When I was a young teenager, I had a switchblade knife. So did a number of my friends.
No, we were not hoodlums hanging out on a street corner looking for a “rumble.”
Those switchblades were essentially “toys” that we really shouldn’t have had in the first place, but it sure seemed cool to have one at the time.
You pressed a button on the side of the knife and a blade popped out, and you suddenly became sort of a tough guy; “sort of” being the operative words here.
The idea that tough guys carried switchblades had been nurtured by popular movies in the 1950’s, such as “Rebel Without a Cause,” “High School Confidential” and “West Side Story.”
