Toys Of The Time

In the era in which I grew up as a child, store bought toys were expensive and most of us couldn’t afford them. We improvised and used what we could find to make our own toys. Here’s some of the games we played.

Toys Of The Time

 

During the time I was about 7 or 8 in 1950 and 1951, one of the toys I played with most was a homemade wooden rubber gun. ( was that an oxymoron?) We would find an old piece of wood, one of Moms clothes pins, and an old inner tube (synthetic rubber tube that used to be inside the tires on all automobiles) and we were in business. We shaped the wood to look somewhat like a rifle and notched the tip of the barrel and cut some rubber rings off of the tube. We then attached the clothes pin to the stock with one of the rubber rings being careful to wrap a couple off wraps around the tip of the clothes pin to give it holding strength. And we had a wooden rubber gun with a pile of ammunition rubber rings.

 

The wooden rubber gun rifle with inner-tube rubber bullets.

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We also made wooden rubber gun pistols in a similar manner. We made bullets for the shorter barrels by clipping the inner tube rings in half and tying a knot in the clipped end with about an inch of the ends left to clip into the clothes pin trigger. The best rubbers for firing the farthest and stinging the most were from tubes made of red rubber. If you could find one of those, you were the king of the neighborhood. Every kid in the neighborhood made his own version of the wooden rubber gun and we often chose sides and had rubber gun wars. The side with the red inner tube rubbers nearly always won the war.

The pistol wooden rubber gun with a hair trigger.

The coveted red rubber inner tube made the best rubber gun bullets.

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The other game we played was marbles. Every kid had his own sack of marbles he carried with him. We would draw a two foot diameter circle on the sidewalk with chalk or in the dirt with a stick. Each kid who played would put three of his prize marbles inside the circle. Before you started you had to establish whether you were playing for “keeps” or not. If you played for keeps, you got to keep all the marbles you knocked out of the ring on your shot. You could use a regular marble or a “tallie” which was a little bigger. You could use any shooting method you pleased, but most everybody used the tucked thumb shot because it was more accurate, and you could get more velocity on the shot. You could shoot with your hand on the ground or in an elevated position but the shot had to come from outside the circle. You continued playing until all the marbles had been knocked out of the circle. There was an older kid that was an ace shooter that took a lot of our marbles, but we quickly learned not to play with him.

 

Bag of marbles with 2 tallies showing.

 

Kid taking aim at the marble he wants to knock out of the ring with the elevated shot technique.

 

 

When YoYo’s became popular, you could buy a good Duncan YoYo for a quarter which could keep you entertained for hours trying to learn all the tricks. We all carried a YoYo in our pocket for a long period of time.

 

 

The old wooden Duncan Yo-Yo we all went ” around the world with”.

Thanks for reading Toys Of The Time,
Hawg Jaw Bill