I remember a fun one but not certain of the name. Seems it was "ssp" or some such. Maybe "sst" ???
Anyway, a dragster looking car with a weighted wheel in the center and a T-handled zip strip. The zip strip was a rack and pinion type of affair, the harder you pulled it the faster the car went. That thing would go about 2 blocks down the street. Mine finally self destructed on the curb.
I had a room full of Tonka Trucks, they were my favorite till I was given my first Rifle, a Marlin bolt action 22 RF. Then there was this Wrist Rocket. I loved those so much that I bought one last year just because! I shoot it a lot.
I remember a fun one but not certain of the name. Seems it was "ssp" or some such. Maybe "sst" ???
Anyway, a dragster looking car with a weighted wheel in the center and a T-handled zip strip. The zip strip was a rack and pinion type of affair, the harder you pulled it the faster the car went. That thing would go about 2 blocks down the street. Mine finally self destructed on the curb.
I loved that one too. Only thing is you could not pull the chord too fast or it stripped.
Also had the magnifying glass. I must have burned up several colonies of ants.
I can. It was a stuffed monkey. Never had a name but just a cotton stuffed monkey about 18 inches long. Rusty red cordaroy body with cream colored face, hands and feet. Button eyes and red stitching mouth in a slight smile.
See, my Father was halfway around the world in India protecting mom and me from the evil "Zaps" as I called them. So monkey was my protector in lieu of a dad. And when Mom was "mean" to me, like making me eat my squash, monkey was my confidant and an understanding if silent companion. Oh, we had great adventures monkey and me. Monkey gained several honrable battle wounds. They were carefully stitched up by a great aunt who knew how to sew in the old time way. Ten stiches to the inch.
When Dad finally got home and I had a real live companion again and bigger boy toys monkey lost my interest. Went on to a Lionel electric train and a Red Ryder BB gun. Things like that. Monkey disapeard from my life along with all my other baby toys.
When we were cleaning out the house after my mom died five years ago we empied the old cedar chest.
In the left back corner, wrapped in one of my baby blankets was monkey.
I lost it. You want to make fun of a sixty-five year old man sitting in the middle of the floor, clutching a stuffed monkey and crying like a child now is your chance. I don't care
Monkey is sitting on the book shelf behind me right now. He is kind of old and frayed around the edges. Pretty fragile and would fall apart if you handled him rough. Hell, so am I.
I can. It was a stuffed monkey. Never had a name but just a cotton stuffed monkey about 18 inches long. Rusty red cordaroy body with cream colored face, hands and feet. Button eyes and red stitching mouth in a slight smile.
See, my Father was halfway around the world in India protecting mom and me from the evil "Zaps" as I called them. So monkey was my protector in lieu of a dad. And when Mom was "mean" to me, like making me eat my squash, monkey was my confidant and an understanding if silent companion. Oh, we had great adventures monkey and me. Monkey gained several honrable battle wounds. They were carefully stitched up by a great aunt who knew how to sew in the old time way. Ten stiches to the inch.
When Dad finally got home and I had a real live companion again and bigger boy toys monkey lost my interest. Went on to a Lionel electric train and a Red Ryder BB gun. Things like that. Monkey disapeard from my life along with all my other baby toys.
When we were cleaning out the house after my mom died five years ago we empied the old cedar chest.
In the left back corner, wrapped in one of my baby blankets was monkey.
I lost it. You want to make fun of a sixty-five year old man sitting in the middle of the floor, clutching a stuffed monkey and crying like a child now is your chance. I don't care
Monkey is sitting on the book shelf behind me right now. He is kind of old and frayed around the edges. Pretty fragile and would fall apart if you handled him rough. Hell, so am I.
not my first but wore a machine simular to this out on the farm when i got stuck and asked dad to get it out he never just grabbed it and put on solid ground he said it's a tractor it has to be pulled out by a tractor.
I was seldom seen outdoors without my Daisy lever action BB gun and its later replacement, a Crosman 766 BB/pellet gun. As much as I liked my guns, I couldn't use them indoors. Indoors, my favorite would have to have been Legos, hands down.
Erector set, model airplanes, and chemistry set.. Actually our favorite endeavor was going down to the local drug store and purchasing sulphur, salt peter,and charcoal,then making homemade bombs out of flashpowder.
Had a TON of em. Don't know how many hundreds of them got sucked into the vacuum cleaner.
My little boy heard one of his Legos go up the vacuum sweeper yesterday. He was on the verge of tears until Momma calmed him down and explained that she'd dig it out of the cannister before she dumped it. Nothing finds stray legos like a vacuum, except for maybe bare feet.
I remember back in the day when I was growing up we would play Army and I made a 50 cal machinegun out of some leftover lumber. All my friends wanted to be on my side because once I was dug in, I would wipe out the enemy, until one of them came up with the bright idea of using pine cone "hand grenades". Man those were the days.
I also remember going to the movie house and watching films about African safaris. I can't remember who it was but a company came out with a couple of different toy "safari" rifles. Never owned one but I wanted one badly.
Mine was about a foot long piece of bamboo. Depending on the day, it was a sword, a rifle, a guitar or a spear.
And in later years, a bong.
I collected Matchbox cars. Wish I still had some of them...some are quite valuable. Also, many of the kids in the neighborhood had Flexies. We didn't get much snow where we lived in California, so our sleds had wheels instead of runners. I'm sure I hit terminal velocity more than a couple of times on that thing.
Wasn't much of a indoor toy kid, didn't have TV but Shetland pony with old saddle a Red Rider BB gun tied on took me on many mile rain/snow/sleet/hail. Haven't been without a horse very often since then.
Looking back I'm surprised my folks didn't worry more about a 6 year old saddling up his horse after school to go for a ride. More than once I got home after dusk but always found my dinner in the oven keeping warm.
most of all my slingshot. Killed a chit load of birds, bullfrogs and rabbits with the slingshot and gravels i picked up off the dirt roads where i lived . There where hardy any paved roads in the late 50's and 60's
Had a TON of em. Don't know how many hundreds of them got sucked into the vacuum cleaner.
My little boy heard one of his Legos go up the vacuum sweeper yesterday. He was on the verge of tears until Momma calmed him down and explained that she'd dig it out of the cannister before she dumped it. Nothing finds stray legos like a vacuum, except for maybe bare feet.
Legos were my favorite. I kept them in my dads old shop vac.
Christmas time, out in the back yard, starting grass fires so I could put them out.
There was one of those at the local five-and-ten that I wanted so badly I could taste it. I didn't get it and it has haunted me ever since. I used to look on ebay and saw that they were selling for quite a bit of money. I would have bought one if I had ever seen one that was complete and in good working order.
we ran a rope with stick handles on each end between the forks of two tress in the backyard and hooked the middle under the footstep of our homemade stilts sitting bottom up and angled on a couple of milk crates. On the count of three we could get a very nice flight out of them......until we sent one through the roof of the neighbor's garage.
For me it was GI Joe, little plastic army men (WWII Germans vs USA), toy guns, and the like. I also had a great little frontier army fort with cowboy and Indian figures that I spent a lot of time with.
Little green army men. Can't believe no one has mentioned those. I spent thousands of hours spitting and sputtering and creating artillery explosions with a sharp rap to a kitchen knife stuck in the dirt at a 45 degree angle.
While we had a few traditional "toys", I can't really remember playing with any of them past the age of 7 or 8. We lived out in the country....five miles from the nearest neighbor and 8 from any of my friends.
Most of my time was spent in the woods and along the creek with a .22 rifle and spinning rod. I constantly had a trap line or string of set hooks in the creek and ran it every day. My mode of transportation was a bicycle and I made a 5-mile "run" every other day with a tow sack tied to the handlebars to collect coke bottles for the deposit (had to have some way to buy ammo for the .22).
I remember I almost always shot .22 shorts instead of .22 LR because the shorts were almost half the price. In those days an 8 year old kid could ride into town with a rifle strapped to his back, go into the hardware store and buy whatever ammo he wanted.....and no one thought anything about it. That store would actually sell shotgun shells one at a time.....or however many you could afford. many a time I'd pile my bottle deposit money on the counter and tell him I wanted a box of Shorts and however many shotgun shells this will buy.
When a gruop of kids did get together (and we weren't hunting or fishing or camping), we'd play whatever ball game someone had a ball for.....baseball, football, basketball. We were mostly cousins and played ball together from the age of 5 or 6. Maybe that's why we dominated high school sports (even though we were one of the smallest schools in the state) once we got to high school (three State Championships and multiple district/regional championship teams).
I remember the Creepy Crawlers where you'd melt rubber/plastic compound and cast your own "creatures". Can't imagine parents stday turning a half dozen 7 and 8 year olds loose with moltent plastic.....but somehow we all survived.
While the creations were sort of OK.....we soon discovered that if you put a hook and small weight in the Crawles.....bass and bream couldn't resist. Mny a plastic worm, bug and crawfish were sacrificaed for a fish dinner.
I remember the first time I saw a commercial plastic worm (a Creme worm with the dual hook rig inside) I thought...."They stole our idea".....not knowing the Creme company had been making those baits for years. I still thought our baits worked better rigged on a small jig head. Tickles me when I see Bass pros winning tournaments today with the "amazing" Craw-worms and a jig......and I tink, "We were doing that in the mid-60's.
Toy guns of all kinds, Mattel Fanner Fifties, a "Rifleman" lever action, Mattel Tommy Gun, snub nose .38, cork ball firing muskets, cannons, machine guns, you name the war or era - Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, Civil War, WWII and a bit beyond and I probably had something appropriate for it.
Playing "Big Army" with the toy guns or "Little Army" with the hundreds of green and gray American and German soldiers. On any given Saturday you would find 5-10 young boys running around the neighborhood in everybody's yard carrying out attacks and ambushes. Lots of young bodies strewn across lawns waiting for the magic "two touches and you're alive".
Had a big sandpile and would build intricate forts for the toy soldiers with tunnels and log emplacements made of twigs. I was walking in my play area by the old house a few years ago and found one lone soldier half buried - a German carrying a rocket launcher. He is in a special box in the closet right now along with the very few other prized possessions left over from those days.
Models were probably next - fighter planes mostly, tanks, some ships, no model cars to speak of. Monogram made the best with the most movable features, Revell was second and I forget who was third. Most all of the model planes got bullet holes via an unbent paper clip heated on the stove.
Hit puberty right before GI Joe came on the scene. We thought he was the gayest toy in the world. Basically they wanted boys to play with Barbie dolls dressed in green uniforms.
Fishing Pole was # 1... #2 was a simple toy pistol that had a big spring on it... it had wood and cardboard planes that slide down onto the spring... when you pulled the trigger it "shot" the plane out and it flew around.... We use to shoot them at each other... had a blast with them.... # 3 was a BB gun....
Mattel made a whole series of models in the same scale that could be grouped together � tanks and a jeep with a 37mm anti-tank gun in tow, a deuce and a half and a bunch of soldiers in different poses. I remember the mortar squad in particular. Cool stuff for sure.
I didn't get a Red Rider but did have a Daisy pump BB gun. Probably shot close to a ton of BB's through that gun. It was a pain to load and didn't hold many BB's, but shot pretty close to where it was aimed. I grew to love a peep sight with that gun.
A hammer. I would use it to smash all my toys flat. My dad made me a solid, cast, indestructible car. When I learned that I couldn't smash it, I threw it away.
Nothing finds stray legos like a vacuum, except for maybe bare feet.
Worked well on stray nuts and bolts from the erector set too.
Loved Legos, Erector sets, lincoln logs and tinker toys. Did you know that if you glued a tinker toy airplane together you could put it on a string and dogfight your brothers airplane. They don't survive the collision so well though.
i had a daisy red ryder. once when i was younger i tried to figure out how many bb's it fired before the lever broke. i came up with just over 100 cardboard tubes of 1000 bb's each.
can you imagine the plastic fantastic bb guns now lasting 100,000 shots?!
I don't think for a second that the Daisy BB gun made today would ever live up to what I remember my Daisy doing, but I'm going to give it a chance! Next time I get to Bass Pro Shop one of them is coming home with me and I'm going to have some fun.
I had a hand me down Daisy from my sister. It wasn't bad, had an adjustable peep sight on it with replaceable inserts in the front.
Was pretty damn accurate. Would take old dominos and put them way the hell out there and shoot them. You would see BB make a giant arc of about 10 feet to get out there but it would knock it down. Once you had the sight adjusted you could knock them down all day long.
I wish I still had it. I don't know the model but it wasn't a Red Ryder. I think it was fancier than that, had a sling on it and no saddle ring deal.
Got curious and looked it up. Champion Model 499. Dunno why we had that instead of a plain jane Red Ryder, but I really learned to shoot with it. See they still make them and they sell for $249 on the Daisy website, probably 1/2 that somewhere else.
A section of blackboard from an old country school auction my dad bought for a quarter...
I was 5 years old, and we had a pretty good year on the farm. Christmas presents were a little more spendy than usual. I got a couple of Tonka trucks and some other cool stuff, dad said I barely touched them until the box of chalk was gone.
I couldn't wait for Christmas in 1962. We would take the Sears catalog and circle our choice and put our name by it. I only wanted the Mattel shootin' shell rifle/pistol set.
I got it, and I also got a Sharps carbine from Woolworth's for only $.89, but it took a month of pop bottle collecting and a paper route to get it...
Christmas time, out in the back yard, starting grass fires so I could put them out.
There was one of those at the local five-and-ten that I wanted so badly I could taste it. I didn't get it and it has haunted me ever since. I used to look on ebay and saw that they were selling for quite a bit of money. I would have bought one if I had ever seen one that was complete and in good working order.
Was in good shape, but let my youngest son play with it for a few years. Rubber does get old and cracks. Still have it, will keep it for which ever grandchild.
I was fortunate to have a dad who was a regional manager of a five and dime store chain so my brother and I always had some cool toys around ...... one of my favorites was my Johnny 7 OMA (one man army), army men, tons of hot wheels and johnny lighting cars and miles of track, creepy crawly maker machine, 007 toys, batman utility belt, evil Knievel toys, Arnold Palmer golf course game, wrist rocket, red ryder, cox dune buggy, dragster and planes, estes rockets, slide show projector, chemistry set, old train set, slot car race track, model cars air planes and boats, slinkys, duncan tops and yo yo's, M-80's and black cats, sassafras whistles, june bugs and some thread, tinker toys, view master, snoopy snow cone machine, man was I blessed... truth be told, Dad never had much in the way of toys growing up so he was just as big a kid as we were .... thanks Mom and Dad for a glorious childhood.
Legos like have been mentioned were a fav. We would make cars and have crashup derby contests. Also teh zip strip motorcycles.
A toy I remember most was a sword my dad made out of some extra surveyor's lath that he sanded down and attached a guard with leather and leather handle.
As I got older of course the daisy bb gun and then the crosman 760 pump. That one sure isn't made like it used to be. I had the benefits of living in the country as well but no neighbors for friends. My dog and I were pretty close.
Every summer I waged war on the red ant piles with black cats and other assorted firecrackers.
I was fortunate to have a dad who was a regional manager of a five and dime store chain so my brother and I always had some cool toys around ...... one of my favorites was my Johnny 7 OMA (one man army), army men, tons of hot wheels and johnny lighting cars and miles of track, creepy crawly maker machine, 007 toys, batman utility belt, evil Knievel toys, Arnold Palmer golf course game, wrist rocket, red ryder, cox dune buggy, dragster and planes, estes rockets, slide show projector, chemistry set, old train set, slot car race track, model cars air planes and boats, slinkys, duncan tops and yo yo's, M-80's and black cats, sassafras whistles, june bugs and some thread, tinker toys, view master, snoopy snow cone machine, man was I blessed... truth be told, Dad never had much in the way of toys growing up so he was just as big a kid as we were .... thanks Mom and Dad for a glorious childhood.
It was a plastic little green man with moving arms and legs.
I don't know where I got him, but I got real attatched to him. He saw lots of action with all my treasured army men (toy soldiers).
'Playing' hard took a toll on him, he even lost a leg below the knee joint - so I white taped the stump and fitted him with a small blue plastic 'crutch' (from a polio fund drive?) and so extended his longevity.
When I got older, losing interest in my toys, it bothered me what to do with him. I couldnt just cast him aside, but he was getting creepy.
Not too many toys needed when a kid had a Wham O slingshot. Going from rubber strips to rubber tubing represented a great technological advance, increased velocity and greatly flatter trajectory. I took all the nuts from the old man's tub of machine screws which turned out to be great monometal projectiles. They whizzed like bees when shot and made the annoying neighbor kid descend from trees rather quickly.
her name was xxxxx( should really say the name), kinda a older childhood toy, still kids though, she was my favorite,
Still have my Sheridan pellet gun I mowed lawns and bought and a wrist rocket with new surgical rubber, not sure what happened to the bikes that took me places. Still have a solid glass Shakespeare fishing rod I picked fruit and bought. It caught a lot of fish over the years but has not been used in 40 years at least.
Many of them. Probably several forgotten toy guns and knives. I remember getting a "Johnny Eagle" replica of a Colt SAA and Winchester that fired plastic cartridges. Johnny West, Chief Cherokee, Geronimo and Capt. Maddox were all well-used. I had two GI Joes, one of which I still have. A litany of plastic cowboys and Indians and a plastic frontier fort. Baseball glove and baseballs. Finally broke my bat. Worn out footballs and baseballs.
Probably GI Joe if I had to pick one. It's like picking one gun.
Quite a few come to mind. Leggos and erector sets. My Crossman bolt action CO2 pelet gun. (I had the .22 cal.- not those whimpy .177 play toys!) Squirt guns were always a hit in the summer. And then there were the slingshots. 'Saved up my money and got the Whamo Wrist Rocket. Every squirrel in the neighborhood feared me, for they knew death and destruction was only a pocket full of rocks away. My first pocket knife was a special occasion too. A little two blade Barlow, which I still have to this day. That little knife's got more stories behind it than you can shake a stick at. 'Even gutted a deer with it one time when I forgot my bigger knife. 'Can't even beging to count how many fish, muskrats and beavers that little clip blade has dealt with over the years.
I remember the Creepy Crawlers where you'd melt rubber/plastic compound and cast your own "creatures". Can't imagine parents stday turning a half dozen 7 and 8 year olds loose with moltent plastic.....but somehow we all survived.
Yep. Same. Still vivid in my memory. Like it was last week. Can see the molds and all in vivid detail. I've often wondered what toxins we were exposing ourselves to as well.
A hammer. I would use it to smash all my toys flat. My dad made me a solid, cast, indestructible car. When I learned that I couldn't smash it, I threw it away.
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