Category: Toys

Many a kid was seen walking down the street playing with a yo-yo when we were kids. They were also played with by our parents, and probably our grandparents, too.

The yo-yo is a toy that has had many waves of popularity since its introduction early in the 20th century. One of those waves coincided with my childhood, another one hit in the early 70’s, when I was in junior high. During the latter craze, yo-yos and clackers were banned at schools all over the country, as kids played with the toys instead of doing their lessons. At Bentonville Middle School, the principal kept a box in his office that was full of confiscated yo-yos, popperknockers, and squirt guns.

The yo-yo can be traced back to Greece about 500 B.C. It is belived to have been used in China long before that date, but actual specimens from Greece have been unearthed. Artwork from the period also shows people playing with them.

The yo-yo spread around the world. Art from places as diverse as India and France from the 18th century depicts them. They also achieved a large degree of popularity in the Philippines.

In 1915, Filipino Pedro Flores immigrated to the United States. He went to law school, but never completed his law degree and began instead making yo-yos while working as a bellboy. In 1928, Flores started his Yo-Yo Manufacturing Company in Santa Barbara, California. Two years later, the Donald Duncan Company bought him out, and, despite the Depression, the yo-yo business did pretty well.

Duncan survived the Depression and sold millions of yo-yos over the next thirty years. They hit a wave of popularity during WWII, then faded again. In the early 60’s, they took off again. Interesting how the yo-yo business went up and down, isn’t it?

But Duncan received a lethal blow in the midst of their toy’s popularity. When they bought Flores’ “invention,” they also trademarked the name “yo-yo.” That meant that competitors sold “come-backs”, “returns”, “returning tops”, “whirl-a-gigs”, and “twirlers.” However, in 1965, the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that Duncan’s trademark for the word “yo-yo” was no good. Yo-yo’s name had become so widespread that it was now a permanent part of the language and it no longer only described the toy, it was the toy. The legal costs incurred sank Duncan.

The company which had been manufacturing Duncan’s plastic yo-yos bought the Duncan name and took off like a rocket. Yo-yo innovations began pouring forth, and another wave of popularity hit the early 70’s.

As the years went by, things like ball bearing shafts, clutch springs, and rim weighting have turned the humble yo-yo into a sophisticated performance piece. But we Boomers have fond memories of cheap wooden models, or Duncan Imperials that were a bit more pricey, as we made our way from childhood to being grown-ups.

There’s not a person in the world who has looked at American comic books from the 50’s through the 80’s and isn’t familiar with a device called X-Ray Specs. There would always be a half-page ad from some novelty company offering items like onion gum, joy buzzers, whoopie cushions, and the mysterious magical spectacles.

They promised the ability to see the bones in your hand, and hinted that you just might be able to see through curvaceous young ladies’ clothing, as well.

Talk about something that grabbed the attention of a young male!

I never knew of a single friend of mine who actually ordered a pair, though. We just never could justify spending candy bar money on something that, while looking very intriguing, also carried with it that curious phrase “a hilarious optical illusion.” That phrase seemed to imply that it didn’t really use x-rays to allow a peek under young ladies’ dresses! Come on, for a dollar, this thing better be the real deal!

However, if you want to go ahead and spring for something you may never have bought as a child, you can order a pair from Stupid.com. Inflation being what it is, though, they’re up to three bucks.

It amazes me how many of our toys involved endless repetitive motion. Take the Whee-Lo, for instance.

The Whee-Lo was a wire loop which held a rotating wheel that was magnetically attached at its axle. It would traverse its metallic circuit endlessly, powered by gentle motions of a child’s wrist. That yellow plastic hoogus could be slid up and down the handle to vary the speed of the wheel.

The toy was introduced way back in 1953 when a company called Maggi Magnetics began selling them. This was a surprise for me in doing my research, because I remember the toys appearing in stores in Miami, Oklahoma in 1968. Soon, every kid in town was sending the spinning wheel around its course as they walked to school in the mornings.

The endless looping of the wheel was a natural accompaniment to sitting in the back seat during long automobile trips. We made annual sojourns of 500 miles to my grandparents’ homes in Iowa and Texas. I remember nearly wearing out that Whee-Lo on one of those trips.

The toy came with cardboard disks that you could stick on the wheel to provide some variety. But it really wasn’t necessary. The toy provided a Zen soothing effect as you watched it repeatedly traverse its steel route.

In fact, I could use some of that today. I may just have to buy one to add to my cubicle toys collection. A Whee-Lo in hand during a long, mindless conference call should provide me the same therapeutic benefit that it did in the back seat of that Plymouth on the road to Iowa in 1968.

You can still buy Whee-Lo’s at this site, as well as several others. Try a Google search.

One thing virtually every Baby boomer who grew up in the US has in common is a shared recollection of having various Wham-O toys out in the yard.

Wham-O produced the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, and the SuperBall, of course, but they also made a whole slew of other toys that were very popular, though not the sensations that the previously mentioned trio were.

Wham-O was founded in 1948. Its first product was a slingshot. The founders, Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, were into falconry. They would hurl meat up into the air to train the birds. The idea of a forked stick with flexible straps to propel small objects just occurred to them. Thus was born the little window-breaker that would soon be in the hands of kids all over the country.

Of course, Wham-O hit it big with the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee. But they also made numerous other products that would populate the memories of Baby Boomers.

For instance, there was the Wheelie Bar for banana-seat bicycles. I never had a Wheelie Bar myself.

Other Wham-O creations include Super Elastic Bubble Plastic and The Bubble Thing, which made HUGE bubbles.

Perhaps you weren’t aware that Wham-O dabbled in the firearms business. But sometime in the late 50’s or early 60’s, they manufactured a single-shot .22 pistol! I was surprised to hear that, but guns really didn’t carry as much of a negative stigma back in those days as they seem to now. I grew up with a house full of guns for hunting, as did many other Boomers in rural and small-town areas.

But Wham-O made lots of play guns, too. One of the most amazing was the Air Blaster that could blow out a candle twenty feet away. To be shot with an air blaster would be to experience getting smacked with a ball of compressed air. Weird and fun.

Wham-O is also responsible for the Water Wiggle, the Slip and Slide, the Hacky Sack, and Silly String, all of which appeared during our lifetimes. They also sold (I believe) a rubber ring with a ball attached at the end of a stalk. You would slip a foot through the ring and twirl it, jumping over the swinging stalk. Perhaps a reader could enlighten us as to what it was called, as I couldn’t find anything.

But not everything Wham-O sold was a raging success. One of the founders took an African safari in the early 60’s and was amazed to see a species of fish that laid its eggs in mud which would become completely dry. The next rainfall would see the eggs hatch.

Thinking he had his next big product, Melin brought a bunch of egg-laden mud back to the States. His idea was that he would sell a little mud with instructions for an instant aquarium. In fact, according to Wham-O’s website, millions of orders were taken for Melin’s latest product.

Alas, the fish, as temperamental as panda bears, wouldn’t reproduce well in captivity. So that’s why you don’t remember Mudfish, or whatever they would have been called.

So here’s to Wham-O, a wonderful toy and gadget company that is still alive and doing quite well. Our childhoods just wouldn’t have been the same without Frisbees, Hula Hoops, Slip and Slides and the like.

I certainly didn’t hurt for toys when I was a kid. However, I didn’t have EVERY toy.

Witness the Texaco Fire Truck. Another cool toy that sadly never made it into my toybox was the water rocket.

I saw hundreds of ads for water rockets in various comic book ads.

One day at junior high school, for a science demonstration, I finally got to witness a water rocket in action.

Pretty cool stuff! So cool, that nowadays there is a passionate online following of homegrown water rockets. Read on.

The water rocket was allegedly created in 1930 by future professor Jean LeBot in Rennes, France. While still a student at school, he experimented with a champagne bottle (designed to hold high pressure) filled partially with water and pressurized by compressed air from a bicycle pump fed through a cork with an inner tube valve at its center. The rocket was launched from an inclined plank forming a ramp.

It flew well, but the bottle would smash on impact.

At some point after that (the details are very sketchy), toy manufacturers began marketing water rockets made from high-impact plastic. The rocket would sit on a plastic hand pump and launch with a trigger pull.

I found photos of some rockets that were manufactured in Germany in the early 50’s and that looked just like the V-2 models that rained down on Great Britain.

Later models included curved fins that would put a spin on the rocket, causing it to fly higher and straighter.

Once you pumped the launcher enough times to achieve optimal pressure, you pulled the trigger and were rewarded by a rocket shooting skyward, accompanied by a satisfying hissing sound and a jet trail of water and water vapor.

Then, the device would plummet to earth (the nicer models included a rubber padded nose cone to absorb the impact).

The comic book ads we grew up with are long gone, but water rockets continue to exist today, looking very much like we remember them.

However, there is a passionate following of home-built water rockets out there on the web. Most of the rockets are made out of plastic two-liter soda bottles. The lightweight cylinders can withstand high pressure, and are thus ideal for aeronautical flight. Not only that, they don’t shatter like glass champagne bottles when they land.

In the 60’s and 70’s, if you weren’t old enough to drive, or if you were, but didn’t have a car, odds are you got around on a bike. And if you had a bike, the odds were also great that you had customized it in some fashion.

The coolest bike I ever had was a Stingray knockoff (I think mom got it at Sears) in 1971, when I was 11 years old. This bad boy was green, my favorite color. It had a 36″ sissy bar with a top cover, high-rise handlebars, and a cheater slick. I could do some monumental jumps on that bike. But that long sissy bar discouraged riding wheelies.

I remember my earliest bike customizations. They involved clothespins and baseball cards, some of which could have been very valuable had I squirreled them away somewhere. Clipping the card with the clothespin to the frame so the spokes would whack against it made your bike sound like a motorcycle.

There was a bewildering array of accessories you could put on your bike to pimp it. I always liked the klaxon-styled horns with the twist in them. That made for a deeper honk. Bikes on Leave It to Beaver always had bells instead of horns. That must have been a 50’s thing. No self-respecting kid on my block circa 1966 would have been caught dead with a bell on his bike.

Then there were the streamers. The streamers would look best dangling from a set of high-rise bars. The idea was to make them go perfectly parallel to the ground as you zipped along as fast as you could go.

You could also put a speedometer on your bike. They used a little rubber wheel to rub against your wheel rim to calculate your speed. I’m not sure how accurate they were. Going as fast as I could generally peaked my speed out at about 30 miles per hour.

A headlight might be affixed to your trusty banana-seater. It would either be powered by a couple of d-cell batteries, or by a generator turned by your wheel. The power unit would goof itself up in short order, by the rubber stripping off the wheel that contacted your rim, or by simply locking up. Even if you managed to get a better-quality unit that would last longer, it still added a noticeable drag to your bike, very bad when there was a need for speed.

One of the funkiest customizations you could perform on your bike was installing a steering wheel. These were pretty popular in the 70’s, although I was unable to locate an image of one. The wheel was smaller than a car’s steering wheel and lightweight. They were adept for spinning your front wheel around rapidly while riding a wheelie, very impressive. The less talented could hold their front wheel up while standing stationary and do the same thing.

You could also wrap metallic tape around your frame, put reflectors on your spokes, or attach a basket (yeah, right! Only if you wanted to get beaten up). Customizing your bike could take many forms indeed. The important thing was that you do SOMETHING to distinguish it from the rest of the bikes with their front wheel stuck in the stand in front of the school.

Boomer kids grew up on two wheels. From the time the training wheels came off, we were spotted buzzing around town on our Sting-Rays, or on less expensive banana-seated clones.

However, many of us had more technologically sophisticated rides. Perhaps we inherited them from our parents or older siblings, or perhaps the non-conformists among us showed our rebellious traits at an early age by opting for them over the high-handlebarred models that everyone else preferred.

The result was the fairly common sight of three-speed bikes on the 1960’s streets where we lived.

The three-speed bike has a venerable history. Before the invention of the automobile, bicycles were seen as an alternative method to getting around town for those without a horse. And let’s face it: it was difficult for a city dweller to own a horse, so the bicycle may well have been an essential part of his or her life.

Thus, around the turn of the century, technological developments were taking place very rapidly on bicycles. In 1909, the British Raleigh bicycle, equipped with a Sturmey Archer 3-Speed hub, started production. Thus began the three-speed revolution.

The three-speed hub allows for variable gear ratios. This makes for easier hill climbing as well as greater speed on level areas.

Comfort was the priority of the three-speeds. Most of them had a spring-loaded cushioned seat. They also had upright handlebars that your hands found naturally comfortable to grasp. The shifter might have been found on the bike frame in the form of a “stickshift,” but was more likely found near the right handgrip.

Front and rear brake levers were also found attached to the handlebars. The three-speed hub made it impossible for the bike to use the coaster brake that most single-speed models used.

The bikes were designed for a leisurely trip through town. Many were equipped with front or rear baskets. All of them came with fenders, to prevent that nasty road grime from covering your back while pedaling in wet conditions.

What they weren’t was cool. Riding around on a three-speed meant that you were not:

A sports jock
A babe magnet
Likely to be voted Most Popular in school
More concerned with image than functionality
Afraid to be seen riding a contraption more suited for your Uncle Joe

At the time, non-conformity was a course taken by a courageous few. The rest of us were slaves to image, and were sadly likely to poke fun at those who weren’t.

The three-speed bike was a classic design that had the further advantage of being extremely durable. Bike frames were generally made of good old heavy steel. The gear mechanism was sealed against the elements. The tires were massive rubber monstrosities, with thick treads, designed to go thousands of miles. Try THAT on those skinny 27″ tires that came on the later ten-speeds.

Thus, many a three-speed pedaled by a Boomer kid was a hand-me-down. Those bikes could last for decades with just a bit of care and the provision of a dry place of storage.

Nowadays, three-speeds have their fan clubs. For instance, take a look at the 3-Speed Adventure Society, who enjoy dressing up in tweed and hitting the road like it was 1920.

It was the ten-speed that caused an explosion in bicycling in the 1970’s, and a future article will cover that in full. But here’s a doff of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap to the three-speed: the triumph of function over form.

Ah, the rivalry between Ivy League schools. Who invented the ubiquitous flying disk known as the Frisbee? The consensus agrees that the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, made pies that were sold to many New England colleges. Students soon discovered that the empty pie tins could be tossed and caught, providing a fun way to work off the calories just consumed. But who did it first?

Yale claims that a student named Elihu Frisbie grabbed a collection plate from the chapel and flung it across the schoolyard in 1820.

Even very few Yalies believe that.

The identity of the first pie-pan throwing student, or what school he/she attended, will forever be a mystery. But Frisbie pies, while gone since 1958, have their name live on in (at least in homonym form) the Wham-O Frisbee,

The plastic disk can trace its origin back to one Walter Morrison, who was enjoying tossing a popcorn can lid back and forth with his girlfriend in 1937. Morrison conceived of an aerodynamic toy that would likely be popular.

In the meantime, World War II intervened. Morrison found himself a prisoner in Stalag 13, along with another soldier named Warren Franscioni. They discussed going into business together if they could survive the grueling prison camp.

Survive they did, and in 1946, Morrison patented a flying disk. His first model was the Whirlo-Way, which didn’t make a whole lot of noise, sales-wise. Franscioni and Morrison parted ways in 1950.

By 1955, the public began to be captivated with UFO’s. Morrison began producing the Pluto Platter that year, and was more successful. The owners of a small but up-and-coming company called Wham-O saw big sales potential, and bought Morrison out while still giving him royalties. Everybody won.

The only thing Wham-O’s Rick Knerr didn’t like about the amazingly aerodynamic disks was the name. “Pluto Platter” didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Having heard the pie plate story, he decided, with a trademark-ready spelling change, to call the flying disks Frisbees.

Today, Frisbee is one of the most recognizable brand names on the planet. In fact, it was back in the mid 60’s, when I got my first one and tossed it around the yard. You can buy them in many incarnations, from glow-in-the-dark to edible (for your pet) to expensive tournament models.

Of course, if you don’t mind an advertisement on it, you can get them free at trade shows. That’s my preferred method of ownership.

There was a tiny little world that I remember entering as a child. To get there, you had to use an object that required you to point it to a bright light source. Once you did so, you peered through the eyepieces and observed a miracle: gorgeous color images of national parks, cartoon characters, or perhaps animals in incredible three-dimensional realism!

A Viewmaster was found in practically every house with kids in the 1960’s. Perhaps one reason for its popularity was that it wasn’t just fascinating to the young! Parents got a kick out of them too.

The Viewmaster actually predates the Baby Boomer generation. It was debuted at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It was invented by organ maker and photographer William Gruber, who wanted to create a stereoscopic way to view recently invented Kodachrome slides.

The product was inexpensive from the start, and this contributed to its popularity. And it also contained few moving parts and required no batteries. Plus, it established a standard size for the Viewmaster reel, or disk, that let you view the latest releases on the oldest Viewmaster, or vice versa.

And they also opened up a wonderful world to kids. We saw stunning images of Yosemite, Yellowstone, New York skyscrapers, massive mountain ranges, and, of course, Donald Duck.

The fact that every kid had one meant that visiting your friends’ homes would give you access to reels you might have never seen before. A Viewmaster sitting out with a few reels would quickly be grabbed up and checked out by visiting playmates.

After several ownership changes, the rights to Viewmaster were eventually purchased by Fisher-Price, who still manufacture them today. In fact, you can buy a brand spanking new viewer for six bucks. It doesn’t look much like the pictured vintage model, but it works the same.

How about it, fellow Boomers? Why not introduce your grandkids to the same wonderful 3-D world you remember as a child?