The general idea is that you have to be old enough to make the choice on your own. I was pretty independent for eight in some ways, but yeah, I had to go to church, that wasn’t a debate and so yeah I was going to follow suit.

So here is going to be a funny or sad comment about the whole thing depending on one’s point of view. My main driving factor from this was the local Mormon ward directory, in other words a small self-published phone book of all the church members in the city. See until you were an official member you’re name wasn’t listed in the book, just everyone who was older and anyone who has been seven knows that being older is one of the most important things to be when you’re little.

So sign me up for a lifetime of phone calls from the elders I need my name listed below Mom’s in the Davis ward directory. Sure maybe a bit superficial, but it was motivation, and around this time and the next few years the church has a lot of little tests and goals for kids to achieve. Without a motivating factor someone like me would just rather play Donkey Kong, why add extra study?

With that in mind I was ready to go. Like I said Karl was my only other male in Sunday school, but dang if we didn’t have a bunch of girls in that class. Our room that year was hidden way in the back of church too, which I always liked, no one could come find us. And our teacher was a friend of the family’s (well they all kind of were I guess) Merle Prince.

I bring him up because my birthday is in February, so when the baptism time came, his owning of a hot tub became key as well. Because I don’t really think I fancied, nor did my mother, the idea of going out in the cold of winter and getting dunked into a freezing pool.

So on a cold Saturday in February I went out to, Brother Prince, as was the way people got titled in the church, ‘s house and Dad confirmed me to be a LDS member at the ripe old age of eight. Next year I was in that directory!

And so what if convince myself that meant I was somehow older was my motivation, it is what it is. In all honestly I think that is a better way to look at things from that age than to think at eight I understand the metaphysical world enough to definitely know it all and make the right choice. Nobody actually does no matter how much they posture themselves at church, I learned that over the course of the next few decades, so take that my faith in directory listing might be more wholesome than someone else’s blind obedience to doctrine they’ll claim to reject in a decade.

And the baptism was itself a fun event. You get to invite people over and stuff, it’s like a extra birthday party. In June when Karl was ready to take his plunge it was even more fun because I didn’t have to get dunked, and He had his whole ceremony at the L street house, which meant festivities and getting to play on the TI/99 before and after. Then there is the fun of years later when Karl really soured on the church being able to poke fun at him about how earnestly he got baptized in my backyard.

One thing that I did find fun and still do from this whole accepting the church into your soul at eight thing was the historical study of it. I have no intention of getting preachy about religion when talking about my youth, that’s everyone’s personal business, but the Mormon church has a very interesting history to look into, both from inside and outside of. When one is going through this phase as I was, well at least with my parents, a lot of church history became the focus of study.

Now one could write a book about this, so I am going to skip the majority of details and just say that we read a lot, including the traditional bible for a while and the Mormon equivalent, or equal I guess because they use the bible, the Book of Mormon. Every morning and sometimes in the evening we would read verses until we knocked all the Book of Mormon out and a lot of the Bible.

The Book of Mormon then has it’s own history to it’s origins, which are littered with controversy and murder, which is pretty crazy and leads into the summer of 1986, because this summer we were going to drive cross country to visit Cindy and Rich. Cross Country? Yup, they no longer lived in Arizona one state away but had moved to Canton, Ohio, home of the Football Hall of Fame.

Thus, we embarked on a cross country drive spanning most of the United States along with stops in Utah to stay with even more family. If there was one thing I was to learn in my single digit travel years, it was that we had family everywhere and Dad would ask them all if we could visit.

That trip was amazingly memorable since it was the first time I got to grasp just how large the world was, since it took us multiple days to make the drive from California to Ohio. Along the way we stopped at McDonalds frequently enough that I was able to assemble the Happy Meal box dioramas with the toy cars they were distributing that summer. We stayed in Utah for a while with Aunt Lela and Uncle Dale and I remember lining up all the boxes for the toy cars obstacle course and playing for hours. Surprisingly I might still somewhere in a box have at least one of those cars saved to this day (2023).

Lela and Dale’s was also memorable for having the sugar cereals that were not allowed at home. It made the stay there worth waking up for when a eight year old who fought hard and lost the war for Lucky Charms was allowed to have that marshmellowie goodness. A vacation of the gods! Of course, my brother Randy and his family were in Utah as well and I know we had to have stopped by there, however sadly we did that so much that older details are all a jumble as to which trip they were on.

Probably doesn’t help that most of the time at Randy’s would involve me playing downstairs with his two older daughters Sybilla and Venessa in the basement, which probably changed over the years, but my memory has it the same dark colors in 1997 as in 1986. But luckily some TV programs will help with that.

Sadly then that means the only thing I remember for certain from this trip is that we probably watched Teen Wolf downstairs in the basement while the adults did whatever it was they were doing upstairs. To an extent a neat deal, Teen Wolf for and eight, seven and six year old is a pretty edgy movie and obviously has stuck with me, but pretty mundane.

Probably around this time is when I remember that they had a lot of Barbie dolls in various states of wellbeing. I only really recall this though because I had smaller action men and how one successfully played with a Barbie seemed odd to me, but I was intrigued by the kind of battle damage they took, Barbies head seemed very prone to coming off and I think I remember the girls showing me how easy it was to head swap a Barbie.

The weird part is I remember all that. Speaking of weird, one thing I vividly remember was looking out for gas stations that were usable on my parent’s Chevron gas card. This was another mind blower for me as a little guy. Outside of California not all gas stations had the same name, or even looked the same. When we hit the middle of America, I was also stunned by the shear amount of corn along interstate 80. It helped that Mom was stunned by it as well.

McDonalds happy meals though were still there. So was their breakfast, we started having so many egg McMuffins in the old Styrofoam containers that I could use them as toys in the backseat as well. Then there was waiting for the Little America billboards. That was probably the birth of my love of penguins. I wouldn’t go all in this trip on Little America, but I was still entranced by the advertisements of some Penguin motel utopia in the center of the country.

It took almost a school’s week worth of driving but eventually after visiting other family and then staying at motels across middle America we arrived in Canton Ohio. The lack of wooden fences and fireflies will always stick with me from that trip. Of course, it was a reunion with my former partner in crime Melanie.

If memory serves at night there wasn’t sufficient centralized air so we built these weird forts to sleep in that used box fans to keep air circulating. I know that I found an ewok action figure at a toy store that I was super happy to get since Star Wars toys were getting almost impossible to find by 1986. But I feel like most of what I did there was play in the backyard.

Now the way back to California I might mess up some details, because we would do this again in a couple years. But I am pretty sure the 86 trip is where we followed some of the Mormon church history and is where all the build up from earlier pays off. This includes the Kirkland temple tour in Ohio, Carthage Jail in Illinois and the Navouu temple ruins in the same state.

Kirkland housed the first Mormon temple. I believe at the time, and maybe still to this day I don’t know, that temple is no longer owned by the Mormons. Well I know it wasn’t because part of the tour including sitting in the temple, and active Mormon temples don’t allow that sort of thing. So this tour was a historical tour probably sponsored by the city or some historical society.

And that was okay I guess, but other than it being the first, none of it really resonated with eight year old me. It was the other legs of the trip that would. Carthage Jail is the jail that Mormon founder Joseph Smith was shot and killed at. That of course is the event that probably solidified the Mormon church as morbid as that sounds. Don’t worry ill explain why an eight-year-old sees it that way.

When you are little you look for logical patterns to things, since as I have stated before you’re being taught to believe that the universe follows a understandable pattern. Jesus a bazillion years ago was killed by the masses, so it came to logic that Joseph Smith must have been onto something since they murdered him too. Flawless. And whether you like it or not that simple idea probably has worked through a lot of people’s minds over the years. Had Smith lived on, and maybe pushed for different ideals then his successors in the church, It’s possible he might not have been progressive enough to setup a church that could change with the times and was flexible. That death and the subsequent fleeing the Mormons did to Utah shaped the modern church in ways I personally don’t think it would have if it would have stayed an east coast based group.

The percussion by the local good Christian folk, the Tarring and Feathering (which I learned about for the first time on this trip) was more of a uniting factor on the followers than it was teaching these early church leaders that their gospel was heresy. Being raise Mormon also made me wonder why the non-Mormon’s in those areas never saw that. Of course older I realized that prejudice doesn’t have rational thought behind it and that the thinking was more, “they different they bad!” than anything more logical that ran through my brain at eight.

Change is so normal for little kids it’s hard to imagine that the fear of change causes irrational behavior and so you end up just marking the villains, as they are portrayed a bit in the narrative on the tours, as just being ignorant. Which then helps solidify the idea that this is just a more modern Bible story and probably helps a lot of Mormon’s with their faith when they visit these places. Funny the people that persecuted them might have gotten their way if they just ignored it and let them be. Maybe not, but I think their reaction greatly increased the churches resilience.

It was during the tour in the jail cell that I might have got a little ADHD and started playing with my flip flops on the ground a bit. I wont name names, but some eight year old might have stopped paying attention to all the details of the story. And that is when the tour guide pointed out the story of Joseph Smith’s brother, who was also killed at the jail.

His brother was shot and killed in the cell and blood stains remained on the ground, some of which I was playing on. Mortified I moved by feet from the dark marks on the floor boards. Trauma helps memory sometimes, and I wont forget that Hyrum Smith died right there in that cell where my feet were.

It was on to southern Illinois next and the ruins of the Navouu temple. This was the leg I was most excited for. Some ruins? Why? Well my mother. Mom loved history, in fact beyond being a piano teacher my mother was also a documented college completed, degree having genealogist, which was a career she kept trying to transition to the last quarter century of her life with moderate success.

In this our house on L street was littered with large, beautifully pictured history books. After all before the 90s there wasn’t a History channel, there wasn’t a internet to speak of where you could just Wikipedia information about the past. Nope back then it was book clubs and museums and cool promotions from National Geographic. And National Geographic was something both my parents could get behind.

Dad loved collecting every month’s issue, for which we had a subscription. And then they would both order the amazing atlases, maps and other books that were part of having the subscription. Thus when I was little, the office would have these fascinating maps of the ancient world hanging next to pictures of my older siblings having fun in an era I didn’t exist in. And I loved pictures of things.

Then there was this one small book my mother had which showed off either Greek or Roman ruins. It was a small red book maybe 3 inches by 4 inches. Small to an adult, perfect for a goober. And this special little book didn’t just have pictures of these ancient ruins, but it had a transparent overlay page that you could open and close over the modern day picture with an artist rendition of the missing parts. Allowing one to see what the ruins were once part of. I loved this book and used to go through it a lot. Because of it I was mesmerized by ruins and what they used to be.

Now since we weren’t a rich family we weren’t really jetting off to Rome and Athens on the whim of a small child, so now eight and going on really the first big family trip of my life we get to see ruins of a historical event. The fact that the temple was destroyed actually made it my favorite in Mormon history lore, it was just cooler with battle scars.

When we got there we were allowed to walk around the old temple grounds, and touch and see the few remained stones left at the location. Mom found it spiritual, I found it awesome, it was like the ancient ruins in far off lands but in the middle of America. I would for a while after this draw the corner stone of the temple and so far for fun, I just found it all so cool.

Now oddly decades later I have never seen any photos from this trip floating around Mom’s archives or anyone else’s. Which seems insane I have hope of one day a family member suddenly realizing they have the prints from this trip.

We also made a stop on this trip to the Salt Lake City Temple, which for anyone not a Mormon church member is the building you probably most associate with Mormons. It is in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City and is postered all over pictures from the church and its detractors, and for people that like pretty landscapes and so on and so on.

Being that it wasn’t ruins on a hill somewhere, it was okay. Getting to hear the pin drop from the other side of the Mormon tabernacle was impressive, but this is a tour and stop that anyone can make in the area and never felt as neat as the other stops.

Did this solidify my faith I had pledge at eight? Honestly nah I was the same kid as before the trip. I just thought this stuff was cool, especially the temple ruins, heck Mormon temples pre2000ish are just cool buildings with unique architecture and some really neat designs. There fascinating and I was a little kid who loved wonder, Transforming robots, laser swords and cathedrals with ornate rooms hidden deep within. Wasn’t third grade going to be a year.

Third grade sometimes feels like a lost year to me. I don’t remember much of what went on, I do remember chicken pox. The year before I had perfect attendance, so missing an entire week of school was strange. For one coming back a week later and missing a whole weeks’ worth of lessons is a strange feeling when you’re used to never missing a thing. Then that week we had started a large scale project which involved toilet paper rolls we transformed into puppets and then had to put on a presentation with, in Spanish. When I got back my group had already gone and there was only a couple more to go, throwing everything off in my little brain.

I think Dad’s indoctrination into the world of Baseball wouldn’t come until later in 1987, which could have been fourth grade, thus adding to the mystery of just what Third grade meant to me. We still had wall pogo I guess.

Maybe elementary school had become too common now. I knew the routine. Perhaps some of what I feel like was second grade was just third grade but without a frame to reference it in. The same lunch lines, the same cafeteria and outside seating, the same and with less controversy as the next year would bring, so no memory. This was the middle of my time at North Davis, I wasn’t particularly different than I was the school year before, even with my ward directory status.

So, I’ll throw in some displaced memories that might be from this time. Lunchtime on the grass would be when the boys in my class would gather around and tell jokes. All offensive, many of those have stuck with me throughout my life. Can I repeat them now, probably not in mixed company. Tolerance is a blessing these days and without understanding that these were little kid jokes from days gone by people might get touchy about them. Nothing terrible mind you, we just live in different times now.

Lunchtime also included for some time a yard duty that knew my parents from church and didn’t like my behavior at all. This would probably be fourth grade then since I was difficult that year, but it could have been earlier. She spent a fair amount of time calling me rude. Rude was a hard moniker to juggle as a kid though. From my point of view I was standing up against the oppression of adults.

That angle never helped. My mother would scold me a lot for it and she laid a lot of the blame on one thing. Cable television. Yeah, here is another topic that gets people worked up like religion, television programming. Now, this is going to be interesting to tackle. Mom isn’t irrational for the most part, and blaming outside programming on kids behaviors is a severely slipper slope from concerned parent to fanatical psychopath.

So let me explain. It was somewhere in this time frame of late second grade early third that Dad, who loved watching tv when he got home managed to upgrade the set in the family room to cable television. Thus obviously Mom didn’t hate the concept of it, because she was installing it and paying to have it in the house. No, Mother’s issue was really with one program in particular that she said was glorifying talking back to adults and portraying them as imbeciles in the first place.

If you are from my time, you might have a clue, but this show was Nickelodeon’s You Can’t Do That on Television. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078714/ . Mom had a real problem with this show and claimed it as the defining issue with how I was treating adults. From my perspective no, I honestly remember especially by fourth grade feeling a sense of the world not being fair like it should be, which I have gone over a bit. This actually had more to do with why I would lash out. I could see favorites being played, especially at school where I was around the same kids now for the last four years and it made me mad, and so I would be shitty to the adults I thought were feeding into an evil system.

But I was young and couldn’t really articulate that, so Mom thought this was coming from watching a comedy show where adults were treated poorly. Honestly she isn’t wrong, the show runner’s even intended to make the humor child directed and played on the us versus them mindset kids have. It made that show so successful that it went from local cable access show in Canada, to arguably still the most important show for the Nickelodeon Network. The green slime is still the networks brand to this day (2023).

And I did watch a lot of it. Especially because cable was new at this time and Nickelodeon was this amazing thing where they focused on children viewers. But it wasn’t the only show, heck I loved Mr. Wizard just as much and that show is purely educational based and held the adult on the show in very high esteem. So go figure it wasn’t as simple as tv show bad, but I think even Mom knew that.

She also knew there wasn’t a lot she could do besides air her grievances. By now Mom worked in the afternoons and would go to school during the day. Instead of paying for Day Care now, I was just doing a lot of latchkey kid, which also meant I would get home and watch television unsupervised and love it.

The latchkey side of things may have been a response to a day at North Davis Elementary School when I never got picked up. Mom had made some sort of scheduling snafu and I think thought someone was picking me up for her since she had a class that day, but that wasn’t the case. So, I walked up and down the block from the school to the park and back to the high school forever waiting for a ride. I think what happened was an administrator finally noticed my pacing and somehow mom came and got me but like an hour of more later than when school was out.

Since Mom was attending Sacramento State University and since Davis has no public busing for school one’s parents were literally forced to find rides or order a private bussing company to pick up their kids. So, this year I was put into one of those programs in the morning. Action Bus. I don’t know how long I did this; I have a block of memories of killing flies in the back of the bus, being initially introduced into what Dungeons and Dragons was, but it being an early morning activity when I was little it’s more a blur of colors than an actual memory anymore.

This was the only year it would be a thing though. By fourth grade I would just bike to school, so the Action Bus was a short lived morning event. Never again would I ride a school bus, and you know what, I am probably fine with that. Since this was a private bus, I had to get up super early and be ready for when the picked me up and then wait while all the other kids in the system got picked up one by one at their house, it took forever.

image 64 Boulder Hill playset from Christmas 1986

That makes 1986 the MASK Boulder Hill Christmas. Christmases now since 1983 have been a good run. Now the funny thing is knowing the history I do know, the 1983 Star Wars figures hidden in the tree were probably guys dad bought last second because they were all essentially peg warmers, General Nadien, The Rebel Commando, I think Admiral Ackbar was another. But as an almost six-year-old they were cool. Which to me shows that kids don’t need the rare figure in a line to be happy on Christmas, probably if not for eBay and then YouTube they wouldn’t know one was harder to find than the other.

But 1986 would start to see the boom in toys die down a bit for me. Some of the newer items coming out for my beloved lines didn’t seem as “cool” as they used too. Now this might be in part to the expanded television repertoire. With cable television I wasn’t limited to Channel 31’s afternoon lineup of cartoons anymore. And shows like Mr. Wizard didn’t come with action figures.

I also was really enjoying the Ti/99 and the Odyssey. So of course, by now I was really wanting a Nintendo (NES), but as we know I am still a job away from achieving that dream and entering that era of my life since I was getting opposition from mother on that front. I can remember really trying to find older Transformers or even Star Wars figures at the stores and getting excited when we could find some out in the world or in the back of Dad’s Thrift store

I’ve touched upon it lightly, but especially around this time in my life I would sometimes go with Dad to his work and just go digging through the donation bins in the back of the thrift store looking for any discarded toys that some kid or parent had given up on. Finding a lost Transformer or Star Wars man was always a delight. But my hobbies would start to make a switch soon so this was the tail end of action figures being the end all be all of gifts.

Christmas post the big Toy Era, which I consider up until 1987 when Dad would have me change hobbies, which ill touch upon later, became a little less memorable. It’s weird there is a transition between little kids gimmie toys Christmas, and then the fun Christmases that were created as a teenager. Just some solemn times when I think we tried different ideas for what and how to do the holiday with different results.

Now this school year could have been the start of the Origami fad we had in our class, although that could have been second grade to a smaller extent. Most of the toys were still the same, some of the lines would change but the feelings around them weren’t new or more exciting. Some kids started getting the NES and other consoles, but video games didn’t matter that much to, well the did, but we did have some good ones at home. It’s a lost school year. It wasn’t until the next year, fourth grade that life becomes dateable again. We might have got Battle Beast and MUSCLE this year, I did love those two lines.

https://www.transformerland.com/wiki/battle-beasts/battle-beasts/

MUSCLE sticks with me because they were cheap, like the He-Man stickers, they were easy to get parents to buy on impulse. They were also heavily featured at Brain (from first grade) ‘s stay over night birthday party. That party was a big deal because I had to get special permission to attend it.

Unfortunately for me, his party was Saturday night to Sunday, and well, Mom and Dad had to take me to church on Sunday, so I had to fight to get permission to stay the night, have them come get me early in the morning and take me to church and then take me back after. As weird as it sounds, during all this pro-religion stuff that was going on with my life at this age, almost not being able to attend a birthday party that every other boy in class was going to might have been the first straw in blind obedience to church that broke. Like I said, I was learning at church that life had meaning and was fair, so why wasn’t it letting me attend my friends birthday party? Why is my happiness unimportant? Weird things that kids latch onto, I keep saying it, and it’s true.

Battle Beasts origins are a little sketchier.  I don’t remember there being a cartoon or anything to promote them, just a gimmick, and that being that each beast could be on one of three sides, earth, water or fire. You would know their allegiance until purchasing them and rubbing a hologram on their chest.

But they were small, cheap and could live in a child’s desk, much like MUSCLEs. And I can remember them doing just that, getting setup in kids desks in front of the chaos that was everything else in the desk. I was notorious at not caring about organizing my  desk in grade school. So my Battle Beasts might go in, but it wouldn’t be until desk clean up day that they would come out for air.

But like I said it was MASK, a interesting new toy line from Kenner, who prior was in charge of the Star Wars toy line that won Christmas that year. Boulder Hill was a massive playset for the figures and transforming vehicles that this line was all about. I adored the toy line, and wished I would have had more as a kid. Instead It worked out that everyone had a few and together we made voltr.. I mean all the teams.

I had the main base, and the main villains helicopter a friend down the street had the semi-truck which was another nice piece and we for a small time played with them. But as I keep foreshadowing these are the last days of these toys being… toys, the kid market is changing a bit, and next year I will be nine and have more refined tastes, and then after that I will have a whole decade under my belt.