Lost Along Our Way to Perdition

re: The Action Pack: Books for Boys. The usual angry go-to line for such cultural extinctions is “Remember what they took from us,” but I fear this one died all too naturally.

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Once in a while at our local church-run thrift store I’ll see something that punches me square in the heart. Imagine, for a common instance, coming across a stack of old VHS clamshells of Disney movies from that long-ago time when the brand represented family-friendly wholesomeness. It’s hard to imagine such an organization once existed but the corpus delecti is here in your hands.

Likewise, you’ll come across books from a time when a book or a series of books could become wildly popular and widely read. Text of any description is read on tablets and phone screens now. It’s been trending that way for well over a decade already. I’ll be surprised to see the thrift store carrying books in a couple of years. Printed books are all but obsolete in this third decade of the 21st century.

Then you come across a box set of paperbacks packaged as The Action Pack: Books for Boys. You see the silhouettes of the fighter jets on the cover of the box amid a simple, basic color scheme, you look at the spines of the books within. Anyone remember novels about high school sports heroes playing their sports against various adversarial elements, with the climax being The Big Game? Not only did they exist, there were authors who specialized in writing such stories, and exclusively for boys.

To be clear, no one was stopping little Susie from curling up on the couch with these books, but she likely wouldn’t have bothered with them. There was a time not too long ago that girls had their things and boys had their things, and everyone was a lot happier for it. I know. I was there. Ironically, I’d had my masculinity questioned by dumb galoots who moved their lips as they read, if they read at all. Real Men™ didn’t have no time to be readin’ no stupid books. That was life in the over-glorified working class back in the Good Old Days, and I give thanks to Almighty God for delivering me from that.

 So who read these books? Maybe some lone second-string lineman riding the bench, dreaming of making it big as the others play. Maybe there was some up-and-coming quarterback who related to Crazy Legs Mc Bain or the Fullback for Sale, or a talented basketball player who liked imagining himself playing among The Fighting Five. These were three of the eight books in the box.

This means there was a market for high school boys’ sports stories. It’s hard to imagine, but for the longest time “Does this sell? Does this make money?” was the priority. 

Looking through the books in the box, I note that most of them were first published in 1961. These books all went through multiple printings, so they were selling up until they were bundled up for this 1970 box set. The world was changing throughout that most pivotal decade, though.

Referring to the 1960s as “a decade of upheaval” has become so clichéd that no one appreciates exactly what was up-heaved and subsequently abolished. For example, no young American man would ever think of growing his hair out in 1961. In 1970, in some places, you could still get beaten up for having hair over your ears, but it was an option that many young men were willing to risk their safety for. Another item that might seem shocking to those who shamelessly wear pajama bottoms while out and about, was that blue jeans weren’t allowed at all in most schools until the early 1970s. Girls were expected to wear dresses because men wore the pants. This forever-running conceit was somehow up-heaved in the 1960s, but unless the girl worked on a ranch, she could only get away with wearing capris pants/clamdiggers, not denim. Until the early to mid-1970s, depending on where you lived, neither boys nor girls wore jeans to school.

I’m convinced that 1970 had to be the last year anyone read high school sports novels. The changing demographics had much to do with it. I doubt I’ll find any African-American boys in these sports books. Or, for that matter, White boys who smoke cannabis behind the gym. Boys in high school sports were well on their way from being small town heroes to becoming another niche clique by the middle of the decade. The market for high school sports stories had been diversified out of existence.

Of course, it’s bad enough everyone is so White, these are all books for boys. Boys! White boys of normal sexuality, at that. The world’s absolute worst, according to the moral authorities of our gloriously enlightened and “inclusive” 21st century. I am not only in possession of an historic item, but a forbidden relic, the very possession of which may draw trouble to me should I talk too much about it.

Rounding out The Action Pack: Books for Boys are a couple more military-themed novels, including one involving aircraft, though not the jets featured in the box set art. The Raft, a narrative of survival at sea after a reconnaissance plane goes down in the Pacific during World War II, is the only one of the eight books still in print after all these years. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this is because it’s an assigned text to students at the United States Naval Academy. I note that this was also the most popular book in the bunch. Given the wear on the copy of The Raft, it had apparently been loaned out multiple times, whereas the other books were read once, maybe twice, but not obviously not nearly as much .

I’ve read The Raft, but had trouble getting in Crazy Legs McBain. I intend to read all of these books, or at least attempt them, in honor of that time when even the high school jocks had novels written just for them. It’s a time long gone and never coming back. Girls had their things and boys had their things, and everyone was a lot happier for it. Now we have boys pretending to be girls so they can excel at sports, if only girls’ sports. No sense going into all that. I’m satisfied to have this relic of a long gone age, and to remember when things made more sense than they do in such a time when ordinary masculinity and healthy sexuality are denounced as toxic by fat, sloppy she-creatures with cattle rings in their noses.

We lost whatever good things we had in this culture because we turned God into a cartoon and then went about our business as if He never existed. Now there is no hope for anything getting any better until Christ Jesus returns. That’s all.

Help a Brother Strike His Chains