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<\/a>FIREBIRD 99<\/span><\/strong> (Remco).\u00a0 This is one of the earliest toys I remember.\u00a0 The activities on this yellow car dashboard included: turning the wheel right and left (which made the speedometer rise and fall); beeping the horn; running the windshield wiper; opening the glove compartment; pretend-lighting a cigarette; and losing the key.\u00a0 As I recall, the batteries for the toy ran down quickly and were not replaced often, which made the Firebird 99<\/em> a lot less fun to drive.<\/p>\nIn all the times we played Parcheesi<\/em>, I’m not sure Aunt Pearl ever set up a blockade<\/a> to impede my progress or used any strategy whatsoever.\u00a0 In fact, I would not be surprised if she used her knowledge of the rules to ignore them in my favor and help me win.\u00a0<\/p>\n The same was true in our dumbed-down version of Monopoly<\/em>.\u00a0 Aunt Pearl and I played Monopoly<\/em> without money: properties were simply awarded to the player who landed on them first, and the Chance\/Community Chest cards with dollar amounts were ignored.\u00a0 When all the deeds had been handed out, the game ended and the player with the most properties won.\u00a0 Aunt Pearl would complain how terrible it was when she was sent to jail; her laments only delighted me more as I hopped around the board and she languished.<\/p>\n Later, when I grew old enough to play Monopoly<\/em> by the rules, I was disappointed to learn how complicated the game was when money, mortgages, houses and hotels were involved.\u00a0 Aunt Pearl’s version was more fun.<\/p>\n I played Life<\/em> mostly with my best friend Bill.\u00a0 At our age, we didn’t understand insurance or bankruptcy and we never used the numbered betting strip either.\u00a0 Instead we turned the game into a race to the finish line.\u00a0 We counted our money at the end as a formality, but the real winner was whoever finished first.<\/p>\n Today I remember Life<\/em> mostly for the fact that I left the game on our picnic table one day after we played, and it rained that night, and the next morning I learned that cardboard is not waterproof.\u00a0 The game was ruined.\u00a0 Mom gave me a lecture about taking care of things — and bought a replacement.\u00a0 Life lesson learned.<\/p>\n Marvel was my favorite.\u00a0 She\/it was slightly bigger than the other marbles, the Babe Ruth of the bag.\u00a0 She\/it also excelled in the marble race game I invented.\u00a0 In that game, I would select a pair of marbles, put both in my hand and then toss them toward the baseboard at the other end of my bedroom.\u00a0 The marble that bounced back the farthest won that race and was then matched against another opponent.<\/p>\n There were a couple of fateful developments in the marble race game.\u00a0 One was the race when Marvel lost a big chip from her\/its side and could no longer roll straight.\u00a0 The other was the day I noticed all the pockmarks in the baseboard and started to contemplate what Mom would do when she noticed.\u00a0 The marble race game ended thereabouts, with Mom never saying anything about the noise in my room or the baseboard.<\/p>\n The Jaguar wasn’t my only toy car. I collected a few others from Alpha-Bits cereal boxes.<\/p>\n Both Dominoes and Lincoln Logs served long and honorably as guard rails for the road network in my bedroom.\u00a0 When I ran out of flash cards for “paved” roads, I used Lincoln Logs to stake out a few more miles of “dirt” (i.e., carpeted) roads.<\/p>\n CAREERS<\/span> <\/strong>(Parker Brothers). Although the game was 90% luck, it did illustrate the value of an education as well as the link between risk and reward. There were many decisions to make, which made Careers<\/em> feel more strategic than it was. Most decisions, in retrospect, were as meaningful as picking ice cream flavors.\u00a0 In the end, a player either felt vindicated for having concocted a winning formula, or frustrated by his inability to meet the points-and-money objective.\u00a0 The message to losers: it was your fault for choosing a bad goal!<\/p>\n We usually played softball — as opposed to hardball, i.e., baseball — because a softball was easier to pitch, easier to hit, and less dangerous to try to catch.\u00a0 Softballs also held up to mud and water better than hardballs did.<\/p>\n My dad started me off with a Richie Ashburn infielder’s glove (above).\u00a0 It was okay for a couple of years, but when we started to play hardball more often, it became clear that this glove was not only useless but a liability.\u00a0 It hurt to catch a ball in the thinly lined pocket; but if you tried to snare it in the web, the ball threatened to slip right through.<\/p>\n I coveted the first-base mitt that our “gang leader” Ralph used.\u00a0 It seemed like Ralph was able to catch anything in its huge web, even if he threw his glove at it (which he would do).\u00a0 But as mentioned earlier, I had no discretionary income — until Mom agreed to let me use the spare pennies my parents had always tossed into the giant glass jug in the living room.\u00a0 I bought a new first-base mitt with those pennies, and it didn’t matter that I hardly ever played first base.\u00a0 That glove could catch anything I could reach wherever I played.\u00a0 It was worth every penny.<\/p>\n In what would be our final call that day, the woman who answered the phone and heard my pitch said, “Tommy?!\u00a0 How are you!\u00a0 You sound different!”\u00a0 Somehow, out of 25,000 numbers in the book, we had managed to call one of Tom Tardio’s relatives.\u00a0 In a panic, I said I had a sore throat but avoided the subject of how she knew Tommy\/me.\u00a0 The woman went ahead and spelled rhinoceros<\/em> for us, and as I recall her spelling was just as bad and hilarious as the rest.<\/p>\n Sorry, Tom, for having borrowed your identity to generate some good junior-high laughs.\u00a0 I don’t think we hurt your reputation, much.<\/p>\n I threatened to install a new clutch but never followed through.\u00a0 I drove it for seven years without finding the sweet spot, at times resorting to starting out in second gear.\u00a0 I wanted to sell the WRX but my spouse wasn’t ready, so it became her winter car.\u00a0 Crisis resolved.<\/p>\n I will get along just fine never driving a Jaguar.\u00a0 The important toys are not the ones that cost a lot but the ones that encourage us to explore ourselves, each other and the world.\u00a0 Some of my most valuable toys in that regard were: blocks; blank paper; crayons; sand; and even dry leaves floating on rainwater heading to the storm drain.\u00a0 And not to get all Wonder Years<\/em> about it, but a day at the creek with a friend, a sandwich and a fishing rod instills a sense of personhood in a ten-year-old boy that he does not get by playing with cars by himself in his room.\u00a0 I do know that I wouldn’t be me without all of that.<\/p>\n ______<\/p>\n Do one’s toys say anything about a person?\u00a0 I think so — in fact, your toy stories may reveal more than you might imagine.\u00a0 Here are some notable toys and games that I grew up with and the stories behind … Continue reading <\/a>COOTIE<\/span><\/strong> (Schaper).\u00a0 Many of my childhood toys and games were hand-me-downs from my sister and Cootie<\/em> was one of those.\u00a0 It was probably the first dice-based game I learned.\u00a0 You know the drill: rolling a (1) gets you the body, (2) the head, (3) one of the antennae, (4) one of the eyes, (5) the proboscis — my favorite — and (6) one of the legs.\u00a0 My sister was my usual opponent and, even though Cootie<\/em> is all luck, it seemed to me she usually won.\u00a0 I must have remembered my defeats more vividly than I did my victories.<\/p>\n<\/a>PARCHEESI<\/span><\/strong> (Selchow & Righter).\u00a0 Luck was also the main ingredient in the board game Parcheesi<\/em>, another hand-me-down which I played with my (Great) Aunt Pearl on nights she looked after me.\u00a0 Aunt Pearl had a kind heart and a frisky sense of humor — and the patience to spend hours upon hours playing simple games with me.<\/p>\n<\/a>LIFE <\/span><\/strong>(Milton Bradley).\u00a0 If I remember correctly, I convinced my mom to buy me this game on one of our many visits to the local department store.\u00a0 She would browse the (boring) sewing patterns on the mezzanine, while I headed downstairs to the (interesting) toy department.\u00a0 Life <\/em>appealed to me because it had cars, roads and mountains.\u00a0 The money part was secondary.<\/p>\n<\/a>MARBLES!\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong>I inherited my sister’s glass marbles and later on was given a bag of steel marbles by my Uncle Rudy, who was actually the husband of the sister of the wife of my mother’s brother.\u00a0 And that is pretty much all I recall about Uncle Rudy.\u00a0 But I do remember the names I gave to various marbles. For example, the one marked P<\/span><\/strong> (see photo at left) was Peppermint, M<\/span><\/strong> was Marvel and F<\/span><\/strong> was Fenwick.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>MATCHBOX JAGUAR <\/span><\/strong>(Lesney).\u00a0 My friend Bill had different toys than I did and he also seemed to have discretionary income.\u00a0 One year, Bill was into buying Matchbox cars.\u00a0 He and I would take the bus downtown and visit Majestic Wallpaper and Paint which, strangely, also sold model cars and these miniatures.\u00a0 Matchbox cars cost about 59\u00a2 each but for me they may as well have been $59.\u00a0 I did find enough money one day to buy a red Jaguar E-Type with real windows and a functioning door.\u00a0 It was the only car that looked like something James Bond might drive.\u00a0 Today this toy, in good condition, would go for $30, a 50x increase in value.\u00a0 Not bad, considering that a real Jaguar E-Type that cost $6,000 in 1963 is now worth about $200,000, or only 33x appreciation.<\/p>\n<\/a>BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE FLASH CARDS<\/span><\/strong> (Grolier).\u00a0 Some of my books, toys and games weren’t handed down or pleaded for but doled out by Santa.\u00a0 One Christmas, I was given a set of “Famous People” flash cards with illustrations on the front and short biographies on the back.\u00a0 Among the cards in the box were George Washington (of course), Charlemagne, Helen Keller and Joan of Arc.\u00a0 The one I remember best is Mohandas Gandhi, the only brown-skinned person in the 54-card set. (The other Asian was Genghis Khan; there were no African-Americans.)\u00a0 The cards were often laid out end-to-end as roadways around my bedroom, where I drove my Jaguar over the likeness of Mohandas Gandhi.<\/p>\n<\/a>DOMINOES<\/span><\/strong> and <\/span>LINCOLN LOGS <\/span><\/strong>were other hand-me-downs that I generally used for purposes other than intended.\u00a0 I played Dominoes with Aunt Pearl a few times, but I doubt that we ever followed the rules (which I still don’t know).\u00a0 The best thing to do with Dominoes was stack them in a line and then tip them over.\u00a0 Same deal with Lincoln Logs — the main reason I built things with Lincoln Logs was to crash my cars into them.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>This was my favorite game and I’m not quite sure why.\u00a0 Each player began the game by writing down a (secret) success goal comprised of money, fame and happiness in arbitrary proportions.\u00a0 The paths (careers) that a player selected during the game helped him accumulate the money, love and fame points he needed to reach his goal.\u00a0 As a result, I did a ton of uranium mining and sea travel by the time I reached sixth grade.<\/p>\n<\/a>HARDBALL \/ SOFTBALL<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0 I grew up in a baseball neighborhood.\u00a0 Guys might toss a football around for a couple of hours each fall, but we played baseball from when the springtime mud was still squishy to when you had to wear gloves on both hands.\u00a0 Maybe it was because our beloved Pittsburgh Pirates had won a World Series whereas the Pittsburgh Steelers stunk.\u00a0 (How times change…)<\/p>\n<\/a>TAPE RECORDER<\/span><\/strong> (Panasonic).\u00a0 Reel-to-reel tape recorders seemed to be a thing in the 1960s — two of my friends had one so I had to have one too.\u00a0 What do boys do with tape recorders?\u00a0 We get creative.\u00a0 Bill and I pretended we had a radio show and made up silly skits.\u00a0 If we got bored with that, we would make crank calls and record them.\u00a0 One day we came up with the idea to call random people in the phone book and ask them to spell rhinoceros<\/em>, supposedly for some school assignment. Better yet, we (Bill or I) claimed to be Tom Tardio, vice-president of our student council.\u00a0 The results were hilarious.\u00a0 We could hardly contain our giggles at the mangled spellings offered by our surprisingly cooperative targets.<\/p>\n<\/a>SUBARU WRX<\/span><\/strong> was the<\/em> midlife crisis car.\u00a0 It was yellow.\u00a0 It was sporty.\u00a0 It had a turbo and a spoiler and a leather shift knob.\u00a0 What it did not have, as I would learn after a few thousand miles, was a decent clutch.\u00a0 When shifting from first to second, your choice was a shuddering lurch or a clutch-cooking engine surge.\u00a0 Nothing in between.\u00a0 This was hardly midlife-crisis performance.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/del>JAGUAR 2016 F-TYPE<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0 I end with an imaginary toy. Oh, the car is real all right.\u00a0 Someone somewhere in the world owns and drives this car.\u00a0 In fact, it is probably one of many exotic sports cars this person has in his collection.\u00a0 But I can only imagine how it drives, as I would never spend what it would take to find out.<\/p>\nJaguar F-Type photo by automotive photographer Bas Fransen (basfransen.com).<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"