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Christmas toys; the Baby Boomer top 10 list
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It’s 1963 and I can’t wait for what Santa is bringing me. For that matter, any Christmas between 1958 and 1966, were pretty big for me. Fueled by TV and Saturday morning cartoons and kids shows like Soupy Sales, Captain Kangaroo, Sky King, Fury, Captain Penny, Barnaby and others that could easily turn into another list, I ask you to join me in nominating your Top 10 most wanted Baby Boomer toys. It was a time when Hasbro, Wham-O, Kenner, and Mattel were all household names to kids, even to the point were we could recite ad slogans like “You can tell it’s Mattel, it’s swell”. Swell? Holy Eddie Haskell! Anyway, here is my list with some links to pics and where you can still buy them, while I note which ones I got with an asterisk and a comment or two, which is what I am hoping you will do! (I’ll admit these are boy-centric, so girls, jump in!)
Barbie and Ken in a pink plastic case tie with G.I. Joe* (My sisters had the former, I the latter and you just had to have the G.I. Joe Frogman version) Barbie and Ken were the real first names of the Mattel Co's. co-founder, a woman. No one thought this doll would sell, as it was too realistic and high fashion. In 1989 more money was spent on Barbie fashions worldwide, than on REAL women’s fashions!
Ohio Art’s own Etch-a-Sketch* I do think this was one of my sister’s
favorite toys, which I ruined trying to open it to see how it worked.
Green Army Men* OK, a boy’s toy, with my family's wild and wacky sense of humor, we dubbed one of these poor guys, “Booger Man”. This green “Booger Man” soldier became family legend and was passed from each Baby Boomer cousin well into the next two decades where it became tradition for the person in possession of Booger Man to sneak him onto an unsuspecting cousin’s wedding cake! The girl cousins in the family invented this whole thing from one of my green army men, as I was the only boy in the family. Anyway, I am not sure how that became the current way he is being passed on. Oh, and boys like me and you, used to find all sorts of ways to burn, melt or otherwise blow them up with caps and M-80s, something Ghoulardi taught us well. (See Classic Ghoulardi clips on You Tube with this link.)
Rat Finks.* Well, Rat Finks were just one of the things that Ghoulardi, blew up almost every week on Channel 8. "COOL it with the BOOM-BOOMS!"
Mattel guns.* Whether it was a Thompson machine gun you’d pull back to make it go rap-rap-rap-rap when you pulled the trigger or such a faithful looking M-16 that today it would get you arrested, every boy kid wanted a Mattel gun. A Western Fanner 50, that you could use one hand to “fan the hammer” to fire off multiple shots like the cowboys on TV, was a “must-have.”
Chatty Cathy.* What a wonder, you pulled a string and she’d say things! If you can remember some of them, please post your comments above. Chatty Cathy was something else I think I took apart and ruined trying to figure out jow it worked. They usually stopped working in a couple of months anyway when the sting broke or her speech started to slow down giving her voice a deeper register than Darth Vader’s, but Star Wars toys were years away.
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Mattel’s Vac-u-Form.* You could heat and form your own toys! This had to be the most unsafe toy ever made. I had burn marks all over my hands and arms and the fumes it made were probably more toxic than the lead paint that was still used on most of our houses, not to mention our toys. If the toys coming out of China now have been found to have lead paint on them, can you imagine the levels ours had? One painted wood train would probably have enough lead in it to keep Superman from seeing through anything.
Wham-O Superball*. I can’t tell you how many windows at Noble Elementary School in Cleveland Heights my friends and I broke by accident, trying to harness this deadly toy. One of the problems is that we tried to play baseball with it, and when hit with a bat and facing west, it would go over the roof of the school and land probably somewhere in Parma Heights.
Mr. Potato Head*. Who thought of this? Bigger than the Pet Rock that would come later, this fad lasted inexplicably for years! The only benefit, was that it would lead some children later to become police sketch artists.
The Easy Bake Oven. Man, who thought a light bulb could work as well as Mom’s Norge? Problem was, it could take forever for that light bulb to bake anything. If you started an easy bake cake when you were nine you might reach puberty before it was cooked in the middle. Its popularity inspired food manufacturers to introduce frosting in pouches and cans to real “Housewives”. (Why didn’t we call men, “Workhusbands”, if we were going to define people that way?) Anyway, perhaps The Easy Bake Oven even inspired the much faster cooking Microwave, also with a light bulb inside.
directory.google.com/Top/Recreation/Collecting/Toys/Vintage_Toys
shop.ebay.com/items/vintage%20plastic%20toyswww.dmoz.org/Recreation/Collecting/Toys/Vintage_Toys/
Wham-O's Superball
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