Happy Thoughts

Turning from the tragedy of current events, I have tried to find solace in thoughts of happier times and the joy that a fun toy can bring to a child. My earliest favorite toy was a farm that included a tin barn (I cut myself on it occasionally, and it would not be regarded as child-safe today), a tractor, some fencing and a set of toy livestock. I was especially fond of a red calf for some reason. My second favorite was tinker toys, a pre-Lego building set. I also had Lincoln Logs and an electric train, but my dad played with these a lot more than I did.

I recall a toy that I desperately wanted in my preschool days but never got- Mr Machine, a robot that looked really cool on TV commercials but was actually pretty lame. Just as well I never got it.

Most of the toys I had and enjoyed were inexpensive items that would wear out and be replaced time and again, eg. the slinky, superballs, silly putty, paddle balls (we called them bolo bouncers where I came from), crayola crayons, and play dough. These were the "staples". We also still played marbles when I was a kid, but this more or less died out when I was about 12.

Briefly, a toy called click clacks, two glass balls on a string that you banged together, was popular. I remember thinking that Chuck Berry's Dingaling song was about click clacks. Supposedly, the balls would shatter and send shards of glass into your eyes. It never happened to me, but the toy was not very fun and we got tired of them quickly. Most seemed to have ended their lives wrapped around telephone wires. Of course, everyone went through a yo yo phase.

My personal favorite non-staple toys included a set of monsters and toy soldiers called "Hamilton's Invaders". You could play out your own Japanese monster movie. The main monster was a green bug with jaws that could grab the army men. The set came with a cannon as I recall and some other minor monsters.

I was a science geek and built models of spacecraft. I also had a chemistry set and a model of the human body called the "Visible Man". You painted and assembled the body, guts and all, and encased them in a transparent plastic skin. Later, my cousin and I buried the skeleton part in an old cigar box and convinced his sister that it was the body of a stillborn baby. Naturally, I had dinosaur models as well. I wanted, but never got for some reason I don't recall, models from the back of Eerie and Creepy magazines, e.g. Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and "The Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemare".
My sister and I shared a "Thingmaker", a device that made plastic spiders and bugs in molds. These were called Creepy Crawlies, and it was fun to make them and place them in strategic places to frighten our elders. We also had "Incredible Edibles", a similar device that made foul tasting but comestible candy spiders and bugs. We had a device called a "Time Machine" that took plastic rectangles, heated them up until they turned into monsters, and compressed them back into rectangles. Finally, we had a kit that allowed us to enshrine objects in acrylic and make paperweights and such. I had a rock tumbler, but that was frankly more work than fun. In fact, none of these toys was all that fun, but we got a kick out of having the toys that were being advertised on TV. We had gone through a poor spell where we got few popular toys, and it felt better to have enough economic security to get the supposedly cool stuff.

I had tons of green plastic army men that had to be replenished form time to time as they were blown up with firecrackers or set afire. I never went in for GI-Joe, the only action figure available at the time because it seemed too much like a doll for my tastes.

All time favorite toy that I would still play with?