The other part of Ann’s birthday present from her parents consisted of purchases at an antique mall in Arlington Heights, Illinois, on Saturday afternoon. It had been a while since we’d been there — the last time might have been when I spotted Billy Beer for sale — but we figured she might find some beads or bead-adjacent materials there. She did.
“On the whole it’s a likable place stuffed to the gills with debris from across the decades. I like looking around, just to remind myself how much stuff there is in the manmade world,” I wrote five years ago. Still apt. I also mentioned that place used to discourage photography.
If that’s still the case, I didn’t see any signs to tell me so this time. Maybe the proprietors gave that rule up as hopeless, since every single person who wanders in will have a high-quality, very easy to use camera in pocket or purse. Besides, how is the place going to be on social media if it disallows pictures?
So I took a few pictures. Such as of the plentiful reading material, including good old Mad, font of juvenile wisdom as surely as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang before it.
Other objects. Many other objects.
Husman’s of Cincinnati is no more — as of only last year.
I didn’t take any kind of rigorous inventory, naturally, but I can’t shake the feeling that the mall’s stock is on a bell curve in terms of item-age, with the bulge being from the 1950s through the 1970s, and tapering off at each end. That is to say, nostalgia for people just about my age.
With some older items in the mix, of course.
Along with objects that look fairly new.
The games entertained me most of all, without me having to play them.
Some standards: Operation, Scrabble, Twister, Yahtzee. Some tie-ins: Family Feud, Green Eggs and Ham, Cat in the Hat, Jeopardy. Others: Pass Out, Rummikub, Super Master Mind.
When I looked at that image today I also noticed the Talking, Feeling, And Doing Game, which I’d never heard of. “A psychotherapeutic game for children,” the box says. Copyright date 1973 by an outfit called Creative Therapeutics in New Jersey, and one groovy typeface for the name.
A relic of the much-maligned ’70s, I figured, a rep only slightly deserved, though that’s a discussion for another time. In any case, an echo of that half century ago, now forgotten, right?
Wrong, at least according to Amazon, which asserts that the game is “one of the most popular tools used in child psychotherapy.”
Turns out there’s an entire subspecies of board games that are used in child therapy, as I discovered looking at the Amazon page: Better Me, Emotional Roller Coaster, The Mindfulness Game and Together Point Family, to name just a few. I’m a little glad that I’d never heard of any of them before.
Of all the antique mall games, however, this one amused me most.
Could it be that the real prize among board game collectors, and there must be such, is finding a mint copy of the Fish board game, only a few hundred of which were ever sold?
Almost as good.
My family were clearly stick-in-the-muds when it came to tie-in board games. I don’t remember that we had a single one in our collection of a dozen or so games, and no one (including me) ever expressed any interest in them. I don’t even remember my friends having any. Did I miss out on a delightful childhood experience? Nah.
