Banned Toys
Where’d she go? “Little Miss Phillips” isn’t any of that any more. Besides being all grown up, she has a brilliant husband and two boys. Thankfully she lives nearby, but the more I’m around her boys, the more obvious it is that things have changed and I haven’t.
My Lionel Electric Train set left the station, and I don’t know where it went. I still have the box but it is full of bits and pieces of everything else, including my“Erector Set.”
The Erector Set included small beams of various sizes made of thin sheet metal and lots of tiny screws and nuts. Advanced models had an electric motor so that you could make something that moved something.
Tiny screws and nuts are not for boys who still want to taste everything.
The 1950’s container held “Pick-up Sticks,” sharpened to a point on both ends. “No” on the sticks and bag of marbles.
Sammy Merritt and I tried to make telephones out of tin cans, a length of string and two buttons. We had to yell really loud into the cans and don’t know if the gizmo worked or we heard each other yelling.
I kept a rubber band gun. It was cut in the shape of a pistol from of a piece of scrap wood with a clothes pin attached. They were all the rage for a while and we had rubber band wars at school.
One cap pistol remains of a “Gene Autry” pair and it still works.
“Safety glasses?” We didn’t have any stinkin’ safety glasses, and try taking the cap pistol and rubber band gun to school.
Hobby horses were a broom stick with a horse head on the end of it. You straddled the stick and went galloping through the yard. Ours didn’t have a head but we didn’t care.
My Duncan Yo-Yo lasted for a while after being re-strung. I never could get the hang of the Yo-Yo tricks some boys mastered and none of my homemade boomerangs ever came back.
It gets harder to whittle down the list of my old toys the boys might enjoy, and the pocket knife is off the list.
I have a few pieces of 2×2 lumber and think we’ll make some stilts. Nothing could go wrong there.
Right? joenphillips@yahoo.com
