Beloved toys

We HAD toys and we played with them without wrapping our lives around them like an iphone or a play station.  For the most part, our toys were physical.  We had a tendency to “retool” our things and use them in all sorts of different ways as well, like turning our bicycles upside down and just spinning the wheels.  We all had our first tricycles and bicycles, which my father had to assemble after being ordered through Sears and Roebuck.  We didn’t get the three-speed kind, only the cheap ones.  It was real exercise to ride those things.  One special toy was the slip and slide, which you hooked up to a hose, rolled it out on your yard.  Then you threw your body on it and “slipped and slid” down your yard.  We would also “swim in the sprinkler.”  We just turned on the sprinkler, put on our bathing suits and scamper back and forth getting wet and sprayed.  We visited the Alamo Heights swimming pool when we could, which was marvelous.  On those trips, my mother would give us a thrill and drive us over the Olmos Dam.

Climbing trees also kept us amused.  My parents had planted a number of trees in the yard and by the time we were old enough to climb, they were big enough to accommodate us.  Great fun was had scaling up the trunk and swinging out on the branches of the now towering ligustrums, pretending we were Tarzan.  After seeing the movie “Swiss family Robinson” we longed for a tree house.  My father took two discarded wooden gates, found some accommodating forks in the trees, and nailed them up.  We had to use a ladder to get up them, but played contentedly there for years, often just sitting and enjoying the fact that we actually had a tree house, or platform.

I was not a big doll person, but I did have one doll which I treasured and played with.  She was a Christmas gift and her name was Bonnie.  She was about eight inches tall, vinyl, and had a cute little vinyl bun hairstyle.  It was the time that Wes was going through his “rocket and space” phase that things took a bad turn for Bonnie.  I should have been suspicious when Wes asked to borrow her one day and took her in his room and closed the door for more than an hour.  He had decided that Bonnie simply must have a space suit, and he made her one out of sheets of rolled out green clay.  Carefully and out of my sight, he methodically encased Bonnie until she had her clay space suit, including a helmet. 

I shrieked with horror when I saw her.  Wes was immediately forced to remove her clay space suit, but once the clay was off, Bonnie had turned green and there was no scrubbing it off.  I was scarred for life.  So was Bonnie.

When peace had been restored, we played finger people, making our hands into little walking, talking people that had lots of adventures.  Wes named his finger person “Wesley”.  Mine was simply “Friend,”  Wesley’s sidekick.   This kept us amused for hours.

My mother also bought me Betsy McCall paper dolls.  These came in booklet form.  In the back was the Betsy herself, in cardboard stock.  She came with a stand and wore modest underwear, top and bottom.  After Betsy was cut out and set up in her stand, we worked on the clothes themselves.  We would meticulously cut them out, including the paper tabs to be folded down that held her clothing on.  There were plenty of paper outfits to dress her and entire afternoons would be spent changing her into different outfits.  Paper dolls were cheap, and could be replaced regularly.

Another favorite was tinker toys.  We would empty them out of the can and build every contraption in the instruction book.  Then we would make up new contraptions.  When we had tired of that, we put the tinker toys to a new and creative use.  We laid out floor plans for dream houses, using the long colored sticks to represent the floor plans, and the spindles as furniture.  We took plastic animals and created yarns and stories about their lives in our dream houses.

Every Christmas I could count on receiving my own little baking kit from the Sears Christmas wish book.  How eagerly we anticipated that catalog arriving in the mail and once there, we studied it until the pages fell out.  The baking sets came with miniature pie and cake pans, and miniature boxes of cake and pie mix.  It was usually just add water to the mixes and pour them in the pans and pop them in the ovens.  The taste was wretched, but what did we care?  We were proud, and made sure to save some of our creations for my father when he got home from work.  He dutifully consumed everything I presented to him, no matter how foul.  I later graduated to the real boxed Duncan Hines cake mixes and wanted to make a cake every night.  It was so easy!  Just grease and flour your pan, and add the water and eggs to the cake mix.  My parents and brother gained a lot of weight that year, with a freshly baked cake every night after dinner.  Duncan Hines marble cakes were my personal favorite, with the chocolate and vanilla batter swirled around with a flat knife.  I was not good at the frosting and my top layer had a tendency to slowly ooze off and to the side until my mother taught me how to secure it with a bunch of toothpicks.

Most every child in that era received a cowboy or cowgirl outfit either as a Christmas or birthday gift.  They came complete with a hat, a fringed vest and fringed skirt, and cowboy boots.  Our mothers took our pictures out in the back yard.

On summer nights, we often just sat out in our back yard and just talked.  We had chaise lounges and lawn chairs and stayed out there until long after dark.  We would watch satellites crossing the sky.  Occasionally we would enjoy a shooting star.  There were also bats.  Everyone who has grown up in South or Central Texas knows about the bats.  You learn to spot them quickly because of their erratic flying pattern much different from a bird.  On some nights, Wes was allowed to sleep outside all night on one of the chaise lounges.  It was a huge adventure for him and sometimes one of his friends would join him.  They were not more than 20 feet away from my parents’ open bedroom window, so it was fairly safe.

When Barbie was invented by Mattel toys in 1959, we all had to have one.  If you were invited to a little girls’ birthday party, you were instructed to bring your Barbie, so everyone could sit and play with them.

I of course, received a Barbie, in her black and white striped swimsuit.  I also received one dress to change her into:  the black, glittery solo in the spotlight dress.  I found Barbie a little disconcerting, especially those huge breasts which jutted out and took over.  Her clothes, what few of them she had, were intricate with snaps and buttons.  And did they fit.  When I tired of changing her from the swimsuit to the spotlight dress, I would take rags and drape them around her for some new clothes.  She came with a neat, blonde ponytail, which I quickly tried to rearrange and totally mussed up.   She looked pretty ragged after a couple of play sessions.  I was still not much of a doll person and quickly lost interest in her and she lived most of the time forgotten in a drawer.

Troll dolls, truly the ugliest little creations in the history of toys, appeared around this time as well.  They actually returned in the 1990s!  I was horrified.  Who would want to bring those things back?  But of course, every little girl had to have one.  They came with long hair that stood up like Madge Simpson, or the bride of Frankenstein.  The hair came in bizarre colors:  hot pink, lime green, sky blue.  You were supposed to hold your ugly little troll and stroke her hair for luck.  They came to school with us and were part of the playground.  Mercifully, the trend did not last long and most ended up in the trash.

From the age of five on, I collected Breyer horses.  My first set arrived for Christmas, the Arabian horse family.  I played with them until the color started coming off their tails and manes.  Their saddle blankets were lace doilies made by my grandmother.  Every Christmas and birthday after that, I received another treasure until I owned probably 20 of them.  Breyer horses are still sold, but they cannot compare to what we had back then.  They were stunning with their coloring and detail.  The Breyer horses are still in the family after I gave them to my younger cousin.  He still has some of them, and passed on a lot of them to his sons and grandsons.

Dick's Hobby Shop in Terrell Plaza featured every type of plastic model kit under the sun:  airplanes, ships, cars.  These were kits which took days if not weeks to construct.  On one of Wes's birthdays, he received the ultimate Dick's Hobby Shop gift:  a red go-kart with a powerful Briggs & Stratton engine.  With no license and no experience, we drove it all through the neighborhood.  Its only form of braking was a hand brake which only slowed down the back wheels.  It was an extremely dangerous machine and we sailed through all the neighborhood stop signs in it.  Both of us made it through that phase without a scratch.  There must have been an angel watching over us.