Posted on 12/20/2010 12:15:33 PM PST by arderkrag
Ok, I have to hear the rationale behind that statement.
Which one?
I always mentally file “toys and games” together. Of course, I consider my power tools, cars and electronic gadgets all toys - they’re just more expensive toys.
That's Why
You are 25
Born in 1985
Hey, that rhymes...
The statement that board games aren’t toys.
A.C. Gilbert knew what boys wanted, all right. An all-American boy himself, Gilbert had grown up in the 1890s Old West, playing cowboys and Indians, doing magic tricks, starting his own athletic club in his father’s barn. So even though he grew up to become a world-champion pole vaulter with an M.D. from Yale, he chose to make a career out of boyhood. Boys would never be the same.
Gilbert is best-known as the inventor of the Erector Set. In their heyday, thirty million of the build-it-yourself toys were sold, creating generations of engineers, tinkerers, and backyard builders. But Gilbert was as skilled at marketing as he was at magic. To promote the Erector Set and his other toys, he created an entire world for boys. Contests, magazines, the Erector Institute of Engineering, and the A.C. Gilbert Hall of Science in Manhattan were just some of his innovations. By the time he died in 1961, millions of “Gilbert boys” had built America.
The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made is not a biography. Nor is it pure nostalgia. In telling Gilbert’s story, Bruce Watson interweaves magic, fun, and fascinating stories. We learn how, during World War I, Gilbert “saved Christmas” from the clutches of government bureaucrats. We watch him win set world records in the pole vault only to become the “hatchet man” of the Olympics. We see his Erector Set mushroom into the amazing 1920s models weighing 70 pounds and building boy-sized replicas of zeppelins and airplanes. And we watch Watson try to improve upon his ham-handed childhood by building Erector toys to entice his seven-year-old son.
Along the way, Watson asks serious questions about how boys play these days. Can computer games convey an understanding of a 3-D world? Does anyone build anything anymore? What about girls? Can’t they understand engineering as well as boys? And are kids growing up too fast these days?
Not just for Erector aficionados, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made is a delightful romp through a forgotten time when toys mattered, when one big boy made magic and when one man made boys into builders.
The Erector set was my answer too. They lasted for years until my Dad eventually stole all the nuts and bolts and girders to ‘fix’ various stuff around the house. ;~))
So, in mousetrap, you would consider the game not a toy, but the trap itself you would consider a toy? You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but that seems like picking a nit to me.
Lionel Trains? Did I miss that on the list?
Erector Set?
Lincoln logs?
Tinker Toys?
GI Joe?
Chemistry sets used to be great, but not anymore. They’ve been heavily dumbed-down with all the government regs and fear of lawsuits. The fun chlorates, perchlorates and nitrates are pretty much gone. You used to even get a lump of mildly radioactive stuff and a geiger counter.
Then Chess should be number 1 on that list.
Yeh, we had one of those. Microscope, petri dish samples... it was my ma’s way of placating my desire to become a mad scientist.
Either way, it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, if you want to have some real fun you have to make it yourself.
like racing chainsaws.
It’s number 90.
How many kids will get a toy with "safe radioactive materials" this Christmas.
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