Toys

Cowgirl Chris and her Gun

Toy Story III was recently released to great anticipation and reviews.  I don’t know a soul who hasn’t enjoyed the Toy Story movies, probably because of the memories it brings back of the toys we used to play with and the imaginary worlds we entered when we played with them.

My favorite toys were dolls to begin with.  The plastic doll with a diaper and her own bottle that I filled with water, fed to her and then to my delight, she immediately wet her tiny pink diaper.  The wooden doll with the cloth body, which I loved better than any other doll and that my brother dunked in a bucket of water, which permanently removed the paint on her face.  Neither of these dolls had hair, in fact, I don’t remember any of my dolls having hair.  They didn’t have extra clothes either.  And there were no Barbies then, or Bratz dolls.  I think there were dolls that “walked”, had joints of some kind, but I didn’t have any of those.

I loved paper dolls, too, the kind that were hard cardboard with a book full of clothes you had to cut out with the little tabs for hanging the clothes on the doll.  I had several of these, one or two of movie stars, and I played with them endlessly, changing their clothes.  Trouble with these is that they didn’t bend! It was hard to get them to sit at the imaginary table, but they were better at going to bed.

I liked playing “cars”, too, but these were the days before Matchbox cars and so, oh poor kid, I played with rocks!  I’d make roads in the dirt and drive my rock cars around on the streets in my “town”.  (I know my brother had some cars but he wouldn't share.) And, of course, like all girls, I had a doll’s house.  Mine was made of tin, with painted rugs and walls and plastic furniture, and I spent hours moving the furniture around.  My paper dolls were too tall for the rooms in the house but they could walk around outside of it.

We may not have had Matchbox cars or talking dolls, but in those politically incorrect good old days we had guns and cowboy hats, so we played Cowboys and Indians.  Being the oldest, I got to be Roy Rogers, my best friend, Linda, was Dale Evans, and my brother and her brother traded places being The Sheriff and The Bad Guy/Indian.  We had a large lot with fruit trees so we had plenty of paths and bushes and trees to stand in for mountains and mesas and hideouts.  Our laundry porch was the jail.  I can still make the horse galloping sound with my mouth and tongue clicking against each other.  When I make that sound it takes me right back to those days of trotting around searching for the bad guy and heading him off at the pass.

My most specific and happiest memory of playing with “toys” was recreating school in my bedroom.  I loved clean paper and notebooks, large and small.  I would line up my dolls and give them assignments and then put grades in a tiny notebook.  I don’t recall disciplining anybody, just teaching them.  I used my children’s books as texts and I taught them how to read.  I might have taught them arithmetic, too, because I liked it.

When I got a little older I made my bedroom into an office and I became a secretary--another way to use clean paper and notebooks.  I must have seen an office on television or heard about it on the radio, otherwise I can’t imagine how I would have known about such things.  My Dad either upholstered or was a civil servant at the Navy Yard or Keyport, no offices or secretaries, and my Mom didn't work outside the home.

There were the “physical” toys, too.  The hula hoop, which I got pretty good at, and my bicycle, which I rode around Tracyton endlessly, pretending it was a car.  I wrote previously about how quiet our neighborhood was and I don’t remember ever having to worry about cars while I was riding.  Tracyton had wide roads, some of them still dirt, and a kid could ride up and down the blocks safely.  And in Winter we had a sled that our Dad made us and we had a steep hill that started up by Grant’s Store and leveled out perfectly so that we didn’t slide all the way down to the bay.  

And pick-up sticks and Jacks, the games Darlene Murphy and I used to play at her house, on the kitchen floor.  I loved the challenge of Jacks--I think we used to play it at grade school, too, when we weren’t jumping rope or playing Hop-Scotch.  Which makes me remember the board games--Sorry, Monopoly, Operation.

We played and imagined a lot when we were kids.  We had no electronics except for the radio we listened to most of my childhood because we didn’t have a TV set yet--ours came in 1954, when I was 10, but until that point I imagined Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and The Shadow and The Whistler.  I will never forget the theme song to The Whistler, so mysterious, so scary.  

I feel lucky that I lived in a simpler time, that I played outdoors a lot and that my imagination was percolating all the time.