Childhood Playthings

After blogging about the ARCO Ark the other day, I got to thinking about some of the toys I had as a child... The good, the bad and the downright dangerous... One of the earliest toys I can remember is pictured above. It was a tin doll-house that my grandma got for me with her carefully saved S&H Greenstamps*... The doll-house had mono colored, very square, very hard plastic furniture (You don't want to accidently step on one of these pieces when you walk across your bedroom in the middle of the night.) I can recall the day I received the house and my dad putting the whole thing together... Little tin tabs, fit into little tin slots and then you bent the tabs down to keep the whole thing intact... I remember my dad cutting his finger open on the tin tab during the process. He may have been the first to have received a tin cut from the 'House of Hell' but he certainly wasn't the last! I can't recall the number of times I slit my fingers on the tin framed windows but now I can understand why Grandma kept a large stash of band-aids in the hall closet nearby.

What a nifty idea folks... Why didn't you just give us the lids to old tuna cans to play with? This was obviously the days before the public was aware of the concept of 'Suing for profit'... When you stop to think about it... How many childhood amusements can you recall that were either implements of torture or were seemingly designed to insure a trip to the emergency room... Remember 'Clackers'? 2 solid resin balls that weighed roughly a pound each, suspended from 2 pieces of string tied to a ring... The idea was to put the ring on your finger and then get a pendulum motion going with the balls... What you were trying to achieve was a double clack so that the balls hit eachother on both the down and the upswing... Get the balls out of sinc though, the string would tangle and the balls would come crashing down upon your forearm... Resulting in, at the least, a nasty bruise or a compound fracture... That was if you were lucky! On some occassions the balls were known to shatter and spray shards of resin, which could render the 'player' blind! This toy was so dangerous I couldn't even locate a picture of it on ebay... I'm sure somewhere there's a landfill teeming with resin balls and half-decomposed string. You know, when you stop and think about it... Perhaps the whole toy-making industry was just trying to insure the survival of the fittest.

Sorry about GI Joes nakedness... It's the only picture I could find of 'Joe' with the flocked hair and beard... Just like the ones my step-sisters and myself owned... But if I remember correctly, our Joe's were naked most of the time too! My step-sister 'S' always took really good care of her Joe and she had every accessory available... an inflatable raft, scuba gear, guns galore... You name it!... However, my step-sister 'T' and myself really put our Joe's through the ringer. The only accessories we owned were Parachutes and we'd pitch our Joe's off of hillsides and over rooftops... Seldom did the shoot open in the manor a parachute should... Which would leave poor Joe half-bald from having his flocked hair skinned off due to his inevitable dive into the pavement. Our sister 'S' never let us play with her Joe... Sister 'T' and I always thought her to be extremely selfish but in hindsight I can see why... She was protecting her Joe.
Quick Curl Francie... Barbie's rather under-developed, follicly challenged best friend. I liked my Francie doll for about the first 5 minutes I owned her... I could wrap her hair into a little plastic rod and roll it into a cute 'do but that only worked the first time... After that the wires in her hair never layed flat again. You can see from the picture above that 'Francie' is STILL (after 30 some odd years) suffering from a chronic bad hair day! As for My Francie doll... Eventually I cut all of her hair to within a couple millimeters of her head, dressed her in GI Joe's clothes and she became Barbie's dyke friend who all of the other dolls felt a little uncomfortable hanging out with.

Not many girlfriends that I hang out with today have ever heard of 'Tiffany Taylor'... Probably because they're all so much older than me (hee! just kidding gals.) But 'Tiffany Taylor' was perhaps the most beautiful and prized of my childhood possessions, though I have absolutely no idea where she ended up. 'Tiffany' was in a word GORGEOUS. She was 18" tall with a body that this pre-pubescent girl would pray every night she'd ultimately be graced with... She had long life-like eyelashes and her make-up was just the right touch of heavy but not whore'ish... And her skin color was a golden brown... A perfect tropical tan... Not pastey white like Barbie!

The thing with 'Tiffany' was that the top of her head twisted around so that she could be either a brunette or a blonde... For some reason the brunette side had bangs but the blonde didn't?... And because I wasn't confident enough in my hair color and I'd heard said that blonde's had more fun... My Tiffany usually sported her blonde side. My best friend next door had a Tiffany doll also and her mom and my step-mom used to make the most beautiful clothes for our dolls... I think they were in a mad competition with eachother as to who could turn out the latest in couture for the beautiful Tiffany. The bummer about Tiffany was that she didn't have a male doll to accompany her to the fancy soiree's she was always attending in order to show off those fabulous clothes... But then for a lot of women I guess that's a lot like real life.

Now it's your turn... Post a comment and let me know about your favorite or not so favorite childhood toys.


*Find out about S&H Greenstamps here.