Playtime With The Baby Boomers

The Baby Boom generation has provided researchers with a vast and fertile playground. Those of us born during that period of 1946-1964 have been studied for our buying habits, bedroom habits, and pretty much everything else. Now that summer is here, it seems that our recreation is the next to be put under the microscope.

In an article the Plain Dealer cribbed from the Baltimore Sun, "10 timeless toys" from the Baby Boomer generation were touted as "putting the play back in the child." I perused this article expectantly, looking for the beloved toys of my own Baby Boomer Childhood. Feh. This article was full of Loser Toys. See what you think.

1. Slinky. Are they kidding? This hardly qualifies as a toy. A coiled piece of metal that you held, one end in each hand, and bobbled up and down. Rarely could you get it to "go downstairs" for more than a step at a time, and when you did, so effing what? Then, the urge to see how far it would stretch would overcome you...disaster! The slinky got kinky. End of toy. Once that sucker got a bend or kink in it, it was done with. What the hell was this thing?

2. Magic 8 Ball. Never had one. My friends, Lisa and Laura across the street, had one. We asked it questions a few times. Big deal. Then, Lisa, who had a proclivity for taking things apart, couldn't help herself. She bashed it with her dad's sledghammer behind the garage. End of "toy." Notice again how neither of the 2 things already mentioned is really a "toy."

3. Silly Putty. Oh Boy. We all got this stuff. My family has a story for this involving the putty melting down the side of the brand new couch. A certain sibling got into HUGE trouble. Me? I could never resist the urge to bite Silly Putty. After a while of transferring comics and stretching the images of "Terry and the Pirates", the putty got ugly grey and icky-looking. The egg it came in--hey! why an egg container? I don't get that--seemed to always get cracked and then the putty, which could be rolled into a ball and bounced very high and irregularly, would get lost behind furniture. That stuff cannot be effectively scraped off of avocado sculptured carpeting, either, let me tell you. I had to try once. Yikes.

4. Mr. Potato Head. Okay, this one was pretty okay, but after a while, it just got gross. Then, when a plastic potato was provided, it was just dumb.

5. Wiffle Ball. Now, this was brilliant. It was marketed as an alternative to window-smashing baseballs, but let me tell you: our wiffle ball games produced at least one broken window, leading my mother to make us move the contests to the street out front or the driveway, which was gravel. Our wiffle ball game rules were vast and complex, especially my brother Bobby's driveway games with his he-men weightlifters. Good god. The gallons of Bactine and mercurochrome, let alone the boxes of Band-Aids they went through in a summer were a testament to their manliness.

6. Play-Doh. I am one of the few people I know who has never eaten Play-Doh. But I played with this stuff like nobody's business. My sister was born 5 years after I was, and I am grateful that her birth extended my Play-Doh time. You name it, I made it out of Play-Doh, and that was before all the cool playsets came out. My own boys had the Play-Doh Diner. Long after they lost interest in a Play-Doh session, I would still be at it, making burgers with little pickle chips and fries with realistic looking blobs of ketchup draped over them. Sigh. Love it.

7. Frisbee. What a scam. This dumb thing. I could never throw it and was always afraid to catch it. This is still the case. Especially when my nails are long. This is basically--well, let me show you:

'Nuff said. Oh shut up, those of you who never got over your college days! IT'S A DOG TOY.

8. Hula-Hoop. I can only imagine how immensely ridiculous I looked doing this. I was a short, fat girl with no waist trying desperately to shimmy like some sort of Hawaiian pole dancer on crack. Oh. My. God. It makes me now want to go buy one and practice, take The New Size 2 Me out into the middle of my old street and Hula Hoop Like There's No Tomorrow. Sigh. How do we ever survive our childhoods?

9. Etch A Sketch. This toy rocks. I was pretty good with an Etch A Sketch. A genius, if you asked my father. My specialty was houses with nice, symmetrical windows with flowerboxes under each one and a chimney on the roof with a flowing plume of welcoming smoke. But every day, I fought the demons who teased me about how it worked. If I was really smart, I would have bought Lisa across the street one for her birthday.

10. Trolls. I take issue with this nomenclature. Back during my childhood, they weren't called "trolls." They were called "Wishniks." These sharpei-like Yoda-esque creatures came in all sizes and were mystifyingly attractive to girls of about 8. They had them on their dressers, they tied them to their bike handlebars, they carried them to school. I just didn't get it. They were supposed to be good luck. I never had one and didn't want one. Again, though, not a toy.

Top ten? Huh. What about The Thingmaker? I had the one that made Fun Flowers. That toy would never fly in this hyper-kid safe, litigious world. That one was basically an open oven and toxic waste facility. But I loved making my own little fake rubber flowers with the oily junk called, appropriately enough, Plastigoop. I also had a Footsee, a sort of ankle hula hoop. It consisted of a plastic ring you put around one ankle. Attached to the ring was a cord about 30 inches long with a bell-shaped weight attached to it. As you twirled the ring with one foot, you hopped the string with the other. I was pretty good at it, when I wasn't going so fast that I stepped on the cord and tripped, falling on my face.

Aside from those, I had the usual stuff that wasn't exclusive Boomer territory: metal clamp-on roller skates, a second-hand two-wheeler, jump rope, jacks, and a set each of badminton and croquet. (Although the croquet set was a mystery to me. I think we set it up once, fought during a game, and quit.) Beyond that, we were into playing statues, freeze tag, Mother May I, and Red Light-Green Light.

Sigh. I feel old. But strangely smiley. I can't wait to read your toy memories in Comments.

Last Year at The Dept. of Nance: Men (2)