It’s Friday! Hurray!! So let’s talk about something that’s going to make us smile
I was thinking the other day about childhood toys, and I remember this little tea set I had from my mom. It was blue plastic and was so old that the glue had yellowed. But I loved that thing - and the old box it came in with the pictures of the old-fashioned girls and the little paper slots to put each plate and cup.
Nothing like those tiny little porcelain things kids get now - the little cups held several swallows of Five Alive (my mom wouldn’t give us soda) and the little plates could hold several slices of fruit.
But most of the time - I didn’t bother with the juice and fruit - I just pretended I was having a meal with Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie or Jan Brady (Marcia was too popular for me - I didn’t want her laughing at me) or the five Little Peppers or somebody else I had read about in a book.
When I wasn’t having tea - I would often play with the barbie head - y’know - the thing where you curled her hair and did her make-up. I sucked at make-up applications - but I would brush and braid her hair over and over.
How about you? What childhood toys do you remember playing with?
Heh. I rarely ever played House or anything unless my friends wanted to play. I think I already knew, then, that I wasn’t going to be having any kids.
I do remember however having great fun with My Little Pony. I also had this great garage that I played with a lot, and a Gobot (I didn’t get Transformers - sigh).
I also had a toy Camaro. I grew up wanting one so bad! It had an open top and I used to stuff my barbie dolls into it and make them drive around.
I never really played much with my barbie dolls, they were just fascinating to me because they had beautiful long straight blond hair and mine was curly and snarled and never cooperated.
But my absolute favorite toy, which has since gone missing, was this tiny five cabinet metal shelf that held dozens of tiny little pots, pans, utensils, a wok, frying pans. 3 of the pans could easily fit in the palm of my hand now. They were so cunningly made and everything settled nicely on the shelves, and the utensils hung so nicely. It was so sweet - all in stainless steel.
I remember being in India when I got it, too. I was ten, and visiting my aunts. We used to play on the rooftop - roofs in India are flat and often are like patios here - and it brings back a ton of nostalgic memories.
My younger sister got a cute red and white stuffed monkey. I told my mother I wanted a stuffed monkey too, and she gave me a black one.
We had the greatest times playing with those monkeys. I even wrote and illustrated several notebooks of “monkey tales.”
When we were going through my mother’s things after she died, image my expression when I found my “black monkey” and realized it was an earless, tailess, naked stuffed Mickey Mouse.
I had plenty of cool toys, but mostly I made my own. For some reason we had a stack of flyers from some real estate thing, and they just sat in our garage doing nothing. They were kind of extra large, printed on heavy card stock, and were blank on one side. I’d grab one or two of those, some scotch tape, some scissors, and some crayons and go to town.
The coolest thing I made was a time tunnel. It looked just like the one on the TV show of the same name. And it really worked! I’d send my little green army men through it, back to, like, olden times or whatever.
Probably my Princess Summerfallwinterspring marionette from the Howy Doody Show. She’s sitting on a shelf with my Sparkle Plenty doll (from Dick Tracy or L’il Abner comics, I forget which)
I’ve also still got my little silver cash register.
I loved Spirograph!! It was especially cool if you had one of those 5-color pens - the kind where you can push down a different lever to get a different color.
Most of my fondest memories growning up comes from riding my bike with my friends and brothers. During the school year right after we did our homework, or in the summer as soon as we got up, we’d get on our bikes, and just ride. At the time, it seemed we went miles from home, but looking back it probably wasn’t more than a mile. Come home for lunch, leave again, and then be home when the streetlights came on.
There was one toy that I loved, but never played with very much.
It was sort of a dollhouse. Except it wasn’t a house, it was a castle. And all of the dolls were knights, squires, kings, queens, fair maidens, and I think there was even a jester.
Very shortly after I arrived at SDMB I put in one post at what my good buddy NoClueBoy has said was one of his most fun threads:
Weird toys you vaguely remember which ran from 06-20-2003, 01:16 PM until 07-29-2003 12:27 PM (last post by Elyzabeth) for 161 Posts and 2,972 Views in Cafe Society.
At that time I said
and all I could add today would be a slinky, little plastic babies that we used for soldiers or superheroes by tying little capes on them, tin soldiers and cowboys and Indians, and magic tricks we probably “saved up and sent off and got” from some comic book or whatever, and a Malayan Throwing Dagger that was guaranteed to stick every time (it didn’t).
Annie-Xmas, that is too funny! Your mom was a resourceful woman.
I liked creative stuff. I loved playing with modeling clay and remember getting in big trouble one time because I was playing with it before we left for church. You know how the clay ends up that gray-brown color when you smush all the colors together? As we were walking out the door, my mom looked at my hands and saw that my fingernails looked like I’d been changing the oil in dad’s car, with all that gray clay imbedded under them.
My sister and I spent hours with our ThingMaker. We had the standard set that made various bugs and reptiles, plus one that made flower parts and one that made creature parts so you could make assemble dragons and the like. I have fond memories of going to Cohen’s Drug Store to check out what colors of Plastigoop they had in stock. Got in big trouble one time for putting ThingMaker spiders in our older sister’s bed.
ETA: Another vote for the Spirograph, too!
I also had a rock tumbler, which seemed to have come with a lot better quality rocks than the ones you buy today. It had really cool banded and lace agates, amethyst, rose quartz and other pretty stones. The one I bought my son seemed to have mostly things that turned out brown – a nice, shiny brown, but brown nonetheless. Any amethysts were teeny little chips.
I loved Barbies and paper dolls. Kids don’t seem to care about paper dolls anymore
But, by far, my favorite was “office” I had a nice kid sized long table, and I’d set up my “office supplies” - a pencil cup, maybe a stapler and some Scotch tape - and be at the office. I made magnets out of felt and sell them to my grandma for a quarter. She still has them, and I have to say that my 8 year old self drew corn cob rows quite well!
And, it appears it never went away, because now I have an “office” in my house, and I make and sell things on the internet. For more than a quarter, nowadays! It’s still my favorite game, and I’m quitting my day job in May to play office full time
GI Joe, lots of Matchbox cars and trucks bought at Woolworth’s, crayons, Tinker Toys, a big aircraft carrier which I think was called “Mighty Matilda,” Lincoln Logs, and lots of green plastic army men, cowboys and indians.
Two things I don’t know the names of. One was a red and blue plastic projector that came with long narrow “slides,” each of which had a four or six panel Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I would manually slide the cardboard-edged flim strip through the projector.
The other was a lithographed tin western structure, that was designed, I think, to resemble a old west street with open windows and swinging saloon doors. The back side was open so all the plastic cowboys and indians could be moved around inside. I think I still have a few of the tin wall pieces of that in the attic. It was assembled with tabs that went through slots and folded over. Lots of nice sharp edges. . .
Born in 1958, so these were '60s toys. My brother, born in '63, was a big fan of Tonka Trucks–the metal ones–so we had many of those around in the later '60s.
I had the most awesomest dollhouse. My dad built it from a kit and painted it blue to match my room.
I didn’t have any furniture or a regular-sized family to go inside the dollhouse. But I had great fun making my own stuff from scraps, and arranging the Dollar Store plastic pieces that I could get my hands on. The primary family was a Fisher Price family but they had two cousins of different sizes, and lived in a neighborhood populated with Happy Meal Toys and Sylvanian Family creatures. They drove a Playmobil dump truck as their family vehicle, and hung out at the neighbor’s Lincoln Log cabin from time to time
I don’t know how many hours I spent sitting at that doll house. For many years it was just sleep, school, dollhouse, repeat.
