Every Boy Wants a Remco Toy

That TV ad slogan once included me and most of my friends. In postwar America, Remco made its fortune with toys that made science and engineering fun. By ’61, Remco was as big a factor for boys at Christmastime as Mattel’s Barbie (1959) was becoming for girls. A year or two later, Remco made a momentous, lasting change to their slogan. It became the more familiar one that readers of a certain age may remember. “Every Boy Wants a Remco Toy…and So Do Girls!”

Was that premature wokeism? Performative, proto-feminist posturing? Actually, they changed it because Remco was about to launch a line of girls’ dolls and needed to soften their image fast. But what the heck, why not try to claim a little credit for including girls? It was the kid equivalent of another pseudo-provocative advertising tagline of the era: “Should a Gentleman Offer a Lady a Tiparillo?”

Sixty, sixty-five years ago, a woman in a white lab coat wasn’t always the jaw-dropping, show-stopping novelty that modern dramatists tend to depict. It was becoming less rare even then, especially in medical research. Most educated people had heard of Madame Curie and radium. Computer histories, still a rare novelty, already included Ada Lovelace and Admiral Grace Hopper. But most other parts of “hard” engineering, as in building things and making things, remained stubbornly male.

You know that old line, “The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys”? Remco (which originally stood for “Remote Control”) was founded in New York City in 1949 by two entrepreneurial cousins who’d learned radio repair in the Army. My boyhood favorites were eight different parts kits, each in its own cylindrical container, that let you build things like electric motors, crystal radios, a gearbox, or do simple weather forecasting.

Gradually, some girls did want Remco toys. As I entered my teenage years, I became more and more interested in meeting a few of them. The girls. Not the toys. Yes, some of us did know the difference.

That brings me to Manhattan, in New York City’s ethnically inflected terms, “the borough where it be”, and the awesome Ziegler-Woolworth mansion, a 32-room palace on 5th Avenue and 63rd Street, one of the most exclusive addresses in the world. By 1967, when I was fifteen, it had long since become home of the New York Academy of Sciences. Once a month, on Friday nights, for about a year and a half, as far as I was concerned, it was above all a great place to meet girls.

I should explain. The Science Academy held elaborate fundraising dinners in the sumptuous, Gilded Age formal rooms. Once a month, they indulgently opened it to an invited crowd of New York City high school students of the sciences. In what was already the hippie era, the NYAS had a dress code and sense of decorum based on British and Ivy League “supper clubs.” A snappy suit and tie were nothing new to me, a junior at an outer borough Catholic high school. Most of the other boys looked ill at ease in the getup, and despite sometimes towering intellects, their social manners and tone came across as unpolished. There were about forty of us.

The invitation was as tough to wrangle as one to Hogwarts, but if you got in—and managed to fit in—you were a made man. And it wasn’t just men. Besides the three dozen-plus of us, there were two dozen girls, a surprising ratio for sixty years ago. It was a social revelation for a bunch of guys who by and large weren’t used to hanging out with ladies, let alone ones who shared our interests and could match or better us at the microscope and blackboard.

Looking back, I have to smile at our fledgling attempts to approach girls as friends and equals while still managing to get dates. We were, after all, teenage boys. Remember that once genius Dr. Emmet Brown solved the mere problem of the time-space continuum, he was ready to try to understand the universe’s real mystery--women.