Since Ron is laid up I will have to take up the torch and do some toy blogging for him. Plus post naked pictures of Ginger Rodgers and Joan Holloway (more on that later).
When I was a kid my favorite toy was the Fort Apache play set my dad got me for Christmas when I was six. I kept added to it all the time by going down to John's Bargain Store and getting more bags of plastic figures. You could get Union Army guys and Confederates and Cowboys and Indians and Long Horn cattle and tee pees and cannons and Hills and cabins and all kinds of stuff. It got to the point where I had more than 1,000 little toy soldiers. When my cousins would come over we would put them all out and conduct battles where the green army guys from World Two would help the Calvary fight the Indians and the Chinese communist guys. Then the cowboys would stampede the cows right through the whole battlefield. We would spread them all over the place. When we were really ambitious we would set up the HO Lionel Train tracks with the herds of buffalo. Then when we got everything perfect....my grandmother would call us in to dinner and we had to put everything away.
You see women never want to let you play with your toys.
A lesson you should learn early in life kid.
17 comments:
You have naked pictures of C. Hendricks? Please post!
Trooper, you make it sound like Forbes's Toy Museum.
It should be either HO or Lionel?
There is a big difference I recall.
HO was the smaller scale trains that tended to go off the tracks.
Lionel was the larger scale, more substantial standard bearer of toy train sets.
Of course, the richer families like yours may have had both.
I always thought HO referred to the scale or size of the trains. I had the really big Lionel Trains because in the Sixties they were really cheap in relative terms.
Plastics had just become popular so you could get a big bag of toy soldiers for twenty five or thirty cents. They made all kinds of obscure types.
You guys had HO's as kids?
Now you can buy all kinds of toy soldiers and with the internet it has become a big business.
I bought one of my kid realtives a whole set of the Alamo with the Texicans and Davy Crockett and the Mexican Army and the whole thing.
To tell you the truth I wanted to play with it myself, but I am over fifty years old and I just can't play with it whenever I want to.
Wait a minute, that came out wrong.
My dad bought me the trains because he always wanted them himself and couldn't afford them. So we set them up around the Christmas tree and all. I had all kinds of extra stuff: Trees, houses, an entire stryofoam mountain for the train to go through. I think he liked the trains more than I did. I just wish I had taken better care of them but they all got destroyed or where thrown out or something.
Aurora Plastic located somewhere on LI made all those cool monster models when I was a kid. I had everyone of them too. My favorite was the Guillotine which was discontined after a few short years.
I recently rediscovered a stop-action motion super 8 film I did of a mock execution when I was about 12. Trying to figure out how to convert DVD to something I can post on the web.
Oh when we were in the seventh grade all we did was make model cars and ships like the Arizona and aircraft carriers. Then in high school we joined the model rocketry club and made rocket models that we actually shot off into the sky and stuff.
That was when everyone got all out of shape when they talked about kids sniffing glue a few years later we all laughed our asses off.
I quess we were doing that and we didn't even know it.
We also made all those models with the monsters like Frankenstein and the Wolfman and stuff.
We would get the little bottles of paint and carefully paint all of the details in the set pieces.
I seem to recall that they were made by Aurora like you said chickenlittle.
Model rockets were a hoot but they came later on for me. Estes rockets is still in business. I recently got my son a starter kit and we experimented with the different engine sizes, A B,C,D and DD.
As far as toy soldiers, I collected the the WW I airfix sets, for example the WW I Germans. These were almost too small to paint, but they were close to HO scale which meant that HO scale planes and tanks were available. I made some pretty elaborate trench warfare dioramas back in day. Then I'd burn them or blow them up with firecrackers or something.
Plastics had just become popular so you could get a big bag of toy soldiers for twenty five or thirty cents.
Plastic Benjamin, Plastics
Most toy soldiers were molded out of polyethylene-the soft kind that is really shiny.
Most hobby models, including Aurora ones, were cast in polystyrene, to which paint adheres.
@Trooper:
New York artist James Bama did all the original box cover art for the Aurora monster models. You might find his bio interesting.
My favorite box cover of his was "The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel Mare" link. I remember getting that one on my 6th birthday.
I have fond memories of playing with toy soldiers. I also had a battery operated tank. I used to roll right over everything standing.
I wonder do French kids play with toy soldiers? If so, do they come with a white flag?
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