Kids Made Toys Once Upon A Time

Christmas is coming. Toys will be high on many a list. My grandsons have outgrown toys but not that many years ago I got them remote-controlled helicopters. “Man, we had nothing like these when I was a boy.” That thought took me back to the days when kids made toys.

As a boy, nothing thrilled me more that walking up on a stand of bamboo. Emerald green and tropical, it transported me to the jungle where headhunters shot poison darts from blowguns. But there was another reason to be excited, a better reason. Those jade stalks could be turned into peashooters and flutes.

I made a slingshot too. It rested in my hip pocket and in one fluid motion I could whip it out and send a piece of gravel flying at a rusty old can. A close cousin to the slingshot was a rubber band pistol. Draw a pistol-like design onto a pine board, cut it out with a handsaw, nail a wooden clothespin on its top, and cut a notch in the end of the barrel. Cut some stout rubber bands from a tire inner tube of an appropriate length and you added yet another weapon to your arsenal.

A homemade toy tractor beats a plastic tractor every time.

Another homemade toy was a “tractor” made from a wooden spool of thread, a matchstick, rubber band, and ice cream stick. You’ll be hard pressed to find a wooden spool of thread today. They’re plastic. Wind up the ice cream stick, set it down, and watch it roll off. It could even go uphill.

Nothing fascinated me like magnets. I maintain that a magnet is the most fascinating object on the planet. I tied magnets to a string and looped the string over a nail in a door and just like that I had a crane able to lift small metal objects. Pink Floyd grew up the same time I did, and they paid homage to magnets’ power in “High Hopes” … “In a world of magnets and miracles, our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary”.

Another simple toy we made was a dart fashioned from a matchstick, straight pin, and paper. We’d cut slits into the matchstick and insert paper fins, cut off the match head and insert the pin. Laser beam-accurate.

We made parachutes from bandanas, strings, and rocks. Threw them into the air and watched them drift to earth.

A toy that marked a big change came from a cereal box: deep-sea divers billed as diving frogmen. You’d put baking soda into a compartment under their feet, drop them into water and watch them bob up and down. Here comes plastic and mass-produced toys. The 1950s gave us hula hoops, Silly Putty, Mr. Potato Head, and by the end of the decade, plastic Barbie dolls.

Our homemade, DIY, toys were biodegradable and Earth friendly, and best of all they didn’t depend on batteries. We were green and didn’t even know it. Before plastic arrived, folks made dolls for little girls from cornhusks. We carved propellers from small blocks of pine. Drill a hole in the middle where a nail attached it to a wooden handle. Hold it out the car window and let ’er rip.

Bamboo, cornhusks, and wood break down. You can’t say that for Legos and other plastic toys. Broken and abandoned by kids, a plastic toy in a landfill can take hundreds of years to break down. And just imagine how many batteries end up in landfills each year.

We made our own toys back in the day, and our little inventions made us. Entertaining yourself with a toy fashioned from scraps of lumber or a fine piece of bamboo made you feel good about yourself. “Hey, look. I made this.”

We did little harm with our do-it-yourself toys. I might add that today’s economists would look on our homemade toys with approval. We weren’t consumers; we were manufacturers. In the true spirit of American ingenuity, we filled a void with a much-needed product.

Today’s kids? They’re one of the country’s most coveted consumer markets. And that means a whole lot of bamboo stalks have nothing to fear. Plastic sewing spools? Forget ’em.

Photo credit Tom Poland.

Georgia native Tom Poland writes a weekly column about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture and speaks frequently to groups in the South. Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon Tom, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, stating, “His work is exceptional to the state.” Poland’s work appears in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers throughout the South.

Visit Tom’s website at www.tompoland.net

Email him at [email protected]