Family, Gatherings, History, holidays, Uncategorized

Favorites

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Todays post comes from Steve Grooms.

My sister and I were blessed with two Christmases each year. Our mother was fanatical about the one that happened in December, so our Christmas celebrations were always over the top. Our other Christmas was a day in March when our father returned from the New York Toy Fair. Each years he took a train to New York while lugging huge boxes of samples of stuffed toys his company recently developed. On the last day of the fair, all the company reps dashed around swapping their samples for the samples of other toy makers. Daddy would come home lugging three storage cases filled with whatever he had been able to grab at the fair’s end. So wild was that last day exchange that even he didn’t know what he had been able to bag.

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We were lucky in other ways. Kids growing up in the 30s and 40s didn’t get many toys because of the Depression and the War. Then the nation was rocked by the great Baby Boom. It suddenly became profitable to sell toys in America. Suddenly homes had television sets, a new way to market toys to all those kids. Boys in the 50s were likely to play with cap guns and cowboy garb, while girls were expected to play with dolls. And then there were all the new toys that might appeal to boys or girls: Etch-A-Sketch, Slinky, kaleidoscopes, board games, View Master, card games, Mr. Potato Head, the nose flute and so many more.

My Teddy

Then, as now, toys frequently broke or went missing, so I have no memories of many. And yet I have a persistent emotional attachment to a few childhood toys. I dearly loved an old teddy bear. Although many cap guns came and went, some breaking almost the first time I used them, I owned one that made me supremely proud. I’ll talk about it a bit later. My luck with some toys went the other way. Getting an Erector set proved to me that I lacked the discipline required to create the impressive structures some boys assembled. A science kit pretty much showed me I was not meant to be a scientist.

How about you? What toys did you treasure when younger? Which of them claimed a permanent place in  your heart?

115 thoughts on “Favorites”

  1. At eight years old, I had a large, metal Tonka firetruck. The ladder would extend high enough to reach a closet where army men would bivouac awaiting the assault of those below. The little I knew about war was gleaned from movies. As we know, Hollywood made war movies mostly bloodless and invariably heroic. Current film techniques depict the bloody horrors of war along with heros. One such movie is Hacksaw Ridge. It is the true story of Desmond Doss, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for his actions as a medic during the Okinawa campaign in World War 2. He enlisted in the US army but served as a Conscientious Objector refusing to pick up a gun. I highly recommend the film. In my fantasy battles, there was no blood and no COs. No mercy. I grew up. Back in 1970, the lottery draft for military service took numbers 1-50. My number was 279 so i was classified 1H (Holding), negating my request for Conscientious Objector status. I was prepared to refuse induction and accept prison. Canada was not an option.
    The truck and troops disappeared during one of the Moorhead floods that finally leveled the Woodlawn Park area. That type of truck is now a collector’s item. The plastic army men can be bought for mere pennies a person.

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    1. I remember the Tonka firetruck. A friend had one and it was the most desirable Tonka one could have. I think I had the yellow dump truck but I have no memory of whatever became of it. It’s funny—I remember a lot of toys in detail but have no recollection of what became of them.

      We all had plastic army men and I think a lot of them got separated from their platoons and left behind in sandboxes around the neighborhood. Some of them later had to contend with firecracker “hand grenades”.

      I also had a Fort Apache set, with the fort and soldiers, including Corporal Rusty and Sergeant Biff and Rin Tin Tin, plus a passel of attacking indians. I don’t know what became of that either.

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      1. One of the happiest days of my childhood was the day we were on vacation in a Park Rapids (MN) resort and it was too rainy to play outside. My parents revealed that they had bought a Fort Apache play set for me just in case it got that rainy. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world.

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    2. My dad set up his first stuffed toy factory (meaning the first factory he created after leaving Iowa) in the shadows of the famous Tonka Toy factory in Spring Park. It amused me to think of two toy factories standing almost close enough to touch each other. But metal is metal and fabric is fabric. Rusted, grimy old Tonka Toys are now zealously sought out by folks who restore them on YouTube. The market in decrepit Tonka vehicles is amazingly strong. Meanwhile, my dad’s old stuffed toys have split their seams, lost their eyes and gone threadbare from too many hugs. Very, very little remains of the many thousand stuffed toys my dad made, while life for Tonka fire trucks seems eternal.

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  2. I had lots of stuffed animals. My favorite play thing, though, was the 45 record player my folks had. It was small, with a red base and a white lid. I sat on my bedroom floor and played records. My parents got rid of it when they bought a stero cabinet that played 33s’ too.

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    2. My record player was likely a decade older. It played 78 rpm records, many of them yellow or red plastic, with songs like “Little Toot the Tugboat” and “The Little White Duck”.

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  3. Your comment, Wes, reminds me of how stupid people can be about toys and kids. Your interest in toys connected with war did not turn you into a warlike adult. Instead, you hated war. There is scarcely a photo of me as a child that does not show me with a cap pistol strapped on. I didn’t become enamored of violence from that. Indeed, as an adult I hated war and violence, and I became critical of the role of guns in America.

    Girls, like boys, weren’t programmed by their toys in ways the culture would predict. Some girls who owned Barbies did end up being materialistic and conventional, but others did not. Playing with dolls did not make girls more or less eager to be mothers. The lives of children are far richer and more complex than many think.

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    1. Amen, Steve. I LOVED my GI Joes and my little green army men and played with them regularly. And I WAS able to “earn” my CO status in 1974 when I had to register for the draft. I am certainly the least violent person I know and I grew up with the above soldiers plus cowboy hats and cap guns and toy rifles and even used sticks for guns/swords.

      Maybe playing “war” so much as a kid releases all the violent impulses in a safe manner and allowed some of us boys to become pacifists. who knows? I certainly don’t think toys have anything to do with how people turn out as adults.

      Chris

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      1. I have a picture of my Dad and me with me holding his rifle. He tells me it wasn’t loaded because no one in his airforce unit had been given ammunition but they did have to take the weapon home. In reflecting on that, I can count with both hands the total number of times I handled a real gun.

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    2. I had Barbies as a kid – mine happened to work at NASA mission control. They would work all day doing space stuff – guiding rockets and fun stuff like that, not secretarial work – and then go home to their fabulous apartment where they would dress for elaborate evenings out with men they would never dream of marrying… sometimes they went camping to vacation. 🙂

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      2. You won’t see this, Anna, but I think you are the most naturally comfortable feminist I have ever met. Your approach to gender issues seems pitch perfect to me, and it doesn’t surprise me that as a child you were able to see how girls and boys are just people who have potential for doing anything they choose to do. You remind me of my daughter, a person for whom gender issues are just not an issue. That is so beautiful for me, an old warrior who has witnessed incredible changes in the way this society perceives gender.

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  4. My brothers had Erector sets and Lincoln Logs which I loved to play with. My sister and I had 8” dolls and furniture (bought at Dayton’s) which we were only allowed to play with at special times. We set up a ‘house’ behind the couch but mostly I just like the organizing and setting up the area…didn’t care much for play after that. When very young I had a lot of dolls and a favorite I did play with a lot…pushing in a buggy outdoors. I put my baby sister in that same buggy and pushed around the yard until my mother became a bit unglued and retrieved her. That put a halt to the great joy we were both experiencing!

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      1. I remember being disappointed by Lincoln Logs. They had an appealing look, but their simple design meant it wasn’t easy to invent new ways of putting them together. (Of course, Tinker Toys were even more limited.) Part of the genius of Lego sets are how easily they can be assembled in a wide variety of shapes. Legos are obviously more attuned to spark creativity.

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        1. Lincoln Logs, I think, were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son. (I should double check that but I haven’t).

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  5. Morning all. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of hours now and most of the toys that I remember from when I was younger or not actually my toys. I remember Bobby’s matchbox cars that we played with under the tree across the street. I clearly remember my little sister’s Disney miniatures, or “creatures” as we called them. I Suppose I am must have had favorites, but I can’t think of any right now. I do love when you talk about Toys by George, Steve. Of course it was Animal Fair by the time I got here but I still have a massive stuffed polar bear that sits on a chair in my room. I got it the first month I worked there/here.

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    1. I got the teddy bear when I was four or five. I came down with a serious case of pneumonia that caused me to be hospitalized. My parents freaked out. My dad lost a brother to pneumonia when both were young, and my mom always was ready to freak out over any family medical event. When I survived, the reward was that teddy bear. Dad secretly hated it because it was not his design, and in fact it was the cheap, shapeless sort of stuffed toy he looked down upon.

      If you look at the photo of my bear, you see the right ear is about to fall off. I used to hide secret messages in that ear. The only one I can remember now was a map to a source of honey.

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  6. I really liked Tinker Toys. I could always count on Barbie clothes for Christmas from my aunt, who sewed them. She made quite the Barbie wedding dress for my doll. I also had the green plastic army men.

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    1. Unlike Erector Sets, Tinker Toys were really limited in what you could do with them. Lincoln Logs too. The strangest “construction toy” I can remember was called Lazy Ikes. They were brightly colored plastic pieces that popped together and were more suitable for building crude animals than for architecture.

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        2. Not only “a” fishing lure, but one of the three artificial lures my dad believed in. I’ve always said Dad claimed he believed in the Republican party and Christianity, but as a practical fact what he believed in was the River Runt, Lazy Ike and Tadpolly. His faith in them was passionate.

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        4. Other people have wondered the same thing, Bill. I think it is at least as much a fashion thing as a matter of effectiveness. I knew about a guy who used to hook real nightcrawlers on a Flatfish lure. That was deadly in the 50s, but it also caught fish for him half a century later. Tackle shops sell what people buy, and that is heavily influenced by fashion (although some old lures are just not as usable as the models that have replaced them).

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  7. I suppose not technically a toy, but my dad bolted a real blackboard (don’t know where he got the black material) to our basement (the only playroom) wall, and I probably logged in more hours there than with any other toy. My sister was the only unlucky pupil. I also remember pasting those little pockets inside books and playing library. And I had put in many hours with dolls, esp. when my mom taught me to sew enough to make doll clothes.

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    1. Dolls when I was young were pretty odd. That was the era that produced Chatty Cathy and Tiny Tears. Some dolls would literally wet their diapers, and I think Tiny Tears had wet eyes. Many dolls had eyes fixed to weights so they were wide-eyed when upright but closed when prone.

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      2. Yes – I didn’t have any of those, incl. Betsy Wetsy, but I played with them at other girls’ houses. I was also too old (12?) when I met my first Barbie, so I escaped that one. I had a Toni doll, that hard plastic, that came with a little home permanent set and you were supposed to be able to perm her hair. I doubt if we ever did that.

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        2. BiR, there was a TV ad campaign for Toni that played on that. A pair of twin models capers onscreen while the narrator says, “Can you tell which twin had the Toni?” The implication was that the Toni hair kit, which was really cheap, could match the effect of a beauty shop perm.

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        2. I’ll keep it short. When I was five I had a Chatty Cathy. When you pulled the string which was in her back a small speaker in her stomach spoke. One of her phrases was let’s have cookies and milk. One day when I was at kindergarten, my little sister took her seriously. From then on Chatty Cathy was unintelligible.

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        3. My sister got a Chatty Cathy from Santa when she was 6 or 7 years old. We headed to my grandparents for the day. My mother gave Jo strict instructions to leave the doll at home. My sister LOVED dolls and just could not leave it home, so she sneaked it (snuck it?) into the car. My cousins, the evil twins, got ahold of it and pulled the string so often that Chatty was Silent Cathy forever after.

          Those cousins were destructo children.

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        4. Jacque, there is a theme about toys that seems rich with psychological implications. Think of the destroyed toys in the classic first Toy Story movie. Kid after kid ripped the head of Barbie, poured glue on plastic soldiers or gave a near-fatal haircut to some doll with glamorous locks. As far as I can tell, those kids did not grow up to be serial killers, but to look at their toys you sure would have worried about that!

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  8. Our 2 year old grandson’s favorite toys right now are the 45 piece floor puzzles we got him for Christmas. Our son and Dil are very fussy about the toys he is allowed, and won’t let him play with anything noisy or that has flashing lights-essentially nothing with batteries. His favorite book right now is Where The Wild Things Are. He also likes superheroes.

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    1. I remember that I did not allow toy guns in the house. But then my son made guns out of toilet paper or paper towel tubes, legos, sticks, or anything else that he could. However, he is quite a passivist now.

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      2. There was a cartoon we kept around for quite a few years that showed a mother telling a friend, “We never give Sally dolls or other gender-specific toys.” The next frame shows Sally, holding up a hammer and wrench and saying, “Why yes, Ken, I’d love to go to the prom with you!”

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  9. Our son being born prematurely resulted in low muscle tone in his upper body and very poor fine motor ability. He rarely wanted to play with toys requiring manipulation, and preferred books and action figures. Our daughter didn’t play with toys much, either. For her, fun was just playing with her friend across the street. They were active girls who didn’t play with dolls. They ran around and played make believe, dressing in costumes, etc.

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  10. I was a game nerd. Monopoly, Risk, Chess, Stratego, checkers, Chinese checkers, Life, Sorry, Clue, you name it. I was also into all the sports games I could get my hands on. And I loved my slot cars. Had the track set up in the attic playroom. I’d race those cars for hours.

    But my favorite game other than Risk was my hockey game with the six little two-dimensional metal men that were controlled by steel rods running under the “ice rink.” You batted around a black plastic puck and played like regular hockey except there were no penalties or fights . . . at least not in my league. I had the official NHL set with all six teams represented so I could have Toronto play Montreal or Chicago play Detroit or New York play Boston. Hours and hours of fun, especially when I could persuade my dad to play. He hates to lose!

    Chris in Owatonna

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      1. That never stopped me. I have a brother and a sister and had lots of kids in the neighborhood, but I’d play Risk, Monopoly, Chess, GI Joes, Army men, and other stuff all by myself. I used to have epic Risk games by playing all six colors of armies at the same time. Blue usually won since that was “my” army, but I mostly left it up to the roll of the dice and the random draw of the territory cards at the beginning to determine the winner.

        Seriously, I was (am??) a nerd with a capital “N.” I still like to play chess against a computer more than I enjoy playing against a person. Probably because I can play anytime I want on the spur of the moment.

        Chris

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  11. Wes’ and Bills’ Tonka trucks reminds me of Joel’s absolute favorite pre-school era – a Tonka (or near relative) backhoe digger that we inherited from a 5-year-old friend as he sort of outgrew that stage. A close second was the dump truck into which he’d load things for hours, saying aloud each time… Duummpp!

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  12. The only toy that I know for certain what happened to it was my Lionel train set. It was a passenger train with sleek silver cars that lit up, showing the passengers in silhouette. It sat in a wooden Pepsi Cola crate until long after we were married, slowly rusting away in the basement. I finally sold it to a train shop and bought Robin an antique sewing bird with the proceeds.

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    1. I know what happened to the plastic cowboys and Indians in my Fort Apache outfit. I had an electric train that was truly stupid because all it could do is run around in a circle on a table the size of a card table. Boring!!! So I set up the train to run in circles in our basement with the plastic cowboys and Indians in the freight cars. Then, with the train buzzing around in circles, I blazed away at them with my BB gun.

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  13. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    My favorite toys were my cowboy hat and six shooters, ala Annie Oakley, complete with the stick horse that went with this ensemble. I desperately wanted cowboy boots, but those never arrived. I bounced around our little town “shooting” bad guys and rescuing people, just like Annie did on her TV show. The only sensible use for dolls was that they became the bad guys’ victims who were in need of rescue. Beyond that, I had little interest in dolls, including the Barbie Doll which arrived a few years later.

    The true hierarchy of toys showed up in my little red suitcase which I packed each time I was mad at my mom. I have told the story to you before, in which I got into the habit of running away each time she and I got into it (often). The toys that went into the the suitcase were as follows:

    * book. “What do Daddies Do All Day?”
    * records: the above mentioned yellow Howdy Doody records
    * a bandana to complete the Annie Oakley outfit
    * one doll in case a victim was required on my journey.

    I usually wore the cowboy hat and six shooters, and off I would go, suitcase in hand, to the park one block away until I thought mom was sufficiently sorry. I spent the time swinging on the swings and spinning on the merry-go-round, waiting for the neighbor girls to come out to play with me.

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  14. The comments about Barbies make me realize remember that I had Barbies. I didn’t have a lot of them but I had the most magnificent clothes ever. My aunt Patsy could sew or knit anything and so I had fabulous doll clothes. I made a house for my Barbies out of a dresser (which I still own) because there was no way that money would be spent on a plastic Barbie house in my family.

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  15. Ames Brothers? I think so. If so, I cannot pass up the opportunity to remembrance Ed Ames on the Johnny Carson Show throwing a tomahawk at a human-shaped target and scoring a hit upon its “lower” body.

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  16. I had a squirt gun once. Shortly after getting it, I sat in the back seat of our family car idly shooting at passing objects. Suddenly a car sped past us on the left, then wheeled over and stopped right in front of our car. Dad had to hit the brakes to avoid a collision. A man jumped out of the car and approached us, his face red, angry and dripping water. He roared, pointing at me, “HE SHOT ME!” I had tossed off a shot at his car when we passed it earlier, never guessing that the driver’s side window was down. I think my victim was a local politician who took himself very seriously!

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  17. Hi-
    My brother had the erector set. Grandma’s house had the used set (partial set) of lincoln logs. I had LEGO’s. (I heard on Seth Meyers recently the plural of LEGO is still LEGO. He said it’s too late for him. I agree. LEGO’s).
    https://www.nbc.com/late-night-with-seth-meyers/video/seth-settles-the-lego-vs-legos-debate/4309659

    I think Grandma also had the partial set of Tinker Toys. I’m sure she bought all this stuff from the church rummage sale. Half the little ends were broken off the tinker toys. Nothing would stick together.
    We had a little magnetic set that was pretty fun. It was a blue plastic platform with 4 2″ magnets built into it. Then little depressions for the various metal shapes. That was a pretty fun toy.
    I wanted the Verti-bird helicopter toy. Had one. And then in my late 20’s, I got on one of those Saturday morning garage sale things on the radio and asked for one and got 2 locally. Still have them downstairs but haven’t used them in years. I’m still enamored with helicopters and I’ve gotten a few remote controlled helicopters over the years.

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    1. I played with a lot of toy tractors and matchbox cars. My Dad took one of my tractors and modified it by putting dual rear wheels on it. That was REVOLUTIONARY for the time! I still have it; it’s the coolest thing ever. All the rubber smoke stacks are broken off the tractors; they never lasted.

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  18. Aside from the NASA-employed Barbies mentioned above, favorite toys were my chalkboard/easel – hours of either “school” or creating things. One side had a tray for chalk, the other side had a deeper well for paints and other materials. Loved that easel.

    And then there were the dress-up clothes. My mom somewhere found a pile of what must have been dance recital costumes – no tutus, more like little jester dresses and such. A favorite was a two piece affair that was meant, I think, to be a “genie” outfit. It was a little scratchy, but those sparkly sheer balloon pants with the pink trunks were coveted and often there were great negotiations with my playmates over who got that outfit on any given day. I also had a calico dress, pinafore, and sun bonnet in my dress up wardrobe. I grew up in the 70s, during the height of the “Little House…” craze. My best friend Lisa and I spent countless afternoons and weekends playing “pioneers” (which included everything from attending our one-room schoolhouse in her basement, churning butter, and surviving locusts and horrible blizzards…sometimes all within a single day). I had Legos and Lincoln Logs and a kit with really cool colored plastic shapes for construction, but Pioneers and NASA Barbie, those were absolute favorites.

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  20. All of my cap guns were forgettable, all but one. I was the proud owner of a Mattel Fanner 50 cap pistol. It was such a faithful copy of the Colt .45 Peacemaker that an untrained eye would take them to be the same. The cylinder rotated and you had to load the bullets one by one, just like the real thing. You prepared the bullets by cutting 6 squares off a cap roll, being sure there was a powder pellet in each piece. You took the bullet apart, jammed the square with the pellet down in the shell, then put the projectile on top so it looked like a bullet. With all the steps involved, it took at least ten minutes to load the pistol with six shots.

    That meant I had to be careful about shooting or I’d have an empty gun at the critical moment. I’d sit cross-legged in front of the lovely cherrywood radio console in our living room, listening to my favorite radio shows: Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston, Hopalong Cassidy, etc. They ran a series of great kids’ shows on Thursday nights. With experience, I knew the action in each half-hour show would get hot at about the 24-minute spot. I’d hold fire until then, coming in shooting when my radio heroes most needed support. I’d be up and loaded for the next show before the critical moment for it arrived.

    Ames wasn’t big enough to have a village idiot, but we had a village simpleton: a gentle, childlike Greek immigrant named Martin Papadopoulos. We all called him Spaghet. He walked the streets of downtown in costume, whistling the themes from his favorite TV shows: Have Gun, Will Travel, Gunsmoke, etc. On his hip Spaghet wore a holster with a Fanner 50 cap gun. His usual costume was a Stetson and other cowboy garb, but he could dress as Captain Video or Joe Friday when that was his mood. Businessmen would sneak in behind him and suddenly shout, “DRAW, kid!” Spaghet would whirl, whipping out his pistol. I once saw him jump into the street with a pretend lariat, acting as if he meant to rope a passing car. Spaghet loved the attention his costumes brought him, never guessing that people he thought were laughing with him were laughing at him.

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    1. Oh yeah, cap guns. I had a few with the rolls of caps. Eventually I’d just get a hammer and smash the roll on the front steps. Then the plastic 6 shot ring came out. Those were a little better.
      Mom didn’t like my playing with too many guns. Yet we had actual rifles on the farm. I remember buying the toy plastic M16 machine gun. When squeezing the trigger repeatedly it made a really annoying ratcheting noise. Mom took that away and hid it at one point. Which was OK, I’d just get the actual 22 rifle and go shoot at tin cans.
      I think that’s one of the issues today; as a kid we learned how to handle rifles and use them safely. If you don’t know what they actually can do, you tend to glorify them.

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  21. One afternoon Spaghet entered a Phillips 66 gas station and pretended to hold it up, demanding all the cash. Laughing, the owner handed over the money, then said, “Come on, Spaghet! It’s time to give me my money back.” Instead of the Fanner 50 cap pistol, Spaghet had managed to get his hands on a real Peacemaker that shot real bullets. He blew two holes in the ceiling and ran away.

    Of course, the cops picked him up right away. He was the only simple character in town dressed up like Matt Dillon, whistling cowboy show themes as he walked the sidewalks. His stunt would surely land him in jail now, but everybody in town knew him and most of us liked him. As my dad put it, telling me the story, Spaghet hid in Boone for about a year while emotions over his crime gradually cooled, then came back and resumed his downtown walks. Boone, my parents explained, was a “railroad town” that had rougher citizens. Like Ames, Boone also had Greek immigrants, and they chaperoned him until it was safe for him to return to Ames.

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        2. Jim Bowie’s knife
          Lash Larue’s whip
          Bat Masterson’s cane
          The writers always had to work those into the story.

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  23. Play Doh was fun, but it got boring. I also had a gizmo that heated up molds that you could make rubber-like snakes and insects with this special colored liquids. I forget what it was called. I think they may have been edible.

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  24. My Gilbert Chemistry Set.
    Once when my parents were entertaining a group of their friends, I managed (not intentionally) a sulphurous-smelling and smoky concoction that cleared everyone out of the house.

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    1. Love, love, love ’em! My erstwife and I used to play with Super Balls that glowed in the dark. You’d hit them with a flashlight and then bounce them back and forth in total darkness. And if you have dogs that retrieve and want to catch balls, this gets tricky. I never laughed so hard!

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      1. You ever throw a ping pong ball in a bathtub? We did that when we had just acquired the world’s most manic cat. He raced around chasing that ball in a way that reminded me of that kid storybook in which tigers run around until they melt down in butter!

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  27. We were so poor I had a stump for a toy. 🙂
    I do remember an uprooted tree in the backyard and I played in the roots of that.
    And I spent a lot of time on the lime pile down by the barn.
    And a stick. I had a stick. 🙂

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        1. Ben, Shane is much more than a masterpiece of western movies. It is archetypal and unforgettable. Some evil guys have assumed control over a small town, and they hate homesteaders. There is a homesteader who is married to a super hot woman. He and his family are threatened by the bad guys. Along comes Shane, a gunslinger who is incredibly deadly. The wife falls for him, and the homesteader has mixed feelings because he needs Shane’s help to fight the bad guys but is afraid his wife will choose exotic Shane over a dirt farmer. The tensions build. At one point the homesteader takes on the impossible challenge on his land, getting rid of a HUGE stump. Shane joins in the effort to clear the stump. The two men struggle under a hot sun to defeat this amazing stump, knowing that at one level they are competing for the lady’s favor. I really recommend you see this. Shane is one of the best six or so western films ever made, a movie that was so far above others that it changed filmmaking.

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      1. You had a NEW refrigerator??

        I remember, before mom and dad got one, playing in the hole in the kitchen cabinets where the dishwasher was going to go. It’s a much smaller hole these days.

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  29. wowv111 when i got to check in after midnight
    bikes and card games records in the turntable were my passions
    crayons and baseball stuff
    legos tinker toys lincoln logs army men nope
    6 shooters done by age 4
    i had a memory of catching he’ll from my first grade teacher for writing as an extra credit vehicle
    finish your math, science or other classroom activity and you could write stories as extra credit
    i liked it she didn’t and she gave me hell for finishing all my work so fast and writing all those stories
    i remember having 100 at one time she didn’t like having to grade them
    she got behind
    i realized later she was a 21 year old first year teacher who was lost and i was a mit full. miss majerous
    awful
    then i went to the nuns
    miss majerous seemed like a good one compared to those nazis
    my tractor that i rode around my neighborhood was my passion age 234 i was a ball of fire riding all over age 6 i got the two wheeler down and life was never the same
    i had a stuffed cat named mr boo and a doll named deedee i enjoyed until 3 or so like velveteen rabbits i wore them out
    my moms mom liked stuffed animals as special gifts but the stife animals from germany were expensive non cuddle friendly meant to sit on shelves not be played with
    twins and viking moved to town when i was 5
    my life was complete
    i was too young to lament the lakers move to los angeles but the twins and vikings were all i needed
    ray dewberry and i played rummy. cribbage, gin,
    all stuff you could keep a running score with
    remember 4 square and box hockey
    pom pom pole away red robin red robin
    kick the can
    we had games with rules we made up hitting driveway rocks with sticks . the favorite sticks were the flat surveyors sticks from the new houses being built around the neighbor hood
    we got in trouble every tome for pulling those out of the ground but they were the best so it was worth it

    fun post steve

    Liked by 4 people

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