The toys and games we grew up with
If there were little ones around your Christmas tree, chances are their cute little noses were buried deep into their electronic devices shortly after they unwrapped their presents.
From toddlers to teens, the hot gifts included smart watches, virtual reality headsets, and game systems. It’s not unusual to see kids barely out of diapers tapping on their iPhones, iPods, iPads and iDon’t Know What Else.
It makes you wonder. What DID we play with before Apple, Amazon and V-Tech ruled the world? How did we manage with only Mattel, Milton Bradley, and Wham-O?
I posed that question to my Facebook friends. They helped jog my memory, back to the days when we were unburdened by a need to recharge our devices.
Every little girl’s dream was an Easy Bake Oven. As a former little boy, I must confess I was intrigued as well. After all, it made cookies. Many of the expert bakers of today started out with an Easy Bake Oven. I can’t imagine such a product passing the safety tests of today, but somehow 8-yearolds of the 1960s fired that sucker up and lived to tell about it.
Boys like things that bounce. The higher the bounce, the better the chance of reaching the sky. Wham-O introduced the Superball back then, which bounced really high, and proved very lucrative for the window replacement business.
The Sunday comics section, in color, has always been a favorite for kids. When the makers of Silly Putty told us their magical flesh-colored goo could copy the color ink, we rushed to the stores. As my friend Donna Arnold Kirk wrote, “I thought it was magic.”
Speaking of magic, what could be more magical than the Etch-a-Sketch? You use two knobs to create art, then shake it up to erase, and start all over. Or the Wooly Willy, which allowed us to use a magnetic wand to move “hair” on the face and head of clean-shaven Willy. While we’re talking makeovers, we could grab a potato from the kitchen, creating all sorts of identities for Mr. Potato Head.
I wonder how many of today’s beauticians and designers were influenced by Barbie, Ken, Skipper, and Swingy? Susan Kendall wrote, “I loved my Barbie dolls and played with them daily. Even though I didn’t have all the fancy accessories, my sisters and I used our imaginations. The lid to a hairspray can became an ottoman, a shoebox could be covered with a dishtowel to make a bed, and those plastic cups left over from the Lord’s Supper at church made a nice little flower vase!”
No doubt many medical professionals got their start by playing Operation. Surely the Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Pick-Up Sticks, SpiroGraph and Leg-Os inspired countless engineers, builders, and architects.
I’ll bet you anybody who does automotive work glued together model cars, or played with Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels.
Those of us who grew up with black and white TVs were fascinated by our View Masters, with those round, rotating cards that showed us a world in color.
Every kid was envious of a classmate who owned the Crayola box of 64 crayons, with the sharpener. Most of us had 8 crayons, or maybe 16. But if you had 64 Crayolas with the sharpener, you were king of the neighborhood.
My wife Cindy remembers her life-size Patti PlayPal doll, which was as big as a four-year-old child, and just sort of sat there. One night, her dad, a practical joker, had Cindy swap clothes with Patti PlayPal, and then sit in the doll’s position at the table. Anything to put a scare into dear ol’ Mom, right?
One of my earliest childhood memories is a trip to the Shop-Rite supermarket in Trenton with my dad. I was about four. I spotted a kiddy car on the top shelf, just big enough for me to sit behind the wheel. I wanted it right then. Not for my birthday, and not for Christmas. I commenced kicking and screaming. Photographic evidence shows me happily steering it through the living room, not long after. Thirty years later, I took my son to Toys ‘R Us for the one and only time in his life. Why is he screaming like that, I wondered. Whose side of the family could that be from?
Angela Meyer remembers “Chatty Cathy, who made me who I am today!” Many others recalled the Betsy Wetsy doll. These days, the toymakers probably wouldn’t stop at “Wetsy.”
Of course, many simple items kept us busy. Yoyos, slingshots, jump ropes, pogo sticks, jacks and marbles. Even the manual typewriter. I saw one in a veteran teacher’s classroom recently. All the middle school students were puzzled by it. “How do you turn it on?” they asked.