Effect Of A Memoir - End Of The Search!
This past November (2013), I decided to begin writing a humorous version of my memoirs. I'm not a celebrity, but my early years were, according to many of my friends, rather exceptional, and worthy of sharing them in a humorous context.
Anyway, I made a list of my 75 most memorable, fun, interesting, strange, unusual, unexpected and significant activities, projects, experiments and creative explorations from age 5 to 21 as a basis for "the early years" in this memoir. Within this list, of course, I'd included the functional car kit with the orange gears.
Once again, I did a number of Google searches with what little I could recall about this fantastic kit, but still came up with nothing. I moved on to look for more detail about another kit that my twin brother and I had played with when we were 11 in 1969. We'd always called it a "Knight Kit". It had been passed down from our older brother.
Putting "Knight Kit" into a Google search turned up some interesting hits. I learned that "Knight Kit" was not the name of a specific kit. Rather, it was a line of products sold by Allied Electronics. This led me to pull up an archived version of a 1969 Allied catalogue. I started thumbing through the pages of its electronic equivalent, but soon realized that I might have better luck if I could find the index. Not noticing at first that it gave the page of the index, I went to the back and started thumbing backward from page 542!
Just nine pages into my search for the index I stopped, dumbfounded! I couldn't believe what I saw! There, on the bottom-right corner of page 533, was a tiny, crude, B&W, newsprint picture of a box featuring that incredible functional car kit on it!!!
Continuing to thumb backward to resume my initial search intent, I found the Knight Kit Electronic Science Lab Kit just 21 pages beyond this, but suddenly that wasn't as important any more. I'd just found KEY information about the car kit! It was made by Remco (aka Remcraft), and it was called the "Automobile Lab Kit"!
Entering this combination of terms into Google turned up lots of pictures of my coveted kit from so very many decades prior!
Finally, I had irrefutable proof that I hadn't simply imagined this great functional car kit!