Tag Archives: toys

Pirates Ahoy, Sydney

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Another postcard from a time when that was a more common way to send a short message from afar. In this case, pretty far. I picked up this card in Sydney on Dec. 22, 1991, and mailed it from Canberra the next day.

I’d wandered into a department store in Sydney that day, which I spent walking around the city: Circular Quay, the Opera House, Sydney Tower, the Australian Museum, the Royal Botanic Garden and more, such as the (to my ears) amusing Woolloomoolo district, which I’ve read has gentrified since I was there.

I don’t remember going into a Sydney department store, or seeing the Lego exhibit. Yet the card documents the visit. Lego called it “Pirates Ahoy.”

Jim has a longstanding fascination with pirates — mostly the lore, though I’m certain he’s read some genuine histories. Apparently Lego was setting up pirate-theme displays at the time to promote its Lego Pirates set, which was fairly new at the time, launching in 1989.

The genius of Wikipedia is that there are entries like Lego Pirates. It’s an astonishingly long article, documenting in incredible detail the byzantine history of a children’s playset.

Thursday Debris. Literally

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Over Memorial Day weekend, I started cleaning out the garage. Or, as I told Ann, go Marie Kondo on it — getting rid of a lot of the contents, one way or another. Ann said she thought that might be a misinterpretation of Ms. Kondo’s ideas, but I don’t care, since I have no intention of watching her videos or TikToks or however she gets her message out. Call it willful misinterpretation.

The process continues, sometimes on the weekends since, sometimes in the evenings. I’ve made some progress. Besides simple decluttering, a lot of dust and leaves and other debris has been swept out. The worst of it involved removing boxes torn by an invading squirrel in winters past.

So far I’ve filled our 90-gallon trash can three times, along with the 90-gallon recycle bin, and I’m working on a fourth for each. Other items have been given to a resale shop. A small number of things have come into the house, since I’ve deemed them too useful to be in the garage.

I’ve found things I’d forgotten we had, and which should have gone long ago. Such as items from earlier years in the lives of my daughters. This box and its contents, for instance.

It moved with us from the western suburbs. I know that because I wrote which bedroom the movers were to take it, in the new house — this house — nearly 19 years ago. Ann used it in those days. Ann, who’s in college now. Lilly probably used it before that. Lilly, who’s a grown woman in Seattle.

Did I feel sentimental about it? Slightly. Very slightly. Enough to post the picture here. But that’s all. Knowing that absolutely no one would want the dirty old plastic within, I emptied the box into the trash can, and then (after taking the picture), broke the box down for recycling. Whatever sentiment I felt ebbed away as I inhaled some dust.

Further Considerations About Sock Monkeys (And Long Grove Community Church & Cemetery)

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Rockford, Illinois, is generally credited with creating the modern sock monkey, and more recently fiberglass sock monkeys were put on display there. There are even sock monkeys at the Midway Village Museum in Rockford.

So how is it Long Grove is getting a sock monkey museum? I’ve only done cursory research, the kind the subject deserves, and I haven’t found a connection. I like to think the Long Grove museum will be run by a breakaway sock monkey faction, rivals of the sock monkey orthodoxy in Rockford, but that’s just me amusing myself.

A short distance from Long Grove’s historic downtown is Long Grove Community Church, which is historic in its own right, built by Evangelical German immigrants in the 1840s.Long Grove Community Church

Long Grove Community Church
“With a new century, came many changes,” the church’s web site says, referring to the 20th century. “The church widened her circle of ministry to include local people who were not German-speaking. Two denominational mergers took the church away from her Evangelical roots.

“By 1950, the church had grown so small that the denomination recommended the doors be closed. But God gave the people a vision. Instead of closing their doors, they built Sunday School rooms for children. As people migrated from the city to the suburbs, the area grew and so did the church. By the late 1960s, we had transitioned from a small rural church into a suburban church.”

The Long Grove Cemetery is next to the church.

Long Grove Community Church

Long Grove Illinois Cemetery

Long Grove Illinois Cemetery

There isn’t much information on line about this cemetery, despite its clear historic aspects.Long Grove Illinois Cemetery

But I don’t need a web site to tell me it’s another of the many cemeteries in the Chicago area with immigrant German stones, many dating from the 19th century.

Return of the Zhu-Zhus

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“A line of severe storms slammed through downtown Chicago and surrounding areas Monday, downing trees and power lines, which sparked fires in the city, officials said,” CNN reported last night. That, and there was some riotous looting too.

“More than a million homes and businesses in the Midwest are without power, including a third of all of customers in Iowa,” CNN continued. “The wind was so strong when the storm passed through Perry, Iowa, it blew pieces of boards from other buildings into the walls of a house.”

So we lucked out. As I mentioned, the winds were fairly tame in my tiny corner of the world. After such wind and rain as we had had passed yesterday, I went out in the yard to pick up items that moved around a little, such as one of the deck chairs. The sun had returned and I noticed the rain-speckled hibiscus picking up the light.hibiscusToday we opened up a box that has been sitting in our laundry room for a good many years, tucked under a few other boxes. I call it a laundry room, but being home to the washer and dryer is only one of its functions. Crap we don’t want to put partly out in the elements — in the garage, that is — goes there.

On Saturday, since this is a Summer of Nowhere, I spent a fair number of hours in the garage, till the trash bin was mostly full and garage crap had been rearranged somewhat.

Back to the box. Among many other things, it contained five Zhu-Zhu Pets. Mechanical hamsters, since I’m not sure they rise to the level of robot hamsters.

Ann marveled at them. Her 17-year-old self reflected on how important they were to her seven-year-old self. She got her first one for that birthday. Like most toys, they were important until they weren’t.
What amazed me was that the batteries have held out on all of them. They all still move around and make various preprogramed noises.

That’s about 20 seconds of randomly selected Zhu-Zhu Pet sounds, squeaks and whirs coming directly from 2010 to you in 2020.

Watch the Reindeer Melt! Days of Fun

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Ann brought this to my attention earlier this month, at a crafts superstore I rarely go to, but from which she wanted something. On display was an item that seemed to be sold for Christmas, but which by January was at a deep discount.

One of the stranger holiday items I saw this season, or any holiday season, really. A reindeer figure. Build it! Watch it melt! Watch it melt? Watch it melt?

Walmart’s marketing text about the item is positively demented, which I guess is fitting: “Build the reindeer and watch it melt magically! Fun for days. Completely reusable. Keep building and watch it melt over and over! Perfect stocking stuffer! Miracle Melters! Reindeer! Build it and Watch it Melt!”

Sure enough, someone has made a video about this — toy. I can’t say that I watched all of it, skipping around some, but the point of the item still eludes me. Do reindeer melt in dark Sámi folktales?

Paper Purge

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Not long ago, I decided to purge some paper around the house. Specifically, user manuals for machines that are long gone. You’d think that those would have been tossed along with the items themselves, but that’s not how clutter works, unless you’re Marie What’s-Her-Name.

Papers like this.

In the same vein, I had setup instructions for iMacs, a reel mower that now has vines on it, landline phones long junked, defunct cameras, a previous dishwasher, clothes washer, clothes dryer, and oven, and a few odds and ends I don’t even remember owning.

From a bilingual food processor manual, I learned the amusing fact that the French for food processor is robot culinaire.

Also: Woody warnings. We took the actual toy to Boot Hill long ago — well, metaphorical boot hill — after the dog did him bodily harm. Somehow, the pamphlet of written warnings was left behind.

Warnings because the only instructions involve replacing the batteries that power Woody’s voice box. The rest of the text lists warnings about the batteries: keep them away from small children, don’t swallow them yourself, put them in correctly, including the correct polarity, don’t mix different kinds of batteries, or old and new batteries, and don’t let the damn things leak, but if you do, throw them away — in a locally acceptable manner.

Pedestrian stuff. Not a single warning along the lines of: If you see Woody walking and hear him talking, you are not having a psychotic episode. Woody is a sentient creature with a secret life.

Five + Half Century = 55

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One of the presents I got on my fifth birthday, just more than 50 years ago now, was a red toy helicopter. I’d probably remember that, even without the help of a photo. I was fond of that helicopter.

In fact it’s the only thing I really remember about that birthday, celebrated in Denton, Texas, except that a chocolate cake with blue trim was also part of it. Or I might remember that because there’s a different picture of me from that day, holding the cake in our front yard. The helicopter picture was taken along the side of the house, on the driveway that led back to some detached garages.

This year, I got a wallet. My old one is wearing out. Had key lime pie instead of a cake.

America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop

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As expected, today was frigid, near zero to begin with, and not much warmer as the day ground on. As the Monday holiday for the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., it’s the sort of day on which school is closed and the mail doesn’t come, but otherwise there was work to be done.

There aren’t many stores like America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop in Itasca, Illinois, any more. It’s an independent hobby shop, largely but not completely devoted to model trains, with its merchandise stacked floor-almost-to-ceiling along a number of narrow aisles. Tight enough to put off the claustrophobic, no matter how much they like model trains or train toys. The store has new and used model train cars, track, and accessories of all kinds and in various scales, a room devoted to Thomas the Tank Engine toys, Playmobil, Chuggington Station — I’d never heard of that — Lego sets, plastic model kits, and a lot more.

The store has a Maplewood Drive address, but it’s visible from Irving Park Road. I’d driven by it countless times over the years, occasionally thinking, I should take a look. But I never did until Saturday. Lilly, Ann, and I had gone to a music store in Itasca to get some sheet music that Lilly needed, but the store didn’t have it. That was annoying, so I decided to make the best of it by visiting America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop, which happened to be across the street.

I like model trains — I had an HO scale model at one time, a fairly simple layout — but I was more taken with the shop’s stacks and stacks of plastic model kits. I built some of those as a lad, mostly airplanes, but also a Saturn V. (We also had a kit for the Mayflower than was entirely beyond my talents.) I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop’s model kits, but my impression is that most were airplanes of one kind or another. I didn’t see an Apollo or Gemini or Mercury or even a Space Shuttle.

There were a few fictional spaceships, such as an original series Enterprise. No surprise there. A original series or remake Galactica would have been cool, but I didn’t see those. I did see an Eagle. As in the Space: 1999 spaceships. The kit looked like it dated from the 1970s and had never been opened, and the price was high. Can there be a collectors’ market for unbuilt models? That would be strange if so.

I asked the fellow behind the counter, who probably knows everything about model trains, whether the shop had any railroad postcards. He looked puzzled. For a moment, I might as well have said, “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.” Guess no one had ever asked about that. Thinking on it, he then directed me to one of the aisles and said there might be some cards somewhere around there. One box tucked away on the aisle had a collection of unmarked black-and-white photos of trains — mid-20th century from the looks of them — and several more boxes contained old model RR hobbyist magazines.

But no postcards that I could find. I can’t fault the store for that; it’s too tangential. Even so, it was popular subject for postcards.

The Final Roundup for Woody

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Looks like peak coloration is here. Or least a lot of yellows and reds and browns and even a spot of orange. The skies have been gray much of the weekend, so that adds to the contrast.

Alas, poor Woody. The dog did a little brain surgery on him this weekend. Not sure how he got on the floor. Maybe he was trying to escape while we weren’t watching. I seem to remember some movies along those lines. But the dog seems to have been watching.

I expect we’ll have to take Woody up to Boot Hill and lay him to rest. The dog does exactly the same thing to a number of rubber ducks she’s chewed on. Goes right for the head, she does.

Tinkertoys Across the Decades

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Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and Legos – the big three among building toys, as far as my younger self was concerned. I thought about that recently when Ann latched on to the two tubes of Tinkertoys that we have around the house. At some point long after I quit using them, the tubes migrated from my mother’s house to mine, maybe in anticipation that one of my children would use them. Until the other day, no.

The tubes interest me now more than the toys themselves.

I think my grandparents bought that taller tube for my aunt in the late ’30s – it has her name on it (I saw her last month; maybe I should offer to return them, since isn’t 80 the beginning of second childhood?). In any case, it says Tinkertoy, the Wonder Builder, a product of The Toy Tinkers Inc., Evanston, Ill. I didn’t know Tinkertoys were from Evanston originally.

The design of the longer tube clearly carries a 1929 copyright, but the image, especially of the boy, harkens back somewhat further. Maybe the artist was middle-aged and recalling his boyhood.

My mother probably bought the shorter tube for me ca. 1970, though it’s possible my grandmother got it for me. Note that it doesn’t promise constructions as intricate as the earlier tube. It still has a retail price sticker on it: Winn’s, 77 cents. Winn’s was a dime store near our home in San Antonio that was there until the age of dime stores was over.

Surprisingly little is available on line about Tinkertoy history, at least on casual inspection – there are suspiciously many hits with verbage the same as other sites. Did the inventors of Tinkertoys really hire midgets to play with sets in department store windows in the early days of selling the toys? That’s a repeated story, and I’d like to think it’s true.