[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.