Present At The Creation
People who invented or started things appear to have been later surprised to find out how they were present at the creation. Either they didn’t happen to think so at the time, or they were just doing something and thought everybody was doing it.
Here’s a piece I wrote for the school paper (bylined “Staff”) about one of them:
Our Frisbee enthusiasts are fortunate, if unknowingly so, to have at the college one of the original Frisbie pie-tin tossers from the mid-1950s.
Tom Carten, our Speech Prof and host of WRKC’s daily program for the visually impaired, lived near the Frisbie Pie Company as a child. He, his brother Jim, students at Yale and other lost-to-history people used to throw the heavy, unstable, pie plates.
“It took some skill,” Tom said. “You just didn’t toss them like the Frisbees of today. They were heavy, they weren’t meant to fly and they wobbled horribly. After a while, you got it so they would go across your backyard and sometimes your neighbor’s. Usually just your own; we were only kids, not big college seniors.”
The art of tossing pie tins was lost when the company went out of business, to be replaced by another which used thin, unflyable containers. Would he go back?
“You want to get hit with one of those? No way. I was there at the creation, and the creation hurt. Give me a plastic dish anytime,” he says.
Here’s a piece I wrote for the school paper (bylined “Staff”) about one of them:
Our Frisbee enthusiasts are fortunate, if unknowingly so, to have at the college one of the original Frisbie pie-tin tossers from the mid-1950s.
Tom Carten, our Speech Prof and host of WRKC’s daily program for the visually impaired, lived near the Frisbie Pie Company as a child. He, his brother Jim, students at Yale and other lost-to-history people used to throw the heavy, unstable, pie plates.
“It took some skill,” Tom said. “You just didn’t toss them like the Frisbees of today. They were heavy, they weren’t meant to fly and they wobbled horribly. After a while, you got it so they would go across your backyard and sometimes your neighbor’s. Usually just your own; we were only kids, not big college seniors.”
The art of tossing pie tins was lost when the company went out of business, to be replaced by another which used thin, unflyable containers. Would he go back?
“You want to get hit with one of those? No way. I was there at the creation, and the creation hurt. Give me a plastic dish anytime,” he says.
posted by Tom Carten at 11:46 AM
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