Very OT: Favorite non-computer toy(s) growing up | Page 3 | The Boneyard

Very OT: Favorite non-computer toy(s) growing up

Status
Not open for further replies.
temery said:
BB guns were long before paintball. We'd chase each other around using a metal garbage can lid as protection. No eye protection, which kind of seems dangerous, at this point. The trick was pumping your gun without dropping your shield.
Expand ...

We wore many layers. No shields.
 
fleudslipcon said:
Anyone love the game Parcheesi?
Expand ...

Yup. Four months a year I lived with my grandmother on a lake in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of things to do outside, but if it rained, we'd all meet up and play board games. I still consider Parcheesi and Yhatzee as my favorites (although not considered board games by most). I now have Yhatzee on my iPad and iPhone, and play all the time.
 
I remember as a kid in the winter going to Barney's Hill in Forest Park. We had a flexible flyer and a toboggan. My memory was of Barney's hill being huge. I drove by Barney's a couple years ago and could not believe how small it was. Great memories though.

cto44 said:
I am so old .. that there were no computers when I was a kid.... and no "action figures" or any stuff like that. I was like IMind... my favorite plaything was the great outdoors... we just ran around out there all day... and made up all kinds of silly games. In the winter, my favorite "toys" were my classic "Flexible Flyer" sled (all wood and metal -- no plastic) and my ice skates (which I used on ponds .... never on an indoor or outdoor rink, mainly because there were NO rinks in my small semi-rural hamlet). Wow, it sounds like I grew up in the 19th century.
Expand ...
 
My favorite board game would have to be Scrabble. Growing up we'd always play it after Thanksgiving dinner (which is a Monday where I hail from). I was one of six siblings and my parents played too, so we had to buy 2 Scrabble sets just so there'd be enough of those wooden letter-holding bars to go around.
 
.-.
If you grew up in the 40's or 50 toys were few but playmates were everywhere. We had 25 boys within my age group.
you had baseball games with every position filled plus a few.

We played war a lot.The Nazis or Commies were the bad guys. One of my friends older brothers made wooden guns on a jigsaw. My favorite was the Thompson. The kid was talented.
Guns. were assigned before the game and turned in afterword.
I owned a baseball glove I iused from little league until high school.
Even though I was a varsity baseball player I never owned a bat.
My best buddy actually made one in woodshop which we used.
I wasn't allowed near machinery.
When wiffle ball became popular we used old broom handles for bats with electrical tape on the handles
My older brother, sister and myself all peddled papers. My brother bought a Daisy Red Rider (wooden handle) which I inherited along with some other stuff.

I saved enough money and bought a 3 speed German Bike.
That was a life changer.
we played football in the fall. My neighborhood had team when I was in Jr High that played other nrighborhood teams. We didn't have the material things but we had a lot of friends.

We rented ice skates when we went .
 
All toys were non-computer toys when I was a kid.

I'm going to list Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set as one item, because we had a big box with all the parts mixed together, and often built things that combined the two. Mostly Erector Set machines that knocked down Lincoln Log buildings.

A little pink rubber ball stamped "second". It was the default stickball/handball element of my youth, but we actually had a game everyone called 2nds, which was usually played 2 on 2 or 3 on 3, but could be played 1 on 1 in a pinch. The guy who was up faced a building wall from about 8 feet away and threw the ball just short of the crease at the base of the wall so it would bounce up and back. then he ran like hell for the base. Yeah, one base. If he defender(s) caught it on the fly he was out. If not, they had to tag him with the ball before he reached the base. Otherwise, he scored. There were variations with 2 bases and rundowns were involved, but mostly we played 2 on 2 with one base.
Every corner variety store sold those balls and I remember paying $0.16 for one. Obviously, they were rejects, but I can't recall ever seeing a top grade one for sale anywhere. Everyone thought they were the cores for tennis balls at the time.

U-Control airplanes. Nothing fancy. Whatever we could build from kits or by combining parts from ones we'd already crashed.Walked around with a cut up knuckle on your right hand all summer from backfires when trying to start them. And the fuel burned like hell when it got into the cut. Ah, the good old days!

Toy guns of all shapes and sizes. Mostly cap pistols, I guess. Epic battles between the forces of good and evil took place in factory lots all over the east side of Bridgeport, and the Korean war was won by the US on a weekly basis.

Fishing gear. Never really thought of it as a toy, but I spent more of my free time fishing than playing. Still do.

And all this made me thing of THE PARACHUTE. Saw a big orange parachute come down on a neighbors roof one day. Called the fire department, who came and got it down. It was a weather balloon radio. FD took the radio, and gave me the parachute! We used to climb to the top of a billboard with the chute and a 5 gallon bucket full of trap rock from the rail yard, and throw it off. Until the neighborhood idiot decided he didn't weigh any more than the bucket of rocks, and tried jumping with it, with his feet in the bucket. Broken leg, collar bone, ribs, wrist, etc. The cops took the damned chute away then.
 
Little did we know back then ....

Also had an original huge Millennium Falcon which my mother gave away after a few years ... :(

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk 2
 
temery said:
I am surprised nobody has mentioned marbles. I still have bags from the 60's.
Expand ...

I inherited a bunch from an uncle. Got involved in a cut throat game of marbles and lost some. My parents took the rest away and grounded me.
 
.-.
Finally, someone mentioned AFX cars. I spent every cent I made from my paper routes buying attachments for that thing. I still remember that smell when the cars burnt out.

STP racers (those are the ones with the pull cords)
Erector sets
Plastic army men for fun and fires
baseball cards
Then Pong came and ruined it all
 
A spaldeen.
Growing up in NYC, a spaldeen was a must for stick ball and stoop ball.
 
RichZ said:
I inherited a bunch from an uncle. Got involved in a cut throat game of marbles and lost some. My parents took the rest away and grounded me.
Expand ...


Crystal Poppers!! LOL
 
ZenConn said:
Little did we know back then ....

Also had an original huge Millennium Falcon which my mother gave away after a few years ... :(

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk 2
Expand ...


Still got mine. Too banged up to be worth anything though. I used my toys.

I preferred the trash compactor anyway.
 
For as long as I can remember, I had Matchbox Cars/Hot wheels.

As I got a little older I got into GI Joe and Transformers. I even had the aircraft carrier!

Finally the WWF action figures. Those were damn fun. Between my neighbor and I, we could reenact most Wrestlemania matches.

As for outdoor toys, I was always on my bike or scooter. Snow forts were a necessity, especially living on a corner where the plows piled up the snow.
 
.-.
a game of 2-hand touch, kickball and hide & seek
 
In no order:

Monster Magnet
Superball
Beanie and Cecil hand puppet that talked.
Fireball XL-5 model
Astroboy anything
Matches (long story on that one)
 
Back in the day, it was all about Big Wheels and Green Machines in my neighborhood.

And if you didn't have one (like yours truly), you built your own ride: a large plank of wood, a cut-out milk crate for a seat, two smaller sticks for the axles, some steering rope, a braking lever, a bunch of old nails to hold everything together, and wheels of course - if you were lucky enough to find them, you rolled with baby-stroller wheels up front and old Big Wheel or Green Machine wheels in back.

We kids used to ride in packs and race each other, and with all the steep hills in Waterbury we had big fun with those things. Until we had to haul them back uphill, of course...
 
IndyMutt said:
A spaldeen.
Growing up in NYC, a spaldeen was a must for stick ball and stoop ball.
Expand ...

So I guess NYC got the good ones. In Bridgeport, all we got was the ones marked "second". Never saw the real thing in any of the store in my neighborhood in the fifties.
 
.-.
Ok I was just a little degenerate at times. I did pitch a few pennies in my youth (yes pennies). Not sure if youngsters know what I'm talking about.
 
Kitaman said:
Ok I was just a little degenerate at times. I did pitch a few pennies in my youth (yes pennies). Not sure if youngsters know what I'm talking about.
Expand ...

The trick was to aim at the ant hills against the wall. It's like landing a horseshoe in a horseshoe pit.
 
1 The old GI Joes
2 Big Jim
3 Micronauts ( Toys and comic book).
4 The Adventure People
5 All comic books drawn by John Byrne , John Romita jr
And George Perez.
 
epark88 said:
Back in the day, it was all about Big Wheels and Green Machines in my neighborhood.

And if you didn't have one (like yours truly), you built your own ride: a large plank of wood, a cut-out milk crate for a seat, two smaller sticks for the axles, some steering rope, a braking lever, a bunch of old nails to hold everything together, and wheels of course - if you were lucky enough to find them, you rolled with baby-stroller wheels up front and old Big Wheel or Green Machine wheels in back.

We kids used to ride in packs and race each other, and with all the steep hills in Waterbury we had big fun with those things. Until we had to haul them back uphill, of course...
Expand ...

our "go-carts" were made from the bottom of grocery store carriages... souped-up
 
I was either in the woods or playing sports. Wiffle ball, football, basketball. Had a ping pong table in the basement, we would play all the time.
 
.-.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Forum statistics

Threads
168,354
Messages
4,566,879
Members
10,469
Latest member
xxBlueChips


Top Bottom