TOY’s WERE US

TOY’s WERE US

When watching my Pa. Crankettes each week, I am amazed and a little jealous of all the neat toys they have.  Then I realize we had many of these same toys.

The Crankettes have “Nerf” guns.  These shoot out little Nerf bullets at warp speed, yet they are still harmless.  We had BB guns.  They were much cooler, but not nearly as harmless.  I don’t recall anyone ever having his eye shot out though.  I think the danger was made clear and it taught us a little about responsibility.  Of course, being kids, we did have to try out just how dangerous the BB gun could be, and everyone took at least one hit, usually in the rump, never the face.  Yes it friggin hurt a lot!

You couldn’t use the BB gun inside so we had our own devices.  We fired paper wads out of a straw, we twisted strips of paper into darts and inserted them into rolled up magazines to create very effective blow guns.  Outside, sans BB gun, we knew how to twist the stem of a common weed into a “weed gun” that would fire the weed seedpod. It was very effective at close up range.

The Crankettes have a little bowling game with tiny bowling pins and a tiny bowling ball.  We used ten flat bottomed erasers and a large marble.

The Crankettes have a really nice bow and arrow set that fires Nerf like arrows.  We used wire hangers as our bow, and the cardboard inserts on the hanger as our arrows.

The Crankettes have fancy store bought glider planes.  We could take a piece of paper and fold it into our own world class glider.

The Crankettes have board games.  We had them also, but we had several of today’s popular board games long before Parker Brothers “Invented” them.  Five die, paper, pencil, and rules handed down from Aunt Betts and we had “Yahtzee” (actually called “yaghtsea” as it was a game invented by sailors and played to pass the time on boats, most likely for a dollar or two.)  It only took a piece of paper and a pencil to play “Hangman.” “Battleship” required graph paper and pencils.  “Tic Tac Toe” are you kidding me?  They actually sell “Tic Tac Toe” board games?

We didn’t have Nerf Basketball, but we could bend a wire hanger into a hoop, hang an old tee shirt on it as a net, jam it into our closet door, and with a rolled-up pair of socks as a ball we had some pretty intense in-home basketball games.

We didn’t have on-demand cartoons, computer games, fancy sleds, and skateboards, but we did have comic books, playing cards, baseball trading cards, Flexible Flyer sleds, and crappy clamp-to-your-shoes metal roller skates.

We had lots of time to sometimes just do nothing, but we were never bored.  If you were bored, mom had a list of interesting chores to keep you busy.

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Uncle Skip posted about an anniversary yesterday and I realized that yesterday was my fourth blogiversary.  This was my very first post.  http://joeh-crankyoldman.blogspot.com/2011/04/its-about-time.html.  There was no explanation of who I was or why I was blogging, I just jumped right in.  I still feel no need to explain.