My generation, the boomers, may be the last to have experienced, almost exclusively, pre-video game fun. We lived in a pre-grand theft auto paradise and didn't know it. Most of our toys required no batteries or electronic power source of any kind. True, there were somre you could plug in, like an electric train set, and others that were battery powered. But when your allowance is fifteen cents a week, you can't be wasting it on packages of D batteries every other day For the most part our stuff had no internal power source; they had to be fueled by our imaginations.
Our toys connected us with previous generations of kids stretching back before recorded history. It was a rite of passage to play baseball in an empty lot, or spend a couple hours with your forefingers locked in a Chinese finger puzzle.
What my dad did as a kid, I did.
He read comics; I read comics.
He played marbles; I played marbles.
He lived through the Depression and fought in World War II; I played with my slinky.
On the news, did you ever see a bunch of third world kids standing around in the middle of a vacant patch of desert with nothing better to do except throw rocks at each other? That was us, except we had yo-yos and paddle balls.
(My favorite toys were the building toys. Legos prepared me, presumably, for a life of masonry while Lincoln Logs gave me an appreciation for early American architecture if not Abraham Lincoln, and erector sets, well, I'm not sure what I got out of playing with these things. Still, they were sort of fun in a self-baffling kind of way.)
Sometime in the late 1950's and early 1960's there was an explosion of non-electronic kid gadgetry. The hula hoop, the slinky, and silly putty hit the scene. They were what I would call one minute wonders. Take them off the shelf, play with them for a bit, and then on to something else.
Hey look. I can use this ball of silly putty to get Beetle Bailey's face right off the Sunday funnies. I can stretch it and twist it and... Okay. I'm done now.
Times were simpler then.
The strangest non-electronic toy of all was the Etch-A-Sketch. It didn't help you draw a single wick. It actually got in the way of drawing! I wasted the better part of a weekend madly twisting the knobs of an Etch-A-Sketch and ended up with a squiggly looking happy face. Still, Ohio Art sold a ton of these things.
Safety requirements were limited to common sense. You shouldn't swallow Silly Putty nor eat the potato that, for a day and a half, promonaded as Mr. Potato Head. And just to prove that safety was a complete non-consideration, one day in early July my mom brought home a set of "Jarts." Also known as lawn darts, a "jart" was essentially a twelve inch, stainless steel mini-javelin. You played a game similar to horseshoes, tossing them into a hoop set out on the ground. Well, that's what the instructions said to do. Us kids figured out a few other uses for them and soon there was a rush on the emergency rooms across the tri-county area.
The Era of Non-Video Game fun came to an abrupt end in 1980 when Atari released the third version of its video game system. True, the games consisted of pretty much the same concept: manipulating an on screen dot to a series of electronic beeps and squeaks. In many ways most Atari games resembled a more annoying version of the Etch-A-Sketch. But their popularity was undeniable.
Today when I shop I can sometimes see, behind the wires, the plastic and the whiz-bang technology, toys from my past. Interestingly enough the Kootie game is still around as is Mr. Potato Head (sans potato, if that makes sense.). And yes, you can still discover a plastic egg of Silly Putty.
When I see these artifacts from my kidhood, I suddenly realize what we have lost.
As it turns out, not really all that much
No comments:
Post a Comment