What was your favorite toy as a kid?

Lego. That is all.
 
I had one of these- I think it was a bit disappointing because in the cartoon series the hat makes you fly. Here it just flies away. Was this the origin of the "propeller head"?
 
Sarah in SC said:
I got a pony when I was 8 and never played with anything else after that! His name was Heyward.
I'm sure before that it was Breyer model horses that I played with most.
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My favorite was a Slinky, the original metal one, I was very careful to not let it get kinked. I also loved Tinkertoys. I never played with dolls, I thought they were creepy.

But what I really wanted was a PONY!!! Sarah, I'm jealous. Instead I had a nice collection of glass horses on a shelf.


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braumeister said:
Alas, the layout was stored in the garage from January to November each year
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I think our parents all thought the same way back then because mine was stored in pieces for the same time period. When they were out of the house I would sneak up to the attic and look at the engine.
 
I don't remember any special toy. Grew up on a farm and had chores to do before anything else. Built "forts" in the woods and did a lot of fishing. Played board games, read books, card games and dominoes a lot in the Winter. We never watched much TV and computers were for school work.
 
I had a real pony and spent the most time with him (Stormy). Next were my skates and my Nancy Drew books. My granddaughters recently got a pony and a horse and it's been so much fun teaching them about riding.


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a Tonka dump truck, Monopoly, my friend's table top hockey with the guys that would routinely fall off their spinny posts
 
Another table top hockey fan. There were only 6 NHL teams then and my friends and I would each be a team and play a whole season.
 
Bicycle for sure, if that qualifies as a toy.


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Put me down for Erector Set as one of my favorite toys as a kid. I actually had two sets, one my parents bought for me and a second, larger one I inherited from someone (probably a relative who knew I had the first set and liked it). This second set included a large, metal carrying case and lots of parts not included in the smaller set I already had. Combining these two sets was great because I could build things beyond what was shown on the fold-out pamphlet.

I was also a Lego fan. There, I also combined two sets, the one in the big box with the hard, plastic parts and a smaller, second set which had similarly sized softer plastic parts.

We also had a set of plastic train tracks we would snap together with some little plastic train cars. Later, we got one of those "Wye" turntables we could use to rotate a track into one of many exits. We would use a set of wood building blocks to create additional grade-separated overpasses and layer tracks above others.

My brother and I were big fans of card games. We liked to play 500-Rummy and would play with multiple decks of cards, sometimes as many as 6 or 7. With that many cards, we could not hold them in our hands so we created "forts" made from various pillows behind which we would place our cards so we could see them. This type of game would take up most of the floor (in the basement, usually, which half of it had been recently carpeted) and take an hour or two to play.

Another game my cousins and I liked to play was Michigan Rummy. I still have the round item with little cups to place the coins or other "currency" we would use such as the many different buttons my mother had. We eventually graduated to poker chips someone found somewhere. At a recent part we were at, my cousin and I reminisced about it and when I told him I still had the item he asked me to take a picture of it and email it to him. My ladyfriend has a digital camera so I was able to satisfy his request. He got a big kick out of seeing it again.

Another favorite family game was Boggle. This was before I became a big Scrabble player and learned of many unusual, small words which I could use to run up the score.

Then there is Strat-O-Matic, a tabletop board game I mentioned in another thread. I played it a lot in the 1970s and 1980s before I put it away until about 10 years ago.
 
Chemistry set before I could read.
Trains, logs,tinker toys, those little metal cars that used to come in cereal boxes.
Cardboard refrigerator box,you could get inside and roll it around like a tank,while on your knees.
Old Mike
Old Chemist-I wonder why.
 
Payin-the-Toll said:
A stick and a rock.......we were poor.
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Sticks, rocks, mud, matches and an old chemistry set(mainly making roman candles). Our favorite in the neighborhood, Road Apple Fights.

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Lego and Barbie dolls. I'd even combine them and build things with Lego for the dolls. I like to think I was raised perfectly gender balanced :) It shows in me as an adult too, I like to do girly things like putting on makeup and dresses but I also enjoy gaming and programming and I know my way around basic DIY.
 
Growing up - building toys: Legos, lincoln logs, erector set. Plus the usual games: monopoly, tiddly winks, etc. We also had a very old fisher price circus set. It was amazing how much that got played with. I still have it and my kids pull it out and play with it a lot. It's missing a lot of the animals, unfortunately.

My kids favorites: Legos... Seriously - between the standard bricks and the technics stuff. I don't like that they don't sell just legos - they sell kits... but ebay and craigslist are great places to buy bulk legos. We have giant totes full of them. If we have a social event with a lot of kids - we'll pull out a bin and kids of all ages will start playing with them (leaving the parensts in peace). Even teenagers end up getting involved in legos.

My older son loves his rubik cubes. He's got a speed cube that he's greased up to improve his time. He's got various specialty cubes (gears, pyramids, 4x4 and 5x5). My younger son LOVES chess... He will spend significant time trying to work through problems. Their other favorite toys are their bikes and their basketballs.
 
At night lots of board games like monopoly, sorry, risk, mousetrap, wheel and deal, chess, checkers. Also liked tinker toys, we had both regular and giant (some pieces were probably 3 feet long).

During daylight built forts, played pig and around the world (basketball) and rode bicycles.

Then came Atari..


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For sheer hours spent, bicycle, BB gun, fiberglass bow, sports equipment (mostly baseball).
 
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Gluing and painting models of all sorts: Aurora monsters (1963...I had almost all of them!), cars, planes, boats, super heroes, Rat Fink, you name it. Hours of hours in my corner of the world, with the radio playing the hits of the day in the background. Sometimes I might hear a song today and it brings me back: like Tom Jones's "It's Not Unusual" in the spring of 1965 and some Ford car of the future that had its two front wheels tight together, or that sweet Cadillac ambulance I put together around the same time.
 
Lionel trains, erector set, lincoln logs, girder and panel building set, table top hockey, chemistry set, Monopoly, Candy Land, pinball machine, bb gun, bow & arrow, Dinky and Matchbox toys
 
I loved to build things, so definitely Erector sets. Also, a really cool toy that let you build buildings out of plastic girders and windows called Girder and Panel. Was surprised to see they still make it (Girder and Panel Building Toy)

Another building toy I really liked was Rivetron, which had plastic panels with holes in them, and you secured them together using a plastic rivet gun and rubber rivets. But I think it got recalled because kids were swallowing the rivets or something like that.

I also loved electronic toys, and each Christmas my parents would buy me one of the 100-in-1 type electronic kits from Radio Shack. They had all kinds of components (resistors, relays, etc) on a board with springs, and you connected the components to each other using wires run between springs. I loved those.

Then Atari came out, and I started getting consumed with video games as a teenager.

I LOL'd at people mentioning matches :D The house I grew up in had a shed attached to the back of it that I used to play in, and one day I found a plastic box full of blue tip camping matches left over from when my Dad used to go camping. To a kid, it looked like there were hundreds of matches in there. Boy, did I have fun with those!

One day I saw an older kid walking by our house and I asked him if he wanted to come and play with matches with me. He ran and told my Mom ("Lady, did you know your little boy is playing with matches?") and she came out to the shed and saw probably dozens of struck matches lying around on the floor. That ended my early experiments with pyrotechnics :)
 
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