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Home Made Toys…The Best

I never had a lot of toys as a kid. Bread, soup, and clothes were more important than toys. I would get maybe one or two toys for Christmas, as I remember. Then play with them till they broke, wore out, or got stolen. We used to make a lot of toys. Any old stick plus some imagination became a six-shooter. Let me tell you, those six-shooters were a wonder. They came with an endless supply of ammunition, you never had to stop and reload. A discarded broom handle became a rifle or a horse, whichever one you needed at the time. From plaster laths salvaged from the housing project, we would make a gun that would shoot rubber bands.

Where did we get the rubber bands? They came from cutting up an old tire inner tube. Any old inner tube was worth two bags of marbles in those days. Two tin cans with a piece of string between them became a private telephone line. Two sticks tied together became a B17 bomber. We used plain paper to make a lot of things too. Everybody learned how to make a paper hat before they reached the first grade. The girls were forever cutting things out of paper. Paper airplanes were quite popular with the boys. It took but a few seconds to fold one up and we would fly them for hours on end.

Another thing we used to make a lot of times was a kite. The sticks were the hardest things to come by, but once you had the sticks, the rest was easy. Any old newspaper would do for the kite cover and for glue, I would get some baking flour from Mom, mix it with plain water and it made the greatest paper paste. The next hardest thing to come by was the kite string. A brand new roll of string cost a nickel in those days and a nickel was a lot of money. Every kid I knew collected string. You would start out with a little string and roll it into a ball. Then as you acquired more string, you would tie it onto the end and roll it up. The more string you collected, the larger the ball, and the greater your prestige.

Whenever you went to some kids house, the one thing that was a "must see" was his ball of string. One kid had a ball of string over a foot in diameter as I remember. He was the champion, the king of the hill. My ball of string was about the size of a baseball and full of knots where I tied pieces together. It looked pretty ratty, but it did just great when it came to flying kites. Mom always had a ragbag of worn out clothing (we didn't waste much) and I could always find a piece of cloth to tear into strips and make a tail for my kite.

My kites were never as big as the new store bought kites, primarily because my sticks were most always salvaged from somebody's wrecked kite. Because of this, my kites were always a little shorter than the others, and noticeably narrower. The resulting aerodynamics of a "skinny" kite was that my skinny kites could climb faster than any of the "fat" kites from the store. This became a formidable weapon when we staged kite battles. I could let my kite drop in altitude to get below the others, then yank on the string and the skinny kite would rocket up and catch the others off guard, get tangled with them, and bring them down.

I know, it was stupid, but that was the object of a kite fight. Get your kite entangled with the other guys' kites and often ruin both kites in the process. You had to be careful who you tangled kite's with too. Once the kites were on the ground where everyone could look at the damage, a subsequent fistfight was not uncommon.

One other thing I remember making was a scooter. What you needed was a wood 2 x 4 about three feet long, a wooden apple crate, a skinny piece of wood a few inches wider than the apple crate, a single roller skate, some nails, and a brick to pound nails with. If you had two roller skates you had to put them on both your feet and actually roller skate with them. But if you had but one roller skate, you could justifiably use it to make a scooter. I remember trading twelve marbles for a single skate. Another kid in the apartment house thought I was crazy; he could have gotten the same skate for only eight marbles. Sound familiar? The roller skates at that time were all metal and made in two pieces, each piece had two wheels mounted on a frame with a long slot. Then the two frames were bolted together with a single screw, the long slots providing a means of adjustment for sizes six through sixteen or something of that nature.

To make a scooter, you simply took one roller skate, take the screw out altogether leaving two pieces each with two wheels. One piece with two wheels got nailed down to the front of the 2 x 4 and the other piece with two wheels got nailed to the rear of the 2 x 4. Then the apple crate got nailed to the top of the 2 x 4 and a piece of wood was nailed to the top of the apple crate to serve as a handle. You were done. Simply take it by the handles, put one foot on the 2 x 4, and push off with the other foot and there you were, happily scooting down the sidewalk. Think of it, today you can buy a scooter that is perhaps half as good for only $59.95.

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