The Baron's Top Ten Childhood Toys

I wish I could give a medal to the really cool toys of my childhood but since I can’t they’ll have to settle for the fractal Medal that goes with this post. That being said, it’s time for yet another pointless meander down Memory Lane..
-
I recently watched a holiday special on HGTV called The Toys We Grew Up With. Seeing a lot of the toys I DID grow up with, (the ones I had a few of the ones I wanted and some I never could fathom their popularity so I decided to comment. Here’s a list of my top ten favorites. Future posts will give the BOTTOM ten and the ten WTF? toys.
-
THE GOOD
1) LEGO. My all-time favorite toy. I don’t remember who gave me my first Lego Play Set (it was a build-your-own city) but I think it was my sister Andrea and I got it for my tenth birthday. From the moment I got it out of the package I was hooked. I played with those interlocking plastic blocks from Denmark for YEARS even doing two school projects with Legos (a Roman house and a Souther-style Plantation home). I remember borrowing my nephew Ricky’s Lego bricks for one of them yet somehow they never quite made it back to his house. I was less impressed later Lego sets that limited your building options but I’d still play with Lego today if I had the chance…
-
2) ETCH-A-SKETCH: I think I went through four Etch-A-Sketches (at least) as a kid because I played with them so much (and they really WERE kind of delicate). I was never good enough to draw faces but I did a LOT of homes and fanciful cities. My cursive writing on the Etch-A-Sketch was also about as good as what I could do on paper (but that says more about my bad penmanship than anything else.) I was the best Etch-A-Sketcher in my neighborhood.
-
3) TONKA TOYS: in the halcyon days of my youth Tonka Trucks were BIG metal constructions and I had quite a few--the dump truck, the fire truck, hook and ladder and some others. My sisters Syn Dee. Jane and Andrea did most of the purchasing of these. I played with them a lot but they stayed in pretty good condition in spite of that (which was a real testament to how well they were constructed). I went on a long vacation with my folks and came home to find all the toys (that I had thoughtlessly left outside for the other kids to play with) had all be destroyed. It still amazes me to think how much effort it would have taken to trash those trucks.
-
4) SPIROGRAPH: this is a relatively simple toy--just a pen and compass that let you draw these awesome (mostly) circular designs (sort of the forerunner to fractals) but I played with it for a long, long time. Honestly, I don’t know why I eventually quit--maybe I exhausted the possibilities.
-
5) MATCHBOX CARS: I think I had at least a hundred of these tiny metal cars. I remember fondly my sister Jane bringing me some “European-only” editions from a vacation she took to Germany with her husband. (I recently saw some of these on line and almost wept to see how much they were going for.) Some of my sisters even gave me some of the larger-scale Antique Car collectables and I enjoyed those too. (I think my sister Tanya has the remnants of the collection in her house.)
-
6) LITE BRITE: I was never much for copying the “punch by numbers” pictures that came with the toy. I started making designs early on. (Maybe it was another precursor to my passion for creating fractals.) Dunno why I quit playing with it after a while: maybe it was just too limiting.
-
7) CLUE: I don’t remember if I got this game as a gift or if I simply played it a lot from our “family” games but I liked it so much I bought the “Master Detective” version (a bigger game with more rooms, suspects and weapons), I still enjoy a good game of Clue today although I think it has more to do with the fact that I always play “in character” (which either amuses or annoys the folks we play with.)
-
8) CRAYOLA CRAYONS: a whole realm of possibilities when my parents gave me the box of crayons with 64 colors and a built-in sharpener! I discovered colors like Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Cornflower Blue, Red Orange and Orange Red (yes they are different colors!) Back then the box also had colors like Light Flesh and Dark Flesh which made me incredibly happy because I could finally color people and make them look more or less real! Sadly, the biggest downside was that my favorite crayons got used up a lot faster then some of than some of the others and you couldn’t replace them without buying a whole new box (which never happened.) Still, I think Crayola Crayons are responsible for my love of color to this day.
-
9) LINCOLN LOGS: I got these in early childhood and played with them for a good long time. These were my first foray into building actual buildings. I didn’t play with them any longer because what I could construct was actually rather limited (at least with the relatively small set I had). I longed to build multi-story log cabin mansions and sprawling forts with towers but I just didn’t have enough to build with.
-
10) SCRABBLE: I never really appreciated this game until adulthood when I realized my passion for words had another outlet besides writing. I’m an OK Scrabble player but nowhere as good as those people who go so far as to memorize EVERY two-letter, three-letter and four-letter word in the Scrabble Dictionary so they can make more points.
-
Looking back on this list it seems that most of my favorite toys involved some sort of creativity or using my brain--it foreshadowed the person I would become. (Of course that‘s probably the case with all of us.) No matter what toys are your favorite I’ll bet they have a way of inspiring a nostalgic longing in your heart for younger days. It certainly does me…
-
Think about it.