Dad Please! Buy me Hot Rod

Discovering stuff you wrote as a kid is fun. I was super into Transformers and I saw the (animated) movie in theaters, so of course I thought Hot Rod was the coolest and I wanted the toy. My dad worked in San Francisco so in my mind he would walk over to a toy store on his lunch break and buy it.

This never happened and I never got the toy, but that’s ok. My brother and I had lots of other Transformers. I recently found an old one of mine, “Inferno” the fire truck. I had to look up online how to transform it into a robot because it wasn’t obvious and I didn’t want to break anything. There’s a lot of information about Transformers on the internet… I had no idea but it makes sense. A lot of it is very Web 1.0 which adds to the charm.

I showed my daughter (~4 years old) the fire engine and told her how it can transform into a robot. This blew her mind as I was going through the instructions and she was bouncing up and down, saying “I can’t wait to meet the robot!” I finished transforming it and then she had a nice conversation with it while I provided the robot voice. So wonderful! There’s a box of old stuff in our garage that might have other Transformers in it, I’ll have to share those with her too.

Now, you might notice the paper I wrote that on has tractor feed holes on it. My dad worked for the Southern Pacific railroad as a fleet manager, meaning he tracked utilization and space of a fleet of railcars along certain routes. He used to bring home tons of printouts of old reports, and I drew on the blank side or made paper airplanes. You can see with this page I not only wrote this note but I also made it into a paper airplane. Maybe I threw it at him to deliver it or something?

Here’s what’s on the other side. I have no idea what it all means, but it looks cool!