Inside his five-bedroom California home in the West San Fernando Valley, Ron Main has constructed a time machine.
Rows of blinking lights cast oscillating shadows among the contraptions that line walls of this time machine. When Main and his wife, Vanessa, enter, they are suddenly transported to the 1950s.
They snuggle next to each other in a diner booth, share a malt, listen to the dreamy croons of Patsy Cline and try to hang on to a time that has slipped away from most people.
But Main, with an investment of thousands of dollars and a fervent dedication to an era of fast cars, Elvis and hokey sci-fi movies, has cheated Father Time. He can slip into the `50s the way others slip on a pair of comfortable shoes.
Main`s time machine is really an add-on room stuffed with the artifacts of the period in which he grew up.
Main, 45, who describes himself as a ”recycled teenager,” has loaded his recreation room with talking pinball machines, movie posters, a jukebox, a soda fountain blender-even the entire soda fountain bar complete with spinning stools. It looks like a setting for an early episode of the ”Happy Days”
television series.
”In a way, I never left the `50s,” Main says.
Or maybe he hasn`t allowed the `50s to leave. He has kept the memory alive. But why does this grown man, whose black hair has a hint of a pompadour, hang so determinedly onto the period?
”It was such a simple time,” he responds.
DRIVE-INS PASSE
Perhaps the craving is an escape from the techno `80s, where everything seems to have gone fuzzy with confusion. In the decades that followed Main`s simpler period, women who once wore snug sweaters have turned macho, men have entered an era of heightened sensitivity, drugs laid the King low and, geez, even drive-ins have become passe.
But on the less psycho-philosophical side, Main says he does it for a kick.
”I wanted to be surrounded by the things that make us feel good,” he says. The Mains` home seems more like a playhouse. They have one jukebox, several pedal push cars, huggable stuffed animals in every room of the two-story house and enough pinball machines to fill a small arcade.
But don`t think Main shuns modern toys. They have bought a large screen television. And with enough popcorn and imagination, it might seem as big as a screen would appear from the back row of a drive-in.
As Main knows, it takes a big screen to enjoy one of his favorite films:
”The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman”-a 1958 cult classic.
Main, who owns a contracting company, has spent more than $10,000 to incorporate small sofas into parts from classic 1950s cars.
One sofa has been made from the tail end of a `57 Chevy, another uses a
`55 Chevy and upstairs there is a `57 Plymouth sofa.
LACKED ENTHUSIASM
When the Mains were married three years ago, they lived in a condominium. At first, Vanessa did not share her husband`s enthusiasm for the `50s. After all, she had only a crib`s-eye view of that decade.
”He`d bring stuff home, and I`d just find some place for it,” she says. But they decided to move, partly because the condo was too small to contain the growing collections of memorabilia. Vanessa, 33, says that there were times when she thought her husband`s collection had gotten to be too much.
While she had no fondness for that period at first, it has grown on her. Or maybe it has just overwhelmed her.
”I couldn`t take her back to the `50s, and I couldn`t leave them; so I brought the `50s to her,” Main says. ”Now she is my Peggy Sue.” –
