If what I was seeing was Pete’s body beneath his clothes, Pete was in trouble at an early age.
Lines like arms and legs showed up as darker green lines. The glasses gave a green, murky view of the world. The only beings in the back yard were Pete, me, a stray burro and a couple of chickens. But one day when we were fooling around in my back yard, I guess Pete got bored. He wouldn’t tell me what he saw, and he wouldn’t let me touch the X-ray glasses. Maybe disappointed, as I think back on it. The look on his face was more like mystified. I saw him sneaking looks at the grade school girls, and at the bigger girls at the high school next door. I knew that a 12-year-old who mail-ordered X-ray glasses in a town of 400 people would probably become the object of talk, ridicule and his mother’s disapproval.īut Pete, a brash kid who lived next door, borrowed my catalog and ordered X-ray glasses, which he took to school. As it turned out, all I ordered was a book on ventriloquism. So I sent off for the Johnson Smith catalog. This was a a year or so before we moved to Flagstaff, where I could peek at the two nudist magazines tucked inconspicuously into the higher shelves of the newsstand. I had only vague, romanticized notions about female bodies. I don’t know how it is with girls, but curiosity is an overpowering element of male adolescent lust. They did not guarantee that you could see through clothes and make out details of the mysterious delights beneath, but they didn’t say you couldn’t, either.
#XRAY VISION GLASSES HOW TO#
A novelty firm called Johnson Smith Company advertised them in the back pages of comic books, along with whoopee cushions, dribble glasses and books on how to become a ventriloquist. I first became aware of X-ray glasses in the 1940s, when I was a boy in Camp Verde. It is the fantasy of every adolescent boy, up to the age of 108. But it didn’t take a rocket surgeon to recognize the appeal of being able to see through women’s clothes. Then the front woman moved behind the woman who had been standing behind HER, and soon all the Maricopa women were forty yards south of Emory.Įmory did not use the word “X-ray,” because Roentgen would not invent X-rays until 1895. The women giggled, and one stood behind the other for protection from Emory’s prying spectacles. Kearny’s expedition would not be the last to provision itself at the villages, trading beads, knives and bright red cloth for grain and vegetables.Įmory said the Maricopa women thought that his spectacles were X-ray glasses–that they gave him the capability of seeing right through the scanty clothes the women wore. The soldiers thought the terrain was worthless until they reached the Pima and Maricopa villages south of Phoenix, where the native people excelled at agriculture. He said nothing in the region resembled any part of the United States. Emory of the Army Corps Of Topographical Engineers made a detailed and sometimes salty report of the journey. Kearny’s army followed the Gila River across Arizona, through an alien land. Kearny’s Army Of The West crossed the land that would later become Arizona, en route to help liberate San Diego from Mexico.
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