Category: Toys

Some of our toys were unique to our own childhoods. The senior members of the Baby Boomer generation had Howdy Doody dolls. Boomers my age and a little younger had Schwinn Sting Rays.

But generations of kids stretching back to 1923 grew up with wagons produced by the company founded by Italian immigrant Antonio Pasin. And they still do. Even Calvin would take his friend Hobbes on some harrying trips down hillsides in a Radio Flyer.

The wooden wagons were known as Liberty Coasters when they came out that year. In 1930, Antonio’s company was renamed Radio Steel and Manufacturing. His first metal wagon, which came out that year, was known as the Radio Flyer.

Despite the Great Depression, Pasin’s company hung in there. The wagons were sturdy enough to serve for working purposes, and Radio Steel also made other implements like wheelbarrows.

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Pasin and company went to work cranking out hundreds of thousands of blitz cans, the familiar five-gallon containers seen bolted to the backs of Jeeps. No Radio Flyers were produced during a period of time from 1942 to 1945.

However, that meant that as soon as our fathers got back from the war, Radio Flyers would once again be available for them to buy for us. And buy them they did. They recognized a good investment when they saw one, and a Radio Flyer would typically be handed down to multiple aged brothers.

Of course, girls enjoyed them too. Pasin made sure they would be included as his customers with his original slogan “For every boy. For every girl.”

The wagon was the finest kind of plaything that there was. The perfect toy should teach a child a lesson. A Radio Flyer was simply a four-wheeled device with a pulling handle that also steered. What you did with such a device was use your imagination.

For example, a kid down the street transformed his Flyer into a fire truck. A wagon that might have once served for hauling toys, puppies, rocks, pop bottles, or anything else a kid might want transported was serving noble duty loaded with bottles of water, a bucket of sand, and other various firefighting implements that he found appropriate. I believe the high point of his life was when a grass fire mom started in our yard to burn off thatch got a bit out of control. David came roaring into the yard making a siren noise and sprayed the miniature conflagration with his water bottles until it was extinguished.

Another lesson the Flyer taught was that you had to watch where you put your fingers. If you caught a digit in the handle hinge, it would get pinched and hurt like the devil. Like a finger in a light bulb socket, you only did that ONCE.

Radio Flyers continue to be big sellers. And unlike so many other toy companies from our childhoods, it has survived intact as an independent business. Radio Flyer, Inc. is a family-owned company in Chicago that is doing quite well, thank you. While their products are manufactured overseas, their administrative and creative center is right here in the good old USA.

So why not start a new tradition with your grandkid and give them a genuine Radio Flyer? His or her younger siblings will be as grateful as the lucky recipient.

You can do the tricks the surfers do,
just try a “Quasimodo” or “The Coffin” too
(why don’t you) Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin’ with me…

Jan and Dean summed up a late 50’s-mid 60’s craze with their 1964 classic Sidewalk Surfin’. Skateboards were big in those times, even though wipeouts were a frequent occurrence. Those steel wheels just didn’t have a whole lot of grab. Later boards in the 60’s featured clay wheels, which gripped the concrete just a bit better.

Skateboards have had an up, a down, and another long lasting up. They first started showing up in large numbers in the late 50’s. There had been some sorts of boards on wheels since the early part of the century, but trucks which allowed maneuvering were invented which caused their sales to soar.

By the early 60’s, they were a true phenomenon. I remember riding one when I was about six years old, around 1965. It was amazing that you could lean and make the board turn.

However, those problematic slick wheels made them dangerous. Cities started banning their usage. After three years of soaring sales, they practically disappeared from store shelves in 1965.

Few boards were spotted from ’65 to ’73. But that year, a sweeping revolution took place that would make the boards familiar sights for the next thirty years.

That revolution was the urethane wheel. FINALLY, skateboards had gripping ability that greatly improved their safety. Sales exploded that year, and every year, a new incarnation of teenagers grabbed them up. Cities that had once banned their use now build public skateboard parks.

But it all started with our generation, ending up with lots of bruises and broken bones on those old slick wheels.

In the 1940’s Mary Carter lived in Cincinnati, making a lucrative living holding fake seances.

Mary was also inventive. She created a slate that would appear to be sealed inside a box, inside which she was able to write messages “from the spirit world.” When she opened the box, her customers were amazed to see messages scrawled on the slate.

Her son Alfred admired the invention, but he realized that it took real skill and dexterity, which his mother possessed in droves, to operate the magic slate. So he set about inventing a device that would “tell the future” in a manner that required no input from the user.

In 1944, Carter created a tube divided in two by a wall that ran throughout its length. The tube had a die in each half, with a windows on each end allowing only one die to be seen. The dice floated, and the tube was filled with a dark, thick liquid. Answers were printed on each die. So the tube would reveal one answer, then it could be turned over and it would reveal another one.

The tube was called the Syco-Seer, also the Syco-Slate, in honor of his mother’s creation. Carter took prototypes to a local retailer, and he expressed interest in selling them in his store, and also wholesaling to other establishments.

So Carter turned to his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, who is credited with the invention of the Magic Eight-Ball. Carter obtained patents for his tubes, then assigned them to Bookman.

At this point, Carter became so enslaved to alcohol that he left all for Bookman to handle, as he descended into a life of sleeping in flophouses.

Bookman surged ahead, marketing the Syco-Seer to as many stores as he could. Alabe Crafts, the company he formed with Carter, was producing the devices in steady numbers. Stores would hire women to dress in Gypsy clothing to demonstrate the “amazing” fortune telling tubes.

In 1950, Brunswick, manufacturers of billiard equipment and other sporting goods, commissioned Alabe to make Syco-Seers shaped as eight-balls. The promotion was modestly successful for Brunswick, but Bookman thought the tube reworked into an eight-ball would be a much greater hit among the masses.

He was right. After his commitment to Brunswick ran its course, he began cranking out Magic Eight-Balls for his own company to sell. And sell they did!

At first, it was marketed as a paperweight. But as time went by, it was aimed at kids as a toy, and that’s when things really took off. Sales went up and stayed up.

Nowadays, the Magic Eight-Ball is sold by Mattel at about a million units a year. It has become part of human culture. They are found in kids’ bedrooms, executives’ desks, and everywhere in between. It’s been seen or mentioned in movies, television shows, and novels. It even had homage paid to it in the form of a Microsoft Word “easter egg,” or hidden trick in a program. On an early version of Word, you could create a blank macro called “Magic Eight-Ball” and it would place an eight-ball icon on your toolbar.

Minor, I know, but it shows you that Redmond programmers dig Al Carter’s creation too.

I am so pleased when I write about a toy from our Boomer childhoods, and don’t have to include it under the “Things that Disappeared When You Weren’t Looking” category! Such is the happy case with the subject of today’s piece, the Etch-a-Sketch, still proudly produced by Ohio Art! I was deeply hoping that they were being made in Ohio, but sadly, that’s not been the case since 2003.

However, let us celebrate the fact that they are still around, exactly like they were during the Decade of Change, when many of us were enjoying wonderful childhoods as Baby Boomers.

It all started in France in the late 1950’s. A gentleman named André Cassagnes (another source credits Arthur Granjean) crafted a drawing device in his basement. He filled a plastic container with aluminum dust. The container had a clear screen, also a stylus mounted to two bars which was moved by small cables attached to knobs. Thus, an adroit artist could make subtle movements to create a single line which could create infinite shapes.

In reality, he created a very cool toy which 98% of us could use to make basic shapes, and cause us to envy true artistes with the talent to create masterpieces.

He took his invention to the International Toy Fair in Nuremburg, Germany, where a US-based company called Ohio Art showed little interest. However, upon seeing “The Magic Screen” a second time, they decided to roll the dice and take a chance on it.

Ohio Art tooled up their factory in Dayton in time to have a boatload of Etch-a-Sketches on store shelves by Christmas, 1960. The result was a smash hit, and a memory for many of us.

The Etch-a-Sketch was a familiar product in dime stores when we were kids, pricey enough to only rate being purchased for a special occasion like a birthday or Christmas. But untold millions were sold during the 60’s and 70’s. And we all learned a few lessons about them as we created our artistic attempts.

1. Not all of us were artists. In fact, most of us were pretty bad, but we still spent hour after hour twisting knobs, then turning the board over and clearing our efforts, and trying again.
2. A mistake meant either starting over, or turning the lemon into lemonade, i.e. integrating the mistake into your creation.
3. The Etch-a-Sketch would eventually crack on the black back side, leaving silvery aluminum dust all over the place.
4. Once that happened, your choice was to (a) talk mom or dad into another one, or (b) move on to something else. In my case, it was the Spirograph.

But it generally took years of being tossed helter-skelter into a toybox to crack the durable plastic. In the meantime, the investment our parents made in the toy had paid off with hundreds or thousands of hours of entertainment, and perhaps inspiration to make a career out of art.

The Etch-a-Sketch continues to be a successful toy, so you can go out and purchase one for your own grandchild. My first is due in three months, I’ll probably hold off for a year or two. 😉 But rest assured, that when little Edie grows up, she’ll have pleasant memories of a plastic device which allowed her to magically create all sorts of black shapes on a silver background.

And odds are she’ll be a lot more talented at it than her grandpa.

A collection of plastic gears and colored pens caught the attention of a generation of youngsters in the 60’s and 70’s. If you were patient, you could create some amazing drawings that would look great festooning your bedroom walls. But it did require patience, something that not all of us came by naturally.

A British electronic engineer named Denys Fisher invented Spirograph in 1962. In the tradition of Super Glue, Velcro, and Teflon, it was created for a strictly-business use which ended up making its mark as a lighter-weight product.

Fisher’s family noticed that one of his geared creations aimed at manufacturing industrial products made some cool patterns in you traced their motions. They convinced him that he had one cool toy on his hands, and he listened.

Eventually, Kenner Toys grabbed the design and started marketing it in 1966. It sold untold millions, including two sets bought by my wife and myself when we were tots.

The tool required patience, indeed. My problem, being a hyperactive child (i.e. a future Type A), was that I would go too fast and screw the drawing up. Eventually, I learned to patiently and slowly trace the mathematically set routes and create some cool images.

The best toys would teach a lesson. This one did just that.

You also learned that math didn’t suck. I always hated math, it was by far my worst subject. Yet, the gorgeous patterns you created were based on good old math. The fact fact that you could vary the size of your drawings by using different holes on the geared wheel was an almost transcendental bit of knowledge. You walked away realizing that math could be applied in ways that were pretty cool.

Spirographs are still available in vastly inferior forms to its glory days when it was a very hot item. The cheap Chinese-made versions are an insult to its legacy.

In fact, the numerous Java-based Spirograph applets all over the web are a more honorable tribute to this classic plastic toy. They make full use of the mathematical principals which Mr. Fisher uncovered so many years ago.

WWII brought about shortages of many basic commodities. One of these was rubber. Rubber was needed for military purposes, and there wasn’t enough of it.

A Scottish engineer named James Wright was looking for a man-made rubber substiitute. He was trying all sorts of mixtures of chemical compounds at the General Electric laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut.

Wright combined boric acid and silicone oil in one experiment. To his delight, it polymerized into a rubbery substance! He excitedly shared his creation with his employers and they began sending samples to other engineers all over the world, looking for a proposed use of the hard-won artificial rubber.

The results were silence. Not one practical idea for the bouncing putty emerged from the educated minds.

Nobody could think of what you could use the rubbery blobs for, but all enjoyed playing with them very much.

Peter Hodgson, an unemployed advertising man, was the man behind the marketing of Silly Putty. Hodgson had marketed the bouncing putty for a New Haven toy store. It sold well. But the store’s owner decided not to market it any more for some strange reason. So he borrowed some cash and purchased a large quantity of the goo from GE for $150. He also purchased a bunch of little plastic eggs and put a dollop of the putty in each one. He sold them for a buck a pop.

At the New York International Toy Fair in 1950, he introduced Silly Putty to the world. It was well received, and sales were steady, but not spectacular.

Then, in August, Silly Putty received a boost similar to the one Yours Truly was fortunate to get earlier this year with the mention on CBS’s The Early Show. In Hodgson’s case, it was an ad in The New Yorker extolling the bouncy putty. Within three days, he had received a quarter of a million orders!

Then, the Korean conflict almost killed his thriving business. Government restrictions on silicone usage in 1951 forced him to carefully parcel out 1500 lbs. of Silly Putty. The next year, restrictions were lifted, and production ramped back up.

Silly Putty appeared in television commercials beginning in the 60’s, and that caused sales to climb ever higher.

Interestingly, Silly Putty saw the demographic of its customers reverse early in the game. When it was introduced, it was a novelty that appealed to grownups, accounting for 80% if its sales. But within five years, the buyers were 80% children! The ratio has stayed there ever since.

Silly Putty could bounce. It could stretch. It could flow slowly like a thick liquid. And, of course, it could pick up ink, as in images from comic books and newspapers.

It was (and still is) small, cheap, and perfect for lots of imaginative uses. It’s also completely useless for any practical purpose other than entertainment. But it’s absolutely perfect for that.

And today, an old goat who just turned 48 keeps a container of Silly Putty in his desk drawer to play with during conference calls and the like.

It’s as much fun now as it was about 1967.