What was your favorite toy as a kid?

[travelover]

.................I LOL'd at people mentioning matches 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!.............

I discovered as a kid that my BB gun would shoot kitchen matches and if I aimed right, they would strike and ignite. Later, I learned that if I packed the match heads into the hollow lead pellets that my Crosman pellet gun shot, the pellets would explode on impact.

Lucky to have 10 fingers and two good eyes.

 

[bradaz2488]

Hot Wheels
Tonka Trucks
SST cars
Slot car race track
Bag of green army men
GI Joe
BB Gun
100-in-1 electronic kit from radio shack
Commodore computer

 

[grasshopper]

The 101 piece chemistry set, mostly we only made rubber eggs. Heathkit shortwave radio.

 

[Live And Learn]

Pre Teeenage years
Styrofoam building block thingies - they worked like Lego's
My dolls - Barbie and Baby
Street chalk
Jump rope

Teenage years
Monopoly - my cousin and I had marathon games that would last HOURS
Bicycle - but I was never allowed to travel very far
Stickball bat, softball bat, softball mitt, paddleball racket

 

[Sue J]

Did anyone else have a Spirograph? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph What a great math toy. That was another one of my favorites.

One of my favorite board games was Pay Day.
Pay Day (board game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It was all about income and expenses and you could only win if you LBYM. Hmmmm what an interesting concept for a childs board game.

 

[foxfirev5]

Rollfast bike. It opened up new areas of adventure within a 20 mile radius of my home. Nothing like 5 or 6 boys taking off for a day of exploring, swimming and building dams in the creek, far away pizza parlors and pool halls.
Of course our DM's assumed we never left the neighborhood. Just so we were home by dinner.

 

[Walt34]

Oh, yes, building dams in the creek. We did that a lot. A my flexible flyer sled in the winter. I seem to recall that we got a lot more snow then than now. The street we lived on was steep enough to get going pretty good and often we'd station someone to watch for cars at the cross street and if it was clear they'd wave us through to continue on to the creek.

If you were really brave you'd try to make to across the creek on the footbridge. The bridge was made of two very long metal pipes and the wooden planks were under the pipes so the pipes would keep your sled on the bridge. Trouble was, the opening was only a few inches wider than the runners of the sled. If you misjudged, off into the creek you went. Great fun!

 

[splitwdw]

Walt, You just reminded me of skating on our pond in the Winter. I can still hear the old records my grandfather and great grandfather use to play from the milk shed. I think they were all waltzes. Picking Golden Delicious apples in late Summer/early Fall. Playing tennis on our clay court. Still can't think of any special toy though.

 

[pb4uski]

Bike, model cars, sleds, erector set, chemistry set, table top hockey, table top football (table that would vibrate - remember those?), slot cars.

I had a train set but hardly ever used it. I remember we had a slot car track down at the shopping center and I got to do that a few times.

We had BB guns. Someone mentioned putting an eye out. I'm surprised we didn't as we foolishly has wars and would shoot at each other. Yes, we were stoopid.

I had a pony (for passing second grade). His name was Smoky. I was scared of him. I remember him dragging me through the field as I hung on to a rope attached to him. I have hated horses ever since.

 

[springnr]

We played outside, 3rd grade I got a full size bike, added a stingray seat years later, Pop sold it while I was in the military.

When we lived in Chula Vista I nagged Mom until she bought me a pair of clip on skates we couldn't afford, a depression era farm girl, she never did understand when she saw that I had torn them apart and nailed the brand new skate to a 2 by 4, 1960 skateboard.

Mom would ring the bell in the evenings to call us home.
Balsa wood gliders were fun, Wham-O sling shot, handed down single shot Daisy 100 model 38 break barrel BB gun

 

[6miths]

Ah all the above sounds quite familiar pb4uski. A friend had the vibrating football game. We sure must have had great imaginations. Hours everyday riding around town on our bikes. Table top hockey. I built model planes and armor and the occasional ship but hardly ever cars. BB and pellet guns. We played cowboys and indians and war for keeps. 2x2's with inner tubes stretched to clothes pins. Could leave quite a welt. We then graduated to pellet guns and bows and arrows. A friend still has a pellet in his thigh and I have a scar from an arrow that hit me in the chin. Good story but obviously could have ended tragically. Baseball and football in the summer, street and pond hockey when the days grew shorter. Ice forts carved into 12 foot snow mounds - crazy stuff. There was much more snow back in the 60s - global cooling was the concern back then! Great times. We had a charmed childhood.

 

[pb4uski]

..We had a charmed childhood.

True, with some of the stupid sh!t things that we did it is a miracle that we are hear to talk about it. If my kids did some of the things we did I would have a cow.

 

[EastWest Gal]

Intellivision. And Star Wars figures.

You are a baby...I remember learning about Star Wars in college from a classmate and high school friend...

My favorite toys were Barbie dolls. Played with them from 3rd through 6th grades. After that stopped playing with toys.


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[scrabbler1]

With many of you mentioning lots of board game, here are a big bunch more I remember playing back in the 1970s. Some of them are rather obscure.

Chess
Billionaire (Global investment board game)
Ulcers (Business employment board game)
Stratego (war board game)
Battleship (war board game)
Pathfinder (Battleship style board game)
High Stakes (Monopoly and casino gambling board game)
Chinese Checkers (checkers with marbles game)
Clue (Whodunnit board game)
1776 (Avalon Hill war game)
Numble (Scrabble with numbers board game)
Go for Broke (lose all your money board game)
Operation (Play pretend-doctor board game)
Careers (life achievement board game)
Stock Market (Accumulate money board game)
Trouble (Move-around-the-board board game)
Sorry (Move-around-the-board board game)
Yahtzee (Dice game)
Othello (maximize checkers board game)
Mastermind (logic board game)
Uno (rummy card game)
Po-Ke-No (Bingo card game)
Monday Night Football (football strategy game)
Water Works (make a pipeline card game)
Scrabble Sentence Cube Game (create a sentence dice game)
King Oil (drill for oil board game)
Bermuda Triangle (Avoid the storm cloud board game)
Connect Four (a vertical Tic-Tac-Toe game)
Life (Achievement and money board game)
NFL Strategy (generic football board game)
Jeopardy (home edition circa 1972)
Parchesi (Move-around-the-board board game)
Hi-Q (eliminate the pegs board game)
Fluster (crossword game)

 

[Lucantes]

I guess the toy I remember most was the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer I got for Christmas in 1981.
Sooooo many hours spent with that, which directly contributed to my love of computer games to this day!

 

[Idnar7]

Lucantes, I still have my TI-99/4A and it still works. Did a little programming with the Basic and Extended Basic. I also had the Speech option which was fun training it to talk. IIRC it came with 1 or 2k memory. Cassette tape for storage and TV for monitor. I think I paid $200 for the base unit in 1982.

 

[Nodak]

Bike, model cars, chemistry set, and making sling shots out of tree branches, rubber from inner tubes and pieces of old leather..

 

[chris66]

I loved any kind of wooden puzzles, puzzle boxes, later rubic's cube, etc

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.

I loved creating whole towns with legos. Even better than for Barbies, I made towns for those Mattel little people that my younger brother was playing with at the time. Had a whole room in the basement with streets and buildings. I loved having a little brother, so I could do this "for him".

Very best, though, was my bike. In the 70's, my dad rode his 10 speed to work, probably mostly because of the oil crisis. I wanted to really ride places with him. So, I went from the bike that I learned on to a 10 speed for my next bike. I was probably around 8 when I got my 10 speed, but I was always tall for my age. My friends were getting banana bikes, but I wanted a 10 speed like my dad. It was metallic hot pink, with a white leather seat. I thought it was SOOO COOOOL to go to Forest Park with Dad and ride the bike path there. There were a couple of stop lights on the bike path, and at that age, having to stop at a stop light was the ultimate in playing "grownup".

 

[VaCollector]

A stick and a rock.......we were poor.

after the chuckle it reminded me of the summer I saw The 300 Spartans…seems I spent that entire summer with my sword (2 pcs of wood nailed together), my spear (cut from a branch) and my shield (trash can lid ~ YES, they were actually metal back then!)….good times!

 

[CoolChange]

Probably like most, my favorite depended on my age at the time. In rough chronological order:

• A paratrooper action figure. Parachute was long gone by the time I have real memories; but, I do remember this being a soldier, super hero and many other things in my young imagination.
• Loc Blocks for a very long time.
• Science sets (chemistry, electronics and biology)
• Bicycle
• Computers (Atari then C64)

Playing cards and board games were a big part of my childhood; but, I am not sure the rise to the standard of favorite for me. TV was another biggie.

 

[EastWest Gal]

Before Barbies, I played for hours with a bunch of little plastic animals we bought at the zoo. Small landscaping rocks and the lawn became jungle and mountains with those tiny lions and antelopes.


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[Bestwifeever]

I know we four kids (six year span) collectively had wooden blocks, alphabet blocks, and Lincoln Logs (which, as I was recently reminded, were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's second son, John Lloyd Wright) that served many purposes.

We were mostly sent outside to play without toys, but we were treated at Christmas to an inexpensive "Treasure Chest of Games" like this one that got played with for a couple of days:

 

[scrabbler1]

Lucantes, I still have a Sharp Scientific Calculator, model EL-506S, I received for my 18th birthday back in 1981. I used it a lot in college for my statistics course. The digital readout is a little tough on my eyes, especially since my eyesight has faded a little over the recent years. I have bought those $5 calculators which do far less but have much larger digital readouts. Once I bought my my first PC which had spreadsheet capabilities, all of those fancy functions on the calculator were less crucial.

 

[easysurfer]

Slight correction. Found the correct picture of a walkie-talkie like the one I had as a kid :

 

[Ally]

This reminds me that my 39 year old son wants us to get him the white Mattel Classic Football game (handheld) that he used to play all the time. The players were just dots of lights. I found some on Ebay for not too much.