Toys, or The Great Let's Make a Deal Massacre

Before there was Wii . . . before there was Nintendo . . . even before there was Pong . . . there was Miss Cookie's Kitchen.

It seemed an unlikely toy for a boy, but who knew from gender roles in 1956 and who cared anyway? It was one of the first toys I owned, and I was crazy about it. Best of all, it was my first Colorforms. Colorforms were, and are, very thin, colorful vinyl shapes you stick on a laminated surface that comes with each kit. In this case, it was interactive because Miss Cookie's kitchen had all these cabinets you could actually open and stick your vinyl pots and pans in. My parents gave me several Colorforms kits over the next few years, usually based on TV characters such as the Flintstones and Huckleberry Hound. Each piece took little imagination (the images were already created for you) and placing them on their chosen backgrounds took even less (each piece had its own spot, clearly defined). The fun for a kid under 12 was simply – well, actually, I'm not sure what the fun was, but I sure had it anyway.

Now I don't want to go on and on about Miss Cookie's Kitchen, but it's as good a place as any to start talking about toys. Like most things, toys have changed tremendously over the past 60 years. Kids today probably have as much fun now as I did then, except they're spending more time alone and probably forget what “outside” means. I could spend paragraph after paragraph recalling the wonderful toys of yore and all of the pleasures they gave my sister and me (Kenner's Give-A-Show Projector, Vac-U-Form, Mr. Machine), but that's boring. Here are some toys that couldn't become obsolete fast enough to suit me.

There was this little car, maybe three times the size of a Matchbox car, that I was supposed to put together, then wind it up and let it careen into a wall. The fun was in putting it together, watching it crash, and then doing it all over again. Well, let's say the car was made up of six pieces (I can't remember exactly). When I aimed it at the wall and let it go, it crashed into twelve pieces. So much for the little car.

Then my parents gave me this rocket ship to build. It had a little space capsule on top just like NASA's Mercury program used. You folded up a little parachute and attached it to the top of the capsule, and when you launched it with the press of a button, the parachute would open in mid-air, and the whole thing would float gently down to earth. In theory. My chute didn't open. The rocket came crashing down onto the street in front of our house, just like the little car. I permanently scrubbed that mission.

Does anyone remember Slip-n-Slide by Wham-O? It was a long sheet of plastic that you laid out on a lawn, then attached it to a garden hose. A sheen of water would spread over the plastic, and you ran toward it, belly-flopped, and slid from one end to the other. It might have been a really great toy, but I'll never know. A friend had one, and I guess there wasn't much water pressure that day. I ran, I leaped, I slid, and I got a red torso that hurt for two days. Wham-O, indeed. (I believe they're still cranking these out. Maybe I should give it another go.)

But of course there were many other toys that didn't crash and burn or cause me bodily harm. By the time I was ten, I had quite a collection. So did my friends Van and Billy, brothers who lived a few blocks away. But you can only play with a toy so many times. After a while, as is the American way, I craved new and better toys. Van and Billy had a bunch of good ones at home, and they liked mine as well. So we decided to swap some toys, but not in a simple trade. We enjoyed watching Let's Make a Deal during our summer vacations, and one of us got the bright idea of playing our own version of it at their house one afternoon when our parents weren't home. So I hauled armfuls of my toys over to their place in three trips, and we let the games begin.

We moved a couch and some living room chairs around so that the couch faced the chairs. Van and Billy got the chairs, and I got the couch. We spread our toys into three piles behind our respective furniture, so that the three chairs represented curtains one, two, and three, and my curtains were represented by the left, center, and right sides of the couch. I think we actually coined the phrase, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” We didn't plan on dying, but we did plan on winning.

Well, it was a short game. I won all the toys.

They didn't pick a single curtain with a toy behind it. My luck was phenomenal. Just in case you think I cheated, understand that at ten years old, we didn't trust the honor system for a second. Once they picked a curtain and lost, one of them got up and looked behind the chair or the couch to verify that the toy was elsewhere. They were good sports, though – they helped me carry all the toys back to my place. It still took three trips, except now there were three of us. (I wasn't a good sport. It never occurred to me to let them keep a few of mine just to keep the friendship going. I was a crumb back then.)

They asked me what I intended to do with three times as many toys as the average kid. Was I really going to play with them all? We brainstormed there in my parents' screened-in back porch. I'd like to say that Van or Billy came up with the solution, but they didn't. It was my bright idea to have a toy sale.

We separated the toys by category – board games, soldiers and cowboys, a few dolls from our youth, politically incorrect rifles and slingshots, marbles. . . . I tore off a mess of paper towels and wrote the prices on them with my father's Magic Marker. Then we went back to their house and returned with a large piece of cardboard, on which I wrote “Big Toy Sale Today!”

Now came the fun part. We spread out in three directions to visit the homes of every boy and girl we knew and told them to come right over to my place. It was big of the brothers to help out since they were the big losers. I promised to give them each fifty cents from my earnings. (Don't laugh – fifty cents to a ten year old in 1964 was a big hairy deal.)

Within an hour, the porch was full of kids, at least a dozen, poring over my wares with their pockets full of change. The soldiers and cowboys and marbles were big sellers among the boys. The girls went for the board games and a few of the marbles. Interestingly, I had to mark down the dolls to get rid of them.

So now it's just after 5:00, and my parents turn the corner onto our block. As they later recalled it, the way awful family memories become pretty funny over the years, my mother said to my father, “What's that?” “Looks like a big sign.” They pulled into the driveway and watched as kids they knew from the neighborhood emerged from the back yard and disappeared around the block carrying toys and games, some of which looked familiar.

The porch was still buzzing with activity when my parents walked through the kitchen and opened the sliding glass door.

“What the hell is this?” my father said.

“It's a toy sale,” I said.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward answer, but they didn't take it well. The kids who were left had to put the toys back, and I returned their money. Then I had to go from house to house and collect every last toy that was sold and give back my hard-earned change. Van and Billy carried their own toys home again, and I spent the evening in my room without the benefit of my mother's homemade meat loaf.

Times have changed. I doubt kids today are swapping video games and cell phones behind their parents' furniture. The new Let's Make a Deal is still fun, but it's nothing like the novelty it was in Monty Hall's day. Colorforms figures don't stick as well as they used to. (I only know this from reading users' comments online. Honest.) If I had it to do over, Van and Billy and I would probably be playing something safe and simple, like Billy's Battleship game.

Oh, yeah – I won that, too.