The Toys of My Youth

by David Margolin

My bedroom was well protected; I had an army tank that ran on batteries. It was small, but tough-looking, sturdy and reliable. It moved slowly but relentlessly in different directions across the hardwood floor. It shot a projectile from the cannon via a lever on the top. I liked the rumbling sound and chemical smell that it made when it ran, probably nothing like a real tank, but it seemed military, somehow.

For me, controls were a big part of the enjoyment of toys. I liked the toy car dashboard and windshield, with a key to turn, a horn to honk, a gear-shift to move and a windshield wiper. In a similar vein, there was the jet plane cockpit, with the enemy plane on the screen, and sound effects of jet engines and machine-gun fire.

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Not all of my favorite toys were mechanical. I watched Jerry Mahoney and his friend Knucklehead Smiff on the Paul Winchell Show. I was probably the only one in my neighborhood with a Jerry Mahoney dummy. I had no ventriloquism skills, but I liked his little outfit; he was very dapper in a suit and dress shoes. I guess that my older brother didn’t like him so much because he punched him in the mouth and broke his jaw. My devoted mother and I had him examined in several “doll hospitals” in Chicago, but the damage was beyond the skill level of those doctors.

I owned a few hand puppets and even put on a puppet show with a neighbor, Wayne. His parents and younger brother were the captive audience. I liked hand puppets much more than marionettes. I had a Howdy Doody marionette, but the movements struck me as odd, even freakish, and the strings were always getting tangled up.

Wayne outgrew puppets to become a sports announcer. He announced imaginary baseball games in the alley that ran by our houses. His descriptions of the games were very detailed, long, and loud. “That ball is gone, ladies and gentlemen, a home run. No wait, Landis is going back, back, unbelievable! He nabs it!” Wayne’s booming voice was put to good use; he became a cantor in a synagogue.

Puppets were celebrities in my day. Kukla (the humanoid boy), Fran (the human), and Ollie (the one-toothed dragon), and Garfield Goose with Frazier Thomas were superstars in the Chicago area. My favorite shtick on Garfield Goose was when Frazier Thomas lifted up the floppy ear of the somnolent bloodhound, Beauregard Burnside III, and shouted something like, “Hotdogs, hamburgers, milkshakes,” which inevitably woke that bloodhound right up.

My toy world included magic tricks. When I was still young enough for my mother to haul me around with her when she went shopping, I would hang out in the magic section of Marshal Field’s department store. While she was off in the mom sections of that legendary store, I would plant myself at the magic counter where the long-term salesman would demonstrate some of the magic tricks. I still have some of them, including the “disappearing coin” case, trick card decks, and the miniature “saw the woman in half” apparatus.

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Mattel made the best toy guns. My collection included a cowboy-style six-shooter in at typical waist holster, a belt-buckle Derringer that popped out with some pressure from my abdomen, and my favorite: a snub-nosed .38 in a shoulder holster, à la Elliott Ness in The Untouchables. They all used unique “Shootin’ Shells” and “Greenie Stick-M-Caps.” The shells were every parent’s nightmare. A small plastic bullet fired from the gun. The caps were green, peeled off a paper backing, and stuck on the back of the shell. Unlike the usual red caps that came in a roll, they almost always fired with a satisfying little explosion. My friend Randy and I had many gun battles. He always had guns and paraphernalia that I didn’t have, including a bandolier. The competition was fierce, but neither of us lost an eye or even sustained minor injuries.

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My sister — younger by 4 years — played a big role in my play life for a while. She was the cowgirl to my cowboy. I rigged her out in the same style of hat, boots, holster, and gun as I wore. More importantly, she was my excuse for playing with toys that I wouldn’t have had myself. Even with her limited vocabulary, Chatty Cathy was intriguing: she sounded so sincere when she said, “I love you.”

The Barbie doll houses with the cardboard furniture were fun to set up and decorate, and the outfits for Ken and Barbie were detailed and entertaining. Cooking with the Easy-Bake oven was a good way to kill a couple of hours, but why did all of the different cake flavors taste the same?

The main “toy” that I learned about from my brother was a dissection set. There was an embalmed frog in a bag and some dissecting tools. Arguably there is a better term for this type of toy, or at least the use of a qualifier of some type, perhaps “learning toy” or “hobby toy.” Whatever the term, chemistry sets are in this category.

Categorizing these things properly requires knowledge of the owner’s mindset. The more fun the owner has with it, the more it belongs in the toy category. My brother and his friend had some fun dissecting the frog. They named the dissecting tools eponymously: Weezer’s tweezers, Friedenberg’s forceps, and Margolin’s magnifier.

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I wasn’t much of an athlete, but my father did take my brother and me bowling on many Sundays for a while. Every time we would roll a strike or a spare, he whooped it up like we were bowling champions on television. Then when we threw a gutter ball he would say, “Practice shot.”

Upon request, I was gifted a toy bowling alley. It was probably about three feet long. There was space for it in the green-carpeted hallway. It was pretty simple: you put the black ball in the little bowler’s hand, release it, and knock over as many pins at the other end of the alley as possible.

My father was very concerned about safety. He reluctantly bought my brother and me a bow and rubber-tipped arrow set. We promised not to shoot the arrows at each other. I don’t remember how long that promise lasted, but when he saw us breaking it, he broke the bow over his knee. Point taken. We also had darts with metal tips and a bulls-eye target. When a dart that I threw landed in my brother’s calf, he dramatically limped up the back stairs, as if mortally wounded, to show my parents how dangerous I was.

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Moving on to much more complex toys, Robot Commando was more than a snappy name, it was a toy before its time, and it was a heartbreaker. Robot Commando was designed to perform seven commands, including turn, move forward, fire a missile, and fire a rocket. First sold in the late 1950s, it stood 19 inches tall, with a red head that opened to shoot an atomic rocket; a blue face and body; black and white eyes that swirled around, and short red arms that rotated and shot out missiles. Here are two fundamental truths about Robot Commando:

All Robot Commandos were capable of performing some of the seven functions.
No Robot Commando was capable of performing all of the seven functions.

I learned these fundamental truths through multiple trips to the toy store in an attempt to find the flawless Robot Commando. As I brought the newest Robot Commando home and removed it from its box, I was filled with excitement and hope. Move forward: check. Turn right: check. Fire rocket? It turned left.

Discouraged but not defeated, we returned to the toy store. I threw in the towel after a few iterations of this drama. I appreciate now how devoted my mom was for patiently supporting the effort. I still wonder if there was ever a perfect version of Robot Commando out there.

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Toys need to be stored somewhere. The toys that I played with the most were in a wooden toy box in my sister’s bedroom. That toy box must have been magic; it defied the laws of logic and physics. By those laws, the toys that I had played with most recently, my favorite toys, should have always been on the top, but they were always on the bottom.

The most novel form of toy storage in the basement was disguised as bench-seating against one wall. The seats lifted up to reveal toy storage underneath. Despite the musty smell, that space was good for big toys, including toy boats.

For a period of time, maybe a year or two, my father would take me to a nearby neighborhood toy store, Schramm’s, on Sundays. I ended up with a nice collection of toy boats that I played with in the bathtub. Some of my favorites were the firefighting boat that shot water from a hose when you turned a crank, a police boat with a siren and tiny police equipment, a boat with a man in a diving suit and air tank that air bubbles came out of, and a glass-bottom boat that had plastic sea life in the bottom including starfish and tropical fish.

In addition to the conventional toys and games, Schramm’s had an impressive collection of gag gifts: plastic dog poop, a little buzzer that buzzed the other person’s hand when you shook hands, a pack of gum that snapped on someone’s finger when they accepted your offer to take a stick, and perfume that smelled like skunk.

In our basement there were also two cabinets with planters on top; sometimes the planters were empty, and sometimes my mom “planted” artificial plants. Those cabinets mostly housed games, including Lincoln Logs, Cooties, and Mr. Potato Head.

Hold on, you might be thinking, are those toys or games? What is the distinction? I think that the key difference is the importance of standardized rules: there are some in games, and there need not be any for toys. Mr. Potato Head and Cooties illustrate this nicely. They are both extremely simple to play with; the former has no rules, so it is a toy, and the latter has rules, so it is a game.

Even classic toys change along with the times. Recently I learned that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are now gender-neutral; the toy is simply Potato Head. Battleship came out in an electronic version, and Fisher Price’s Chatter Telephone now has push buttons instead of a rotary dial.

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I don’t know how many people can relate to this, but certain school supplies resonated as toy-like to me. The bright, shiny, colorful packaging was a big part of the appeal. Opening the packaging of a new pencil sharpener, scissors, eraser, or box of crayons was like opening a present. Each new school supply held the promise of a neater, cleaner, and better-organized semester. That never lasted long. Of course the newness was transient, but the items also became fraught with memories of tedious school assignments and the consequences of poor eye-hand coordination.

The Schaeffer cartridge pens are a prime example. They were a big step-up in convenience from the fountain pen that filled from an ink bottle, usually leaving a trail of ink spots in its wake. You unscrewed the top of the pen that included the writing tip and pierced a small ink cartridge with the needle in the other end of the top. Two things about them appealed to me: The clear barrels came in a variety of attractive colors, and there were many ink colors to choose from, including the flamboyant turquoise and violet options.

I was a late adopter of technology and did not purchase my cartridge pen until I had enviously observed a girl in my class using one. Her hand moved effortless across the pristine school-ruled notebook paper, leaving a turquoise cursive work of art. I returned to school the next day with my brand-new cartridge pen loaded with a conservative dark blue ink. I tried to match my mental image of my classmate’s performance from the day before. Before I had completed two lines, I had smeared the ink with the palm of my hand, and managed to leave enough ink in one place to soak a hole through the page.

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It is easy to find toys that are 60 years old or more for sale that are in mint condition, including the box. That puzzles and worries me. What type of person acquires a toy and keeps it in mint condition for 60 years? If they liked the toy, why didn’t they play with it until it broke or wore out? If they didn’t like it, why didn’t they give it away or return it for something else? Did they know 60 years ago that this toy, in mint condition, would now be worth a small fortune?

There is a Robot Commando on sale through e-Bay for $3,500. What is the price tag on lost opportunities to have fun? What enjoyable experiences would you give up for a fee? Fortunately, we don’t have to make those choices too often. My advice: the next time that you are around someone under the age of 13, offer to help them play with their favorite toy, strictly for their benefit, of course.