NOVEMBER 30, 2025 – Over the past week, my wife and I have become well acquainted with our two-year-old grandson’s expanding toy collection. As I’ve already noted, he’s well into his truck phase, which includes a full complement of cranes, plows, dozers, and excavating machines. He also plays hard with his Duplos and waxed cardboard blocks. When he’s had enough of toys that develop small motor skills, he races his “bikes” around the kitchen island, sometimes expanding his route to circle the dining room table in the adjacent space. In a corner of the living room, meanwhile, are his stacks of books, half in French, half in English, which provide a peaceful alternative to his “active play” toys.
Awaiting his further development is an entire playroom upstairs, which already houses all sorts of interesting toys, games, and activities. Within a few short years, it will become his “playtime central.”
When we help him pick up his toys before story time, then bedtime, I can’t help but reminisce about my own toys in early childhood. I have a vivid memory of them, mainly because by today’s standards, toy options back then were quite limited. The most memorable ones were shared with my sisters. For example, we had two special tops, one larger than the other, each with a pear shaped clear plastic cover over a color wheel and a metal handle with a knob on the end, which you pushed down on to put the top into a spin. My older sisters were much better than I at getting these spinning, and was mesmerized by how the primary colors on the color wheel would become all the colors at the start of the spin, then separate back down to the primary colors as the tops lost their momentum.
Then there was the big stuffed dog—large enough to accommodate two of us at a time, sitting on it as if it were a horse. Attached to it was an oversized label that we’d wanted to cut off until our oldest sister read it to us: WARNING. DO NOT REMOVE THIS LABEL UNDER PENALTY OF LAW. She explained to us what that meant, and since none of us wanted to go to jail, we agreed we should leave the label intact.
Another toy I remember was one I didn’t share: a half red, half blue metal replica of a postal service street box of the sort that was common back then. I think it was a small coin bank our New Jersey grandmother had given me when I was two or three. Somehow it wound up on the corner of the bathtub one evening when my dad was giving me a bath. When I kept standing up in the bath water, I remember, Dad lost his cool and said, “If you stay sitting down, you’re gonna get a spanking that’ll turn your rear end as red as that mailbox.” As he pointed at the toy mailbox, I thought, “That’s way too red. Dad would never spank that hard.” But I complied with his command, anyway. I don’t remember getting spanked until much later in life, when I really deserved it and he used a wooden paddle bearing the words, “Never spank a child in the face. Nature provides a better place.”
The third toy that I remember was a fox with very tough, short hair, mounted on a piece of wood with wooden wheels and a pull string. It had been Dad’s toy when he was a young kid. It looked so old and forlorn, I felt sorry for it and treated it with the utmost care.
I had other toys too—wooden blocks, a stick pony, and a cap gun, which my parents told me strictly was never, ever to be pointed at anyone, even when it had no caps in it. Over time, of course, other toys joined the fun—mostly cars and trucks, but every so often something special, such as the metal barn with a toy tractor and complement of farm animals that was my main present on my fourth birthday.
Supplementing our meager toy inventory, however, was a large allotment of Golden Books and an impressive collection of records that every day my sisters and I played on an ancient turntable. At some point we really didn’t need to play the records—all four of us had heard them so many times, we had all the songs and stories memorized. I liked toys as much as the next kid, but those 40 or 50 – 78-RPM records and the half dozen or more children’s LPs in the “record box” were among our favorite things. Instead of watching television (the household TV broke down before I was two, and our parents never saw fit to have it fixed or replaced), my sisters and I would sit down and listen to those records for hours on end (it seemed). Each of us formed different mind’s-eye impressions from the same songs and storytelling we all heard, but the salient benefit for each of us was that her/my imagination was in high gear—it had to be to make the most of the experience. Otherwise, we’d have been consigned to lying on our backs, staring at the ceiling and seeing nothing but white plaster.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
