Your Favorite Toys as a Child? Why? & Your Age?

[VINMAN]

Anyone remember the Marx playsets?

[GO DAWG GO]

I'm 47. My favorite was the Cox 049 engine and anything I could mount it to. I think I owned most of the airplanes Cox made. I remember the Stuka..This plane had a propensity to break wings...Anybody play with HO trains? I had many....I miss that simple life....


Bob

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Originally posted by Nostril Cheese
Legos. I now design buildings

+1. And I also design buildings. Loved tinkertoys when I was younger and erector sets too.

Biking was probably my favorite activity when I was younger, but I never really considered my bikes as "toys". Maybe they were. Dunno. Star Wars figures & baseball cards were fun to collect and trade, but less so to play with. When I got older my friends and I got into Dungeons & Dragons stuff (yes, I was a dork. I'll admit it).

[David]

GI Joes, Legos, Models, BMX Bikes, road bikes, motorcycles, karts, Porsches in that order as I aged to 39. Don't forget a bunch of girls I played with from 16 to 24 .

[Rot 911]

51: Legos had to be my favorite winter time toy. My dad and I would spend hours building things with them. Warm weather was all baseball, bikes and skateboards. Ah yes the skateboard with the metal roller skate wheels that you prayed to the almighty you didn't roll over a small stone and get thrown off the front.

[id10t]

36, but I was weird growin up. Spent lots of time in the library and fishing. BB gun. Lots of time playing in the creek and pond...

[alf]

I always had a plastic M16 and a PPK with me till I went to school at 6. After that it was a cardboard box, some playmobiles, my dogs and the tree in my yard till I discovered girls.

37, grew up in Singapore.

[URY914]

Erector Sets, I built more cranes than I can remember. I had the set with the electic motors and reduction gears.

HO Slot Cars, I could beat every kid for blocks

1/24 Plastic Model kits. Hours and hours spent on them.

I think it was all a natural progression to what I do now.

[widgeon13]

Ball, bat and a glove, Hardball

[holtjv]

Vertibird, or Whilybird. It was connected to a thin cable and you could hover and fly it around. Was around the 4th grade.

Also, my daisey red ryder bb gun and a wrist rocket sling shot. Jimmy Lucas and I bombarded a house for over an hour with good sized stones, breaking the patio door and terrifying the mom and her 2 kids. What a nice young boy I was, eh? "But Dad, it was Butchie Miller's house! He's a jerk and it was over 200 yards away!" "Really? That far away? Damn." "Dammit, Ken, look at what he did! It's not funny!"

[silver912e]

I'm 52. I grew up in a small town, and one of my best memories was when someone on my street would get a new appliance delivered, like a fridge or washing machine, and the huge box that it came in would get pitched out to the curb. The cardboard box would instantly became the property of the neighborhood kids, and we would have a blast with it. With all the expensive toys out there today, it is amazing how much fun a kid can have with a big cardboard box and an active imagination.

[pwd72s]

63

Another small town guy. But "favorite" toys is difficult. It would depend on the season. Summer was best. I guess I'd name my bike, my softball, bat & glove. No organized little league in our town back then. But I knew where the fields were, so I could always bike to one of them, find other kids playing a game of "work up"...I still have the glove. A "Bob Feller" made by Wilson...my name written on the strap. +1 on having to be home when the street lights came on.

[legion]

Legos.

They could be any other toy. I built Star Wars ships, racecars, anything.

[daepp]

Matchbox cars; Hot Wheels and Legos!

Come to think of it, I still play with little cars...

[vash]

a leather football, frisbee. i am now 40 and throw both like a girl.

[rcm]

Hot Wheels and racing track with loop.

Any model cars or trucks that you built and painted...Lil Red Wagon, Munsters mobile..,Revell? I had tons of these things all over my room.

Slot Cars
Tonka trucks
It really only needed wheels and it was a toy

My bicycle

I'm 48 and hey the toys just make thier own noise now.

[Seahawk]

Originally posted by robert_snyder
I'm 47. My favorite was the Cox 049 engine and anything I could mount it to. I think I owned most of the airplanes Cox made. I remember the Stuka..This plane had a propensity to break wings...Anybody play with HO trains? I had many....I miss that simple life....

50 and all the posts in this thread resonate...I played every ball sport under the sun (except soccer) and was fortunate to have most of the toys listed.

But the Cox .049 was the seat of all that was holy and true...I felt I was flying and that was frankly all that mattered.

Thanks for the memory.

[cashflyer]

Wow... looking over the replies, I see lots of toys that I had as a child. But specifically to the topic of the thread, what were my favorites..... ? I'll list the ones that I remember received a lot of play time.

While younger, I stuck with "imagination" toys.
Legos
matchbox & hotwheels
tonka

As I got into my pre-teen and early teen years, the bicycle really took over. I never did the BMX stuff that some of you did... I just liked riding.


One "toy" that I had, considered really b1chin' by most kids my age, was a Honda MR50 dirtbike. I got it for Christmas when I was 7. Although I really loved the bike, it actually got very little use. In fact, it still had the original tires on it 6 years later when my father felt I had outgrown it's size. I just didn't have anywhere to ride it except the backyard - which gets boring fast when you live on 1/2 acre!





When I hit 15, a drivers license and a car radically changed what I considered "play time" activities.

[scottmandue]

I'm 50, my 20" Schwinn with knobies and I were inseparable most of my childhood, we lived in a very hilly area and I loved dragging the old red wagon to the top of the hill and ridding it back down.
Lego for sure.
Spent a lot of time at the beach, couldn't afford a surf board and boogie boards hadn't been invented yet... we did have some of those rectangular rubberize canvas inflatable things we would body-surf with (and would remove several layers of skin after a days use). Those were the days... we were around twelve years old and mom would drop us off at the beach in the morning and pick us up when the sun went down.

Surprised so many of you manly men played with dolls... I mean "action figures".

[azasadny]

Originally posted by jyl
Lego. Man, that was the best toy. I built giant aircraft carriers with multiple decks and working elevators, spaceships with cockpits and bunkrooms and engine compartments, cars with working suspension (using flat lego piece as a leaf spring), castles with battlements and turrets, hand-held laser blasters, B-17s, everything I could think of. My family was so proud of me, everyone said I'd do great things someday. Ha! I sure showed them!

Plastic models, of all sorts. Preferably military, because flat paint was easier to brush on than glossy. Tanks, fighter planes, destroyers, PT-109, I built 'em all. I was a child environmentalist, diligently recycling my plastic creations using lighter fluid. The ship models got recycled in the bathtub. Amazingly, I never got in trouble for this. And of course, there were no smoke detectors.

Balsa wood and tissue airplane models. I'd wander around open fields, winding up the rubber band propeller and pretending I was Lindbergh doing his mail flights. I really liked reading The Spirit Of St. Louis. When the plane landed off-kilter and shattered a spar or strut, I'd repair it, pretending that I was stranded and couldn't get home unless my plane was flyable.

GI Joes. Joe's patrols usually ended with him stepping on a mine, which the enemy (me) fashioned from firecrackers bought by the gross. Sometimes Joe was captured. After perfunctory interrogation (he never had much to say), the initial cavity search disclosed that, when Joe's arms and legs were pulled, as if on a torture rack, the hollow interior of his torso was revealed, which could be packed with firecrackers. Joe, his clothes back on, stood grimly at attention while the fuse burned . . . the resulting detonation literally blew his clothes and boots off. Great fun.

Guns. As a rather urban child, I never got to roam the woods with a .22, like the boys did in the books I read. But my dad liked to play with air rifles, so during our periods living in the suburbs I got to shoot .177 cal pellet rifles in the backyard. Later, I received a single-shot bolt-action Remington .22 which I was allowed to shoot in the improvised basement range. Unsupervised. As a result, I nearly shot myself in the head with a stray ricochet. An incident which impressed on a certain 10 y/o boy the importance of gun safety.

Walkie talkies. I remember loving these, even though the concept was always better than the reality. You and your friend had to have the same channel, which meant the same crystal. Then you needed some ridiculous number of batteries, which were not always at hand for a little kid. Then you had to be not too far away from each other, without too much in the way, and no interference sources. Basically they never worked too well. But they sure were cool.

Bicycle. Does this count as a toy? In another post, I described my humiliation, how I had to straddle my Peugeot 10 speed and watch, envious, while the other kids jumped and slid out with their Stingrays. So, I didn't like my bike all that much, even though I rode it a lot. (This is why my daughter has a purple metallic Stingray.)

Almost forgot. Slot cars. Aurora F/X HO scale. I had a big track set up on a spare dining table. Lots of cars, all hot-rodded with the special super-strength magnets and so on. I'd never heard of rally racing, but great minds must think alike, since we always put stuff on the track to make driving harder.

I'm 45.

Today I have a big 1/32 scale slot car setup, which unfortunately is currently in storage. Various guns, including that same Remington bolt-action .22. No GI Joe, though. I could borrow my daughter's Joe, I'm sure he'd like some time away from those vapid Barbies, but blowing his clothes off with firecrackers would land me in the doghouse.

Yep, same for me and I'm 46!