What toys do you remember?

[Twisties]

Football, ice skates, hockey stick, bike, deck of cards.

 

My granddad made me a set of blocks, that eventually went to my nephew.

[ednowicki]

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

 

Cool! My brother was asking about this one this morning, but I didn't remember it at all! Thanks for the pic!

[rocks]

[steveknapp]

One of my other favorites was a board game called Mousetrap: as the game progressed players built a Rube Goldberg mousetrap piece by piece.

 

You, Mitch, are the only person I know who actually played the game. I always just built thing thing and watched it fall.

 

My mom dug up some of my very little kid toys for David. Stuff I remember being around, but not playing with. It was pretty cool. 2yr old-age toys are really simple and innocent.

[CoarsegoldKid]

I had a few army vehicles by Dinky. Loved them. Metal construction, rubber tires. Cool.

 

My toy box had Lincoln logs, and erectors sets for sure.

For outside play I walked my wagon down to the local furniture store for large cardboard boxes. Stacked them up and brought home dreaming of how I was going to configure them. Made some super forts.

[Eschelon1]

In the mid-late 60's I had a plastic submarine that ran on some type of pellets (Similar to alka seltzer). It would submerge, cruise under water for a few minutes then resurface. It was a lot of fun it the pool! I think it was made by Hasbro.

 

[Patallaire]

A box scooter! You would take an old wooden crate stand it on end, nail it to a cut down 2x4, put one metal roller skate on it, nail on a bunch of pop tops to the front of the box, maybe nail two steering handles on the top of the box{they always came off} and off you would go. It made a great sound when you stepped off it, and kick,pushed it into a parked car!

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

I had a pair of skates similar to the ones in the picture except that mine had only 2 in line wheels. My idea of a good time was to put on my skates, leash up the dog and have him pull me as fast as he could down the trail in one of the local canyons. but

 

Reminds me of something my brother and I did when I was about 9 and he was 15, a skateboard-catamaran:

 

1. set skateboards next to each other, about two feet apart.

 

2. each person sits on one skateboard, with both his feet on the other skateboard. Lock hands with each other.

 

3. to turn left, the person on the left board leans back, and the person on the right board leans forward. It's the other way around in reverse for right turns. The locking of hands is important here: this enables the leaning-back rider to lean WAY back, like parallel to the pavement.

 

The whole thing was surprisingly stable and yet maneuverable. We had a run down a neighborhood street - a good hill, steep enough to get moving but not crazy-steep - and near the bottom we'd make a hard left into an empty church parking lot. The lot had three tiers; we'd cruise the length of the top tier, make a hairpin-downhill right, cruise the second tier, make a hairpin-downhill left, and cruise to a stop on the third tier. I'd guess we were doing 15-20 MPH at most, but sitting (instead of standing) really added to the sensation of speed. The other plus was that when we crashed (as we did once in a while ), we were lower to the ground and so the outcome was generally less gruesome.

[Steve1962]

Now this is what I call boys toys .....

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56lF8E1psDU

 

Now I can't get the song out of my head !!

 

Steve

[Knifemaker]

 

This and a piece of 3/4 plywood.....Skateboard!!!!!

[Les is more]

 

This and a piece of 3/4 plywood.....Skateboard!!!!!

 

 

...and my arm in a cast when I was 13

[BULLman]

 

This and a piece of 3/4 plywood.....Skateboard!!!!!

 

This was my first skateboard with clay wheels.

 

 

And, it did end up with a ride to the emergency room - 1st time I broke my collar bone

[90%angel]

Atari - yeah, yeah, it's a video game, but it was one of our faves. We all still talk about the time dad got up to a million points on Missle Command, and it didn't know how to count that high and rolled back to zero. Good times.

 

Lesseeee....

 

I also liked Fashion Plates (take your little plates with various high fashion 70's styles, mix them up into some kind of order (the more bizzare, the better, then trace over the plates on your peice of paper and color in your design. Whoever has the most gawdy outfit wins! Kind of like real designers! )

 

Of course, I loved my pink Big Wheel (the little plastic tricycle), with streamers coming off the handle bars

 

Sit and Spins were fun too (sit Indian style on it and spin yourself into oblivion!)

 

Hungry Hungry Hippo was a fun game back in the day. This is one that has gotten "cheap" today. We used to beat on that thing pretty good, and it held up for years. My sister bought the new version for her kids last year, and it's already broken.

 

Anyone else have Romper Stompers? I mentioned those to Russell once and he had no idea what they were. The little yellow plastic cup thingys with green plastic rope coming out the top of them that you stand on and try to walk?

 

I didn't say it was a good toy, just wondering who had them too?

[EffBee]

Lots of memories. Erector sets, Tinkertoys, yes. Never had any Lincoln Logs, though. There are two toys that I remember best, and one more that went way beyond a toy.

 

Carroms were a favorite as a kid. I guess I understood the geometry better than most. They probably got me interested in what has become a lifelong enjoyment of pocket billiards (pool). At one time I even competed in some local amateur tournaments. Never won anything, but I think it was my first organized competition of any kind.

 

The second toy was a Murray Pedal Tractor that actually had a two-speed transmission. I loved that thing. It was a HUGE purchase for us at that time as we'd only been in the U.S. a couple of years and at something like $30 my Dad had to save for several months in order to purchase it. We were paying about $75/month for the house we lived in, just to give you some perspective.

 

(WARNING: Long story)

The toy that became more than a toy was a Hot Wheels Rechargeable Indy 500 Race Set. These were Hot Wheels cars with a single tiny rechargeable battery (the charger was powered by two D-cells) and a tiny electric motor. Think HO-scale slot cars, only smaller and on an open track. You charged 'em up and let 'em rip.

 

It wasn't long before my brother and I (I was 12, he was 9 at the time) began modifying them and the "race" was on. Eventually, due to the modifications and lightening we were doing, the cars were simply too fast for the track, so we pooled our allowances and summer lawn-mowing/car-washing money and bought another track and strung them together. Now we had some distance! And speed! These tracks were 6-cars wide with banked corners. The cars would run up against the walls in the corners and slingshot from one to another.

 

Fully charged, the cars would run a couple of minutes. The battery, discharging so rapidly, would be quite hot, so it had to cool before recharging. To counter that we bought a bunch more batteries. We also learned that new batteries delivered the longest run times while batteries that had been abused lived the shortest, but gave the best performance. Later in my life, when I roadraced electric R/C cars as a factory-sponsored driver, I would test Ni-Cad battery cells and use the highest-capacity batteries when racing with hand-wound modified motors. But for the Stock Class which used Spec motors, I would brutally discharge my Ni-Cads, one at a time, at close to 100-amp load. Occasionally one would blow up. But those that didn't would develop a higher average voltage output (at the expense of capacity, which wasn't much of an issue in the Stock Class), which helped my spec motors spin faster than everyone else's. Everyone thought we were cheating and modifying our motors. They never realized it was the batteries. Anyway, I digress.

 

My brother and I would modify the Hot Wheels cars in the following ways.

 

1. Ground, filed, sanded and lightened the bodies.

2. Smoothed all body joints, especially the windshield-to-body joint which fit like crap on most of the car models. We coated the right side of the bodies in clear gloss and then waxed that side so it would slide more smoothly against the walls of the tracks in the corners, which were also waxed.

3. Fill in joints with Revell Model Cement, then sand it smooth when it dried.

4. We lightened the chassis, especially on the left side where there was no load.

5. The side and rear windows on some models were open so we taped them over with masking tape.

6. We lightened the wheels, again especially the left side.

7. The right rear wheel was the only driven wheel. It was a plastic wheel with a flat rubber ring on it for traction. All the other wheels were plastic. So we narrowed the rubber ring to reduce rotating weight, which naturally allowed us to reduce the width of the plastic wheel under the rubber ring. We also learned to remove the rubber ring, run a couple of narrow layers of masking tape over the plastic wheel, then reinstall the rubber drive ring, increasing the rolling diameter. Instant gearing change! The cars would take an extra lap to work up to full speed, but the speed was greater. Eventually we learned how much was enough and how much was too much.

8. With only the right rear wheel being driven, the cars had a tendency to come down off the high groove toward the middle of the track on the straights, which when they hit the wall next corner at about 30-degrees would cause an abrupt change of direction and a loss of speed. So we tweaked the alignment to make the cars pull slightly right and hold a higher line. Smoother cornering and lots more speed.

9. The track sections were not smooth and, despite our best efforts to sand them into submission, the cars, at the elevated speeds we were running them, would lose traction on the straights. Like a dental drill, you could hear the rear wheel spinning, biting, spinning biting over the uneven surface. We fashioned our own rear deck lids out of old baseball cards, cutting them into shape, soaking them in water, then putting the bend we wanted in them before letting them dry overnight (and sometimes in mom's oven when she wasn't home). Then we'd glue them on. It stopped the wheel spinning. Eventually, we got smart and only did a half-width deck lid over the right (driven) wheel. Interestingly, this allowed us to take some of the right-pull alignment out of the car as it was being steered right by that half-wing.

 

Now, I told you that story, in order to tell you this one.

 

We contacted Mattel. I wrote them a letter telling them what we'd done and how much we were enjoying these cars. Little did I know that the letter would find itself in the hands of a couple of guys in the R&D department, who wrote back and asked for the kinds of details I've given above. Then they asked how fast our cars went, as in had we done any timed laps? No, we'd only raced them against each other. But it didn't take long for us to find a stopwatch. At the suggestion of the Mattel guys, we did, 3-lap, 5-lap and 10-lap runs. We mailed them the times and some pictures of our cars. Remember, this was taking weeks because it was all snail mail.

 

The Mattel guys had been working on cars of their own and a track setup like ours, and had been having fun after hours holding their own races. But when they got our list of lap times, they couldn't believe them. Still, they were nice enough that rather than just figure we were two kids who were lying to them, they invited us to the Mattel U.S HQ in Torrance, CA (about 40 miles from where we lived) and asked us to bring our track and cars.

 

Our parents drove us there on a Saturday. The guard at the parking lot was waiting for us. We were surprised at the number of people working on the weekend. We were met at the front door by another guard who put the boxes containing our track and our cars onto a rolling cart, and took us to the Hot Wheels R&D facility on the 3rd or 4th floor (I forget). There we got to meet the two R&D guys. I think one was named Charles and I can't remember the other one other than he had an accent. I expected them to be in white lab coats, but they were dressed in slacks, shirts and ties (it was the 60's, even if it was a Saturday - - oh how times have changed).

 

We got a quick tour of the facility. They showed us how they designed things, but didn't let us see anything they were working on. We unpacked our track, set it up on a huge table next to the track they had been using. As soon as we assembled it, they began inspecting it. As I said, it was two tracks put together and it was probably about 12' x 5' in size.

 

We pulled out the cars and they immediately wanted us to take them apart and show them what we'd done. But the cars were in such a lightweight race-ready state that they were pretty fragile. We decided to show them what the cars could do on the track first. So we charged them up and ran them against the stopwatch. These two "engineers" were amazed at what we'd done. They showed us their cars and showed us their lap times and I forget the differences, but I think in a 5-lap run we were almost two seconds faster. I think we were doing 5 laps in about 18 seconds. Heck, it could have been 28 seconds for all I know. My memory only goes back so far. But I think it was under 4 seconds a lap because I recall those little cars really flying.

 

The Mattel people were impressed and offered to buy our entire race setup, including the track and all cars. My brother and I got a $100 check from Mattel to split, plus 4 new tracks (each came with two cars) plus 10 more new cars. The only thing that they didn't buy from us was our supply of spare batteries which we'd left at home.

 

We never heard from them again, although Mattel did bring out a Hot Wheels kit with a track that was 50% larger the following year. My brother and I had spent an entire summer racing, modifying, racing and modifying. It was now close to September and school was going to start. I know we never built more cars or modified the tracks we got. I don't even recall if we ever opened one of the tracks we got. But I do remember when my parents decided that if we hadn't done so in X-number of years, then these toys were better off in the hands of GoodWill and kids who'd use them, rather than just collecting dust in our closets. By then, my brother and I had our Hodaka dirt bikes and we were going riding almost every weekend. It wasn't difficult to let GoodWill have the racetracks and cars.

 

Nevertheless, I will never forget that toy and all the things we learned about speed, drag, aerodynamics, chassis dynamics and more. They instilled in me an interest, if not a passion, temporarily resurrected during my R/C car racing days, that has lasted me a lifetime.

 

I know. This story is worthless without pictures. If they're anywhere, they're in a file at Mattel somewhere.

 

I just found a link to some information. They were called "Sizzlers" and apparently they've just been re-released by Mattel. It's not as if I barely have enough time in my life for what currently fills it, but you can't imagine the urge I have to go out and buy a couple of these tracks and some extra cars. But kindly as she is, the Lady Penelope would KILL me.

[sebjones906]

SALLY, the girl down the street.

[Francois_Dumas]

Atari - yeah, yeah, it's a video game, but it was one of our faves. We all still talk about the time dad got up to a million points on Missle Command, and it didn't know how to count that high and rolled back to zero. Good times.

 

 

Don't laugh.. I am typing this on my (already old-fashioned) 64-bits dual-core PC... and that Atari is standing in the corner in my office... Nina found it a few weeks ago in the attic and wanted to throw it away...... No way José !!!

[rocks]

I got one of these this past Christmas in a Yankee Swap!!!

[KevinH]

 

Johnny Astro was really something to play with. What fun that was trying to land that balloon all over my bedroom. Bookcase, desk, floor and bed. It came with a blow molded section of the moon. What a blast.

[Jerry Johnston]

Yep, you pretty much had to make your own toys back then. I too had nailed a pair of these roller kates to a two-by-four and nailed a wooden crate to the top to make a push cart. This was in approx. 1945.

[Laura]

Spent most of my childhood on 8 wheels and 2 wheels. Roller skating outside after school everyday (ouch, can still feel those clamps I screwed into the sides of my shoes) and the roller rink every Saturday and Sunday. "now it's time for reverse skate". When my skake hit a rock outside I stopped short, fell on my hand and fractured it I had to switch to the bicycle until I healed. By then I was hooked on my pink and white bicycle and spent most of the time on that but still hit up the roller rink every Saturday and Sunday.

 

Do you remember Gaylord? He was my favorited (battery operated) basset hound. Loved that noisey slow hound.

[Bullett]

 

This and a piece of 3/4 plywood.....Skateboard!!!!!

 

YESSSS! We made those, too.

[Urban Surfer]

We had a larg sling shot, that was composed of 16 feet of heavy surical tubing. There were two dowls that the tubing double through. It also dubbled throug a larg leather pocket.( as on a sling shot.)

One person would grab each dowl and the third would walk back several feet, drop the pocket near the ground and let fly.

There was so much force that the two holding the dowels would loose ballance and be thrown forward in the directon on the launch.

We could propel an intack egg with this device nearly two city block.

The funniest this is that you were so far away and well hidden you didn't have to run

.

We lonched much heavier projectiles on accation.

I'm sure you don't want to hear that. :

[jfremder]

(WARNING: Long story)

 

Thanks for writing this up Fernando. What a great story! I also enjoyed several fun filled years of R/C Car racing, 1/8th 1/10th 1/12th and 1/18th scales. Still have all my gear. Built all my own packs too, choosing the best rated cells, treating best my racing packs like fine collectibles.

 

I also had a slotless 1/64th scale set for the 'kids' about 10 years ago, using 2wd rechargeable cars with NiCds. It was a Daytona track replica, about 4' x 8' and 4 cars wide. I can't remember the brand, but I don't think it was Hot Wheels.

[Joe Frickin' Friday]

I just found a link to some information. They were called "Sizzlers" and apparently they've just been re-released by Mattel.

 

As I read your story the toy seemed familiar to me, and finally this sentence nailed it. I had the "Sizzlers" setup too, back in the late 70's. I never thought to tinker with them though; that's pretty cool that you and your bro were able to hack them and get such outrageous performance improvements out of them!