HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#90 :: Rubber Geek

When I was 4, my folks took us to the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I remember visiting the Sinclair Oil Pavilion, where an injection-molding machine was cranking out green plastic brontosauruses every minute or so for the rubes. Cast-aluminum mold halves were shoved together by hydraulic pistons, and green plastic pumped through the braided hoses that fed the mold. Steam rose inside the glassed-in injection chamber as cooling jets hit the clenched metal mold. Then they popped apart and a mechanical spatula shoveled the dinosaur into a bin. When my father handed it to me it was still hot and soft, and reeking of the most exotic thing I had ever smelled. I fingered the mold lines that ran from its branded base all the way along its belly and neck, up over its head and down the spine to its tale. It was, to me, immense. My brother got one, too - he managed to gnaw a hole in its tail, being 2 at the time. It's one of those things I wish had somehow survived the hyper-political mosh pit of favoritism and fleeting allegiances that is any child's toybox. But like my little red metal Indy car, my tiger-seated gold-metalflake Stingray and my SuperBall, it's just gone. Injection molding was invented some time back in the 19th century. Dates vary, depending on the accounts, and the methods and materials have mutated since then like so many strains of rhinovirus, adapting to as many uses for plastics and rubber as clever chemists could devise. At some point in the last year (judging by the fresh suppleness of the material) one such machine spat this crazed-looking finger puppet into a waiting bin. A low-paid worker took up brushes and daubed it expertly with color, and it was bagged for sale to a party favor wholesaler, whose supply chain ended ultimately at our house. If it vanished, I might even miss it. I'm taking nominations on its name.