My "Little Boy's Toys"

Long before X-Boxes, Smart Phones, skateboards and Wii, there were scooters, roller skates, chemistry sets, crystal sets and books filled with do-it-yourself toys.  This was a time before lawyers took the fun and pain out of playing.  As an 'old timer', born in 1939, I invite some of you to go back with me and remember this simpler, and I believe 'funner', time.

Our scooters had two wheels about 8 inches in diameter, no lights, a friction brake and back-up parking stand.  They would take us to school or store and only wore out the sole of your pushing foot.

Roller skates had steel wheels, toe clamps, a leather strap to keep your heel in place and a skate key that hung around your neck on a loop of string.  That key would do all the adjusting needed to keep you skating.  When your shoe did slip out of the toe clamps the skate would ride up your heel and take some skin, leaving you hopping along with one skate on and the other flopping around your ankle.  We often combined an old skate with some boards and a wooden crate to produce a scooter more similar to what we see today.

Wooden swords were made by nailing a short piece of lathe (remember real lathe and plaster walls) across a longer one sharpened with an ax or old butcher knife.  These battles usually ended with little more than a knot on the head and some slivers.  If they did draw blood Mom was usually there with a "Band-Aid" and kiss.  If it was more serious she would get out the iodine that caused more pain than the injury itself.  (blow, blow, blow)

Cooping saws, wood burning sets, hammers and nails were other fun tools for unsupervised craft  projects that we would later proudly present to our adoring parents.

BB Guns and slingshots were about the only things that were forbidden or sternly warned about (You will shoot your eye out!).  Old inner tubes kept us with an endless supply of elastic material.

Before transistor radios there were crystal sets you could order for maybe 50 cents.  They consisted of a little bar with a "cat whisker" on the end that we moved about on a small "crystal" mounted in a piece of lead, all attached to a copper wire antenna and ear phones. When we were lucky we could listen to a nearby radio station.  This must have seemed like a miracle as it used no outside power.  These could be upgraded with a tuning coil of copper wire wrapped around a toilet paper roll with a slider made out of a tin can.

Tin cans were the metal of the day for us as they were plentiful and every basement or garage had tin snips.  Combine the end of a tin can with a wooden thread spool, a nail, a brad and a sawed off end of a broom handle and we could have helicopter blades that would sail 50 feet into the air.  Of course this could not be completed without cutting your fingers on the sharp tin, but we all had a lot of that.

Chemistry sets were the pride of geeks to come.  They contained many elements that are banned in mail shipments today.  We could turn water red, heat test tubes until something burnt and create nasty smells along the way.

As I said, most of this was done with little, or no, supervision.  I guess they felt we had enough 'common' sense to not get too badly hurt, and if we did we would learn a good lesson.  And I was a town kid that envied the farm kid who could do so many more fun (dangerous) things.

Stay tuned for "Kids Used to Have JOBS."