Mississippi 1, Florida Nil
Recently I acquired an Arduino board. This nifty little gadget is like Lego Mindstorms for grown-ups: a dirt-cheap microcontroller system you can program from the comfort of your home computer without needing expensive extra hardware. It’s very hacker-friendly, and folks have used them to make all kinds of nifty things, from a MIDI drum kit to a virtual chainsaw. I’ve already got all kinds of wacked-out projects in the works (perhaps even my Internet-controlled automatic flush toilet?) Of course, in order to actually build anything, I need some electronic components, and in times past, when such a need arose, I would gravitate to Radio Shack.
For you young whipper-snappers, “electronic components” are little bits of metal, plastic, and silicon that can be wired or soldered together to make circuits. Back when I was a wee lad, when there was still a Cold War, gas was less than a dollar a gallon, and a “mobile phone” weighed seventy pounds and could only ever be found in a Bond villain’s limousine, America was still in the business of building things out of electronic components. Believe it or not, a small but influential subset of the youth actually did this in our spare time. For fun. There were magazines with names like Popular Electronics and Electronics Now, and you didn’t have to go to specialty bookstores to get them: they had them right there at the K&B Drugstore, next to Cosmo and MAD.
Yes, I know you probably think I’m making this up. But it’s absolutely true. And what’s more, there was a store called Radio Shack where you could actually buy these electronic components in small batches from blister packs hanging from the big pegboard that dominated most of the store. “Radio Shack?” you’re probably thinking. “You mean that crappy store in the mall that sells overpriced radio-controlled cars, ultra-low-fidelity audio equipment, and cell phones?” Well, yes… except way back then, they used to be cool. (Of course, way back then MTV, Aerosmith and parachute pants used to be cool, too.)
There was a time when selling electronic components was what Radio Shack was all about. They even sold little electronic project kits so that kids could learn about electronics. (”Kids? Learning about electronics? Next you’ll be telling me they learned how to program computers from magazine articles!“) However, my recent excursion to nearly every Radio Shack location in the Tampa Bay area told me that, sadly, those days are long dead and gone. America has decided that it’s much easier to outsource the difficult task of learning about how things are actually built to China or India, and the most Kids These Days learn about computers is how to get a good price for their Everquest characters on eBay. Radio Shack, once the happy hunting ground for the now-extinct electronics hobbyist, no longer sells electronic components. At every store I visited, the only things they had that could remotely qualify as components were a handful of LEDs, random stereo connectors, and the ubiquitous DPDT 12-volt relay. (Though those, admittedly, are cool; I once built a joy buzzer out of one and used it to electrify the metal picnic tables in front of the dorm at MSMS.) The era of the electronics hobbyist is now over.
…except in Mississippi.
Yes, when I went home for Christmas, on a lark I decided to stop by the local Radio Shack where I had gotten those kits I so enjoyed in my youth. At first it looked like it, too, had succumbed: the place was dominated by cell phones and euphemistically named “Realistic” audio equipment. But in one corner was a cabinet full of drawers, and in those drawers was a treasure trove. Resistors. Capacitors. Zener diodes. 555 Timer ICs. Stuff Kids These Days don’t even know exist.
I thought maybe it was just a fluke, and that this store just had a bunch of leftover stock from the glory days of the Reagan administration. So then I went to the one in the mall, which had gone even further along in the transition to the new Radio Shack business model of “like Brookstone, only way shittier.” But even there, they had a tiny corner set aside for actual components! Here, in the Most Backwards State in the Union, where you’re statistically more likely to contract syphilis than graduate college, people still build stuff.
It’s not often I have the opportunity to feel proud of my home state, but I can now rest easy knowing that in this one small domain, we haven’t slouched as far as the Sunshine State toward the inevitable dumbing down of America. Oh yeah, and we know how to count ballots, too.
