King of the Wild Frontier

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that when I was a small kid, I loved cowboy hats and my Davy Crockett faux-coonskin cap. In the old photos my sis has scanned was this one of me wearing that very cap. Needless to say, I was a big fan of Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.

In my 1950s childhood mind, I probably had quite a few adventures emulating the bravery of Davy as portrayed by Fess Parker in living black & white on our television screen. Of course I was not alone. Davy was a pop phenomenon in those days. After all, he "kilt him a bar when he was only three".

One of my toys from those days is still in my possession. It was a plastic squeak toy of a child dressed out as Davy. This may be the only toy I still have from my childhood, and frankly I am surprised it is still around. The second picture is it, and you can also see the chewed up end of Davy's rifle. I recall that it was a really pleasant feeling to chew that thing, not thinking about the damage it was doing to the toy. Maybe I was like a dog with a squeak toy, chewing and squeaking it as much as I could.

So there we have it. A story of a boy, a toy, and a frontier hero who died at the Alamo.

Deluxe Reading Playmobile

People always remember their first car. My first real car was a 1963 Rambler Classic 660 station wagon. I will always remember it with great fondness.

However, years before the Rambler, I had another "car". In 1961, the Deluxe Reading Toy Company sold their Playmobile dashboard in supermarkets and drug stores. I remember seeing it on display at what was then an A&P store at the corner of Old Richmond Road (now Bissonnet Street) and Beechnut Street in Houston. Boy, with all the shiny parts and look of a real car of the era, I really wanted this toy. I remember telling my parents I wanted it, but I also saw that it cost $19.95. To me, that seemed like a fortune. It probably wasn't that inexpensive for my parents back then either. Still, when Christmas morning came, there it was under the tree, glimmering and shiny with the colorful tree lights reflecting off of it.

The Playmobile had a car key, sun visors, tinted windshield with working wipers, rear view mirror, and all kinds of gauges, knobs, and switches. Oh man! I must have driven a million imaginary miles at the wheel of my Playmobile!

I guess I always liked driving toys though. One of my very early memories of my life was a big steering wheel that was installed in the playground of a park in Norman, Oklahoma. I must have been about 2 or 3 years old, and I still recall how much I liked playing there and pretending to drive.

Maybe that is why I still love road trips, and am somewhat a road geek all these years later!

David Letterman at Play

Late Show host David Letterman demonstrates why Optimus Prime is such a popular Transformer toy.

Curtsys and Childhood Games

This morning while watching an episode of the television classic, I Love Lucy, there was an episode where Little Ricky was supposed to perform on his drums, but got a bad case of stage fright. I noticed that the children coming in to play their instruments entered and did something you don't see much anymore. The boys would enter and bow, while the girls would enter and curtsy. It occurred to me that you don't see little girls do a curtsy anymore. Perhaps in certain contexts, such as the courts of royalty, a curtsy would still be done. However, it seems that even after artistic performances, the bow is now done by both genders.

This led me to think about other things that children used to do that you rarely, if ever, see happening. We didn't have Nintendo DS, iPods, and other gadgets that keep kids occupied today. We played simple games, such as Four Square, Jacks, Red Rover, Marbles, Spinning Tops, Duck Duck Goose, and Jumping Rope. Jumping Rope was mainly a girls' game, and the jumping cadence was accompanied by unique stories in the form of rhymes. The stories sometimes related to other girls jumping into, or out of, the rope, while each end of the rope was spun by another girl. I found a website with many of these games and lots of jump rope rhymes that you can visit by CLICKING HERE.

For boys, Marbles, Dodge Ball, and Kick Ball were favorites. Kick Ball was a game played with a big inflated ball that was much like baseball, except that you kicked the ball rather than batting. One of our favorites was playing with wooden tops that you would spin by wrapping a string around and tossing to the ground while pulling back on the string. Many tops had metal points, but the folks at Duncan, the yo-yo company, made a safer top that had replaceable nylon tips. These were a lot of fun.

The things kids have to play with today are pretty cool, but sometimes I wonder if they are missing out on the simple joys and toys of days gone by.