Whatever Happened to Creative Toys?

December 26th, 2007 | webmaster | Memory Lane

(Things like hoops, marbles, and home-made toys you built yourself!)

By Kelly Baldwin

Mr. Baldwin wrote this article on March 24, 1999 during the time he worked at the seaport of Savannah, GA as a federal inspections officer for the USDA. It had been stored on his computer ever since. He expressed that he hoped that folks would enjoy reading it and perhaps even identify with it. He continued in his sentiments that he had “enjoyed reading the work of others who have contributed to the Bladenboro Booster Advisor.” Mr. Baldwin, we appreciate your contributing this story, very appropriate for our December edition. -HH

Some of us were talking the other day, where I work, about how times have changed since we grew up. (It was pre-Christmas and a lady in our office was lamenting the fact that she could not find a certain “race track” toy she wanted to buy for her nephew; they were all sold out.) I’ve thought about that a lot since.

When I was a small boy growing up right after World War II we lived in a little community of fewer than a hundred people, called Abbottsburg, North Carolina. My family was poor; the whole community was poor! In those days it was just about impossible to get a “store bought” toy. My daddy had three or four old simple hand tools; a hand saw, a ratchet brace with a few auger bits, and a hammer. He encouraged me to use them.

My daddy used to run a little store and he had a fellow-merchant friend, a nice old gentleman named Mr. Luther Cashwell, who ran a little store right next to the Post Office where my mother was Postmaster. I spent most of my free time after school and in the summers playing around that old post-office building. Mr. Luther liked me and he would save empty apple boxes for me. Back then apples came in beautiful White Pine, wooden boxes. The White Pine was soft and easy to work and it had a wonderful fragrance which I love to this day. I would take those boxes apart and build little toy airplanes, and toy trucks, and birdhouses out of them. I would save the nails, too, and carefully straighten them out so I could re-use them for my projects. I always got double benefits from this activity because I enjoyed building the toys as much as I did playing with them. There is a wonderful therapy that comes from being able to say, “I made that!”

Mr. Luther also accumulated wooden fish boxes that he would give to me and my friends. Fish came in large Yellow Pine boxes. The Yellow Pine was harder and didn’t work as well as the apple boxes, so I usually figured out a way to use those boxes intact. I remember one time I mounted one onto a toy wagon and made an instant “transfer truck.” It was with this toy that I learned that you could parallel park better by backing into a space than by driving straight in. Would you believe that I see people even today who haven’t learned that lesson? We also rolled hoops. A hoop was just that; a round, metal band about eight or ten inches in diameter and perhaps an inch wide. We would take a tobacco stick, cut about ten inches off the end of it, and nail this piece across the end of the stick in “tee” fashion. With some practice, you could hang the hoop onto this tee, give it a little start, and then use the tee to push the hoop along. My friends and I got pretty skillful with this; we could speed up, slow down, steer around mud puddles in the road and so forth. I had no idea at the time, but I was learning first hand about such lofty subjects as inertia, friction, and centrifugal force. To this day, I have no idea where we got the hoops. . . . someone just always seemed to come up with one. Probably, they came off the wooden hubs of wagon wheels that were plentiful in those days.

My daddy had another friend, Mr. E. J. Cox, who ran a big store over in Clarkton, N.C. Sometimes daddy would carry me over there and Mr. Cox always made a fuss over me. I liked him. He often would have some little half-pint cans of paint in his hardware section that had the paper labels lost off them. He couldn’t sell them because he didn’t know what color paint was inside. (Today, they don’t have that problem because the label is printed right on the can!) Mr. Cox kindly would give these to me and I would use the paint to decorate my projects. . . it didn’t really matter to me what color it was. After all, once I had opened up the can, I then knew what the color was. Looking back, I now realize that I was also getting experience in applying paint and maintaining my brush.

Most children today want to be entertained without investing anything of themselves into the process. They want to be entertained electronically. It breaks my heart to see them congregating around the arcades you find in all the malls. Not only are the machines not creative, but they provide a fertile atmosphere in which children learn all the wrong things. After you’ve played, and spent your money, you have nothing to show for it; nothing to carry away! Today’s child often becomes bored. I was never bored. I always had some idea for something I could build and try out. One of my happiest experiences was the time I won the birdhouse building contest sponsored by the Garden Club over in Bladenboro. As soon as I found out about it, I knew it was for me! I remember very well the design of my winning house. I painted it battleship gray with a deep verde roof and red trim. My first place prize was something like ten dollars. . . a literal fortune for me in those days. (Only later did I learn that the birds, for their part, would rather have had the house be weathered and not painted.)

A lot of kids played marbles too. I never did play marbles much; never got good at it. First, you had to get down on your knees to play marbles and my mother didn’t care much for what that did to my clothes. Second, the whole idea in marbles was that you got to keep what you knocked out of the ring. This meant either taking someone else’s marbles or losing mine.
My Momma didn’t care much for that concept either! But marbles was a good game. Add impact to that list of physics I mentioned earlier.

Don’t misunderstand me; I know there are a lot of wonderful, well designed, creative toys out there today, but I do believe children are happier and learn more when somehow the whole process is dependent upon them; when they have an investment in it. There is such a great sense of satisfaction in being able to say, “I thought of that” or, “I built that.” I believe
these ideas carry over into later life and make for more productive workers and happier people! J.K.B.