It’s well-known that smells can trigger memories. That happened to me over the Thanksgiving holiday. We were sitting around a firepit outside, enjoying the relaxing vibe. Someone threw a plastic solo cup into the fire, and the smell that hit my nose took me back to my childhood. I’ll continue with that thought in a minute.
Growing up, my family consisted of me, my sister who was 2 years older, and my mom and dad. I realize now that my parents were big advocates of education and exploration. They were proponents of Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Math, long before anyone assigned the acronym STEAM or designed a movement around those fields of study. My parents provided multiple opportunities for us to learn with curiosity and create with experimentation. This was evident in our toys. While we had girlish toys like dolls and an Easy Bake Oven, our house contained many toys that you wouldn’t normally expect to find in a household without boys; toys that encouraged STEAM education.
Every year, at Christmas, we received toys and surprises. In our Christmas stockings, besides the candy canes, Chapsticks, and other small items, we always found a Charlie Brown Peanuts comic book and a Matchbox toy car. I loved my Matchbox cars. My sister and I played with them regularly, and enjoyed adding to our collection. I also loved my Peanuts comic books. I have always LOVED Snoopy. Snoopy rules.
Another toy we enjoyed was our Lego collection. At that time, Legos were very thin building blocks which required perfect fingernail positioning to pry apart. There were no guides or blueprints for building specific models. We just poured out the bucket of Legos and went at it. We made many incredible structures, including a cool garage structure which our Matchbox cars could visit. We spent hours crafting and designing with bare bones Legos.
We had a large figure-8 racetrack with remote control cars which took over most of the room when set up. We quickly found that at maximum speed, the car on the outside track would fly off the track when attempting to round the curve. While that was great fun, we also found that trying to reposition the car’s guide pole on the center slot trench was very difficult. So, we practiced again and again to race the car at full speed, then decelerate at just the right moment to keep the car from hurling off the track. Many afternoons were wiled away at the racetrack.
Another large-scale toy was our electric NFL football game. As best as I can remember, the game operated on air cushioning and vibrations which caused the small football players to ‘run’ down the field. We spent extended time learning offensive and defensive plays and programming in our play selections, only to watch the wayward football players fail miserably at running the routes or catching balls. I don’t think a single play ever worked as planned. But, we enjoyed orchestrating the scenes and guessing the opposing team’s strategies.
The firepit smell of burning plastic, of which I previously spoke, brought back memories of our Vac-U-Form machine. Vac-U-Form was a devise for creating molded plastic toys. To operate it, you would choose a metal form, such as a car, airplane, or boat, to place on the machine. Then, you would choose a thin piece of colored plastic, add it to the machine and turn it on. The metal would heat to a ridiculously hot temperature, and repeated handle pressing would cause the plastic to melt onto the mold, vacuum-sealing, and taking the shape. Aaahhh, the smell of burnt plastic. If you were patient enough to wait for everything to cool down before extracting the newly minted toy, then, good for you. If not, ouch. To actually use the plastic toy, you had to meticulously cut the rest of the plastic sheet away. If you have ever tried to open vacuum sealed packaging, you know that it’s not the easiest thing to cut. But, we did. Even so, we realized that the fun with Vac-U-Form was in cooking, not in using the flimsy plastic toys afterward.
I mentioned the Easy Bake Oven. That was a toy that I didn’t enjoy very much. My take on it was that I simply had to mix water into a powder base, pour it into 1 of three baking molds, put it in the oven, and wait for the timer to ding. When the cake came out of the oven, there was a little frosting and a few sprinkles to add. Then the whole thing tasted crappy. Why did I want to make that stuff? I was not impressed.
But, another toy with hazardously high temperatures that I did love was Creepy Crawlers. Those were all kinds of fun. For this machine, you selected from dozens of metal plates which had indented molds of various bugs. You then took bottles of different colored goo and squeezed the goo into the mold. It was similar to squeezing Elmer’s glue from a bottle. You could mix colored goos, or create patterns and designs. You had to be very careful to fill every insect leg with the right amount of goo, but not too much. Once you finished filling the molds, you slid the metal plate into the cooker, turned up the heat and cooked the buggers. There were tongs for grasping the burning hot metal plates. When unmolding the bugs, you were always in danger of pulling too vigorously and leaving one or more legs behind in the mold. It was quite a challenge to successfully create bugs. When the task was finished, you had BUGS to play with, to stretch, to collect, to enjoy. Creepy Crawlers was a very fun toy, and there was always one more color combination or bug design which I felt the need to make.
Aaaahhh, the memories. With today’s child proofing and safety standards, some of the toys of yesteryear wouldn’t measure up. I get it. But, it sure was fun to have those tools of experimentation when I was a kid. I’m thankful that my parents opened some doors that I might not have opened for myself, just to expose me to a variety of ideas and possibilities. I spent much of my childhood experimenting and exploring.
Which makes me wonder….can I have a do-over as a parent? There might be some opportunities I forgot to present to my kids along the way. Ooops.