Toys That Survived Two Generations of Play
When my brother and I were youngsters in the 1960s, we had
some favorite toys that had belonged to our parents when they were children in
the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these toys were at the farmhouse where my dad was
raised, and others were kept at my grandparents’ house near Eagle Lake, Minnesota.
Our family often drove there on Sunday to visit my grandparents, and my brother
and I would drag out a box of toys kept on the ledge along the basement stairs
to amuse ourselves, or we would head upstairs to my uncle Dwight’s old bedroom
where a set of shelves held a few more toys and games plus a collection of Big
Little Books, whose fat, chunky shape—about four inches square—pleased me in
some odd way.
Here are a few of my favorites from the vintage toys we
played with:
The Brownie Kick-In Top game:
My brother and I never quite figured out how to play this
old game of my dad’s. We knew it involved marbles, which would fit neatly into
the numbered holes. But I don’t know if we ever realized that the lovely, red
wooden top we would set spinning on the hardwood floors of our house was part
of the game, and was meant to collide with the marbles and send them into the
holes. I still own the metal game board and random vintage cats-eye marbles,
but I am missing the spinning top and the original wooden marbles that were
part of the set.
Hard Rubber Farm Animals:
My grandparents had a set of farm animals made out of a heavy substance that I once thought was Bakelite, but now realize was a hard rubber. The animals had their legs planted on platforms so they stood up very well, unlike the 1960s plastic farm animals we had at home, whose legs would end up splayed or broken, and the animals would stand drunkenly if at all. I remember my grandparents’ rubber cows were mostly painted black and white, with one or two all-brown ones.
There were some rather moth-eaten looking sheep—the
white paint was rubbing off. There were two black lambs as well, and several
pigs. We would line these creatures up on grandma’s rag rugs, which we imagined
were fields and pastures. There was also an old metal tractor and a few other
odd bits—I seem to remember wooden milk cans painted a watery silver. The photo
below shows similar hard rubber animals but the Macbeth ones were painted
differently.
Pix Pix Pick Up Sticks:
This lovely old game feature thin wooden skewers painted in
a variety of primary colors. The game involved holding the skewers upright,
then letting them splay outward on a hard surface. The object of the game was
to try to extract as many of your color skewer without moving any other
skewers. We especially enjoyed flicking one stick into the air with the point
of another.
Big Little Books
While not toys per se, these fat little books brought hours
of fun. I can no longer remember the titles—I believe there were a couple that
featured cartoon characters like Goofy or Donald Duck, and a Little Orphan
Annie one. Most were nearly an inch thick, and had thick, coarse pages that
felt a little like cheap, thin construction paper. The paper was prone to
growing brittle as years passed, so most of the books had pages with little
triangles of corners missing, broken off as we turned the pages. The books were
just the perfect size for small hands, and fat like adult books, so we felt a
little more grown-up reading them.
All the toys and books at my grandparents’ house were sold
or thrown away when her property was auctioned off in the early 1980s. She
could no longer live alone at the farm, so moved in with my Uncle Dwight and
his wife Rosie. The farm and house were sold. My family kept a few things, but
now that my brother and I are older and more aware of what is valuable—both
monetarily and emotionally—we wish that we had kept more things back from the
auction, especially some of the toys that held such sentimental value for us. What
I wouldn’t give for a chunky, rubber cow or sheep to set on a shelf, or to hear
the soft clatter of a shower of pick-up sticks!
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