I have it on good authority (my Mom) that the fellow in the back left of this group got that cool eye patch as a kid with a BB gun. Small town fun.
Posted on 11/30/2003 2:08:21 PM PST by KneelBeforeZod
'Tis the season for dangerous toy warnings. The Public Interest Research Group issued its 18th annual "Trouble in Toyland" report Tuesday, while the Consumer Product Safety Commission was releasing its list of toys cited for safety recalls. Last week was the 31st annual presentation of the "10 Worst Toys List" from WATCH -- or World Against Toys Causing Harm.
You know the drill by now: toys that might choke a kid, toys that could put You know the drill by now: toys that might choke a kid, toys that could put somebody's eye out, toys that could poison you if you chewed them up, many of the toys so obscure that you'll never see them on the shelves.
Through ever-increasing levels of vigilance, diligence and litigiousness, we Americans theoretically keep making our toys safer and safer year by year.
I was just wondering then: How do you explain the fact that the world into which we're sending our children to play is becoming more and more dangerous every day?
Is it possible we're spending so much time sweating the little things that we've lost track of the bigger picture?
Unfortunately, I have no answer to these deep philosophical questions.
What I have is a list of my own: Favorite Dangerous Toys from Childhood.
It's a compilation actually from interviews with other guys. It's amazing that we're all still alive to talk about this stuff. Just don't let your kids read this. They'd be jealous.
First off, there used to be toy guns, lots of them.
Let's set aside for a moment the issue of BB guns or pellet guns, which were always a matter of parental dispute.
There was a time when nearly every boy had a six-shooter with a holster. Most of them fired plastic bullets.
The projectiles didn't move fast enough to break a pane of glass, but they could have certainly "put somebody's eye out" under just the right circumstances.
There were toy rifles, too. Spring-loaded ones with big cartridges.
"I had the Johnny Seven," one protective father told me wistfully. "It was seven weapons of destruction in one. You could pull out the Lugar or convert it into a grenade launcher."
Neither he nor I would allow our kids anywhere near such a thing now.
"Don't forget the dart guns," said another product of a pre-PIRG childhood.
Oh, yes, the dart guns with the hard plastic darts and the rubber suction tips. When you removed the tips, you could do some real damage to your little brother, but you had to keep in mind that his chance would come, too.
I was surprised to find one of those dart guns on this year's most dangerous toy list. I suppose the Chinese are still churning them out somewhere.
There were also bows and arrows with the same suction cup tips. Every boy knew that these could be removed and the arrow point whittled down into something more useful.
My friend Pittsburgh John did this one better. He and his brothers were allowed to have toy arrows with actual steel tips that they would let fly at squirrels and rabbits.
"I don't think we ever hit anything. I'm surprised we never killed one another," said Pittsburgh John. That possibility never curtailed their use, but when the boys started using the bow and arrow inside the garage and put holes in the wall, their father had to put his foot down.
The hazard posed by other toys was only slightly more subtle.
Take the Vac-U-Form from Mattel, which used a sizzling 110-volt hotplate to mold small toys from melted sheets of styrene plastic. The Vac-U-Form heating plate was also later used for Creepy Crawlers and Thingmaker molds.
There's no telling how many ways these would flunk the safety tests today. They could burn you. They could burn the house down. There were toxic materials that let off what were probably toxic fumes.
Boy, oh, boy. What a great toy.
"A sense of danger is what makes a toy interesting," observed another very proper father.
This particular father reminded me of the most important rule about toys: You can never keep a kid from using a toy for a purpose for which it was not intended, not that this would deter either of us from trying to anticipate each and every one.
"You can make anything dangerous depending on what you do with it," he observed. "Superman capes were dangerous because then you'd jump off the garage roof, which I did."
OK, he might be a special case.
I received varied opinions on the potential danger from chemistry sets in that time period. Everyone has a story about combining the various chemicals in random ways that they thought might blow up the house. But nobody could cite any example of actually blowing something up that way.
I've got to be careful. Kids really did get hurt with some of these toys. And I don't want to diminish the work of the safety watchdogs. You can't argue with somebody trying to protect kids.
Another buddy, Scott the Jeweler, had a favorite toy cannon that he fired off in a closed garage. It didn't really shoot anything, but it made one heck of a noise, the louder the better as far as Scott was concerned. These days there's a special category on the watch lists for dangerously loud toys.
Come to think of it, Scott is a little hard of hearing.
I have it on good authority (my Mom) that the fellow in the back left of this group got that cool eye patch as a kid with a BB gun. Small town fun.
Are Superballs still allowed? Silly Putty, cap guns, slingshots, Cox glow engines?
Sleds...certainly they've been banned, Flexible flyers. Dart guns banned but not bicycles?
Certainly Erector sets are prohibited--so many small parts. Probably the greatest toy ever invented.
Take me back 40 years. The world is now a hell hole.
Jarts! We had a set of those babies- they had a (slightly) blunted steel tip mounted in the center of the weighted collar... things of beauty, really. My younger sister and I were warned to be careful with them, but she was too small and inept for much of a safety factor.
I ended up knocking her unconscious with a dirt clod one time (best toss of my life- if she'd have been standing still, I'd never have hit her), but I don't know if that would classify as much of a toy.
I used to jump a Stingray bike with the huge "easy rider" sissy bar and that gigantic shifter clamped to the top tube. We were always crashing and racking ourselves.
Dittos with the shocks. I got a Lionel, remember the three rail tracks, that came with smoke pellets...really great effect. It wasn;t long before the smoke pellets were used up so, genius that I was, I substituted aspirin tablets. Talk about gettin' sick.......
I'll go you one better. I darned near blinded myself with a BB gun once. My cousin and I were shooting at tin cans sitting on a plow. A BB hit the plow frame and bounced back perfectly hitting me in the right eye. Fortunately, it missed the eyeball and lodged in the corner of my eye socket. Neither my cousin nor I could tell anyone for fear of losing our BB guns. My eye turned red and almost swelled shut. Finally my Mother noticed it in spite of my trying to keep it hidden and made me fess up. A trip to the family doc confirmed that the BB was no longer there. So you see, Mom and Dad are always right.
Yes! Now why couldn't I remember that? :-D
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