Do you remember any favorites? I didn't have many toys in the forties, I doubt that many kids did in those days. I do remember on very special Christmas gift though, a toy Caterpillar tractor. It had rubber treads that went around the wheels. I also remember getting Tinkertoys and an Erector set. More common gifts for me were pocket knives and pocket watches or a new flashlight. Some toys were home made, a whistle carved from a willow branch, walking stilts, a "tank" made from a thread spool. My dad carved the first "tank" with little v-notches cut into the rims of the spool to look like tank treads and a rubber band "engine" through the center. Another favorite were "buzz-buttons", a large coat button with a long string threaded through it. (I made those for my kids too.) How about you?
A tin Lancaster bomber aircraft with RAF roundels and a flint gun that fired forward. Lived in Sheffield during WW2 and the aircraft triggered my lifelong love of all thinks aeronautical. Super toy, drove my mother mad I remember.....
I didn't come along until the fifties, but I had a huge collection of metal and wooden toys. As I remember it, the metal ones were mostly toy soldiers, tanks, cannons, and etc. while the wooden ones were cars and tractors and farm equipment. The toy soldiers were old even then, I think. I probably lost most of them playing with them along the river, where I'd set up forts and move the rocks around to stage naval battles. The creek was the location of so much of my playtime, and now it's so overgrown with brush and weeds that I can't even figure out where it was. I owned the property at one time but sold it to my brother, who lives on another part of the property, but let the river bed grow wild.
Do any of you remember playing horseshoes? I remember many Sunday afternoons when we would have company and after dinner, we would play horseshoes in the shade of big old oak trees. Back then we used real iron horseshoes and an iron stob. OH, the thrill when the horseshoe hit around the stob with a loud 'Clang!" You had a ringer!
I do remember horseshoes, and we played it with real horseshoes since shoeing horses was one of the things that my dad did for extra money. When I was a kid though, horseshoes was something that mostly our parents played. Although I have played it several times, it wasn't considered cool. At church picnics and such, our parents would play horseshoes while we played baseball or something else. Another church picnic game was croquet. I liked that one, as it was something like mini-golf. Do people still play croquet?
The Magic Designer, beyond any doubt! It used mechanical cleverness way beyond my understanding as a kid to create an endless number of picturesque line-drawings. Here's how it worked: A stubby, well-sharpened wooden pencil was inserted point-down in the bottom of the "V" shaped arms, to the left of the little crank wheel. Turning the crank rotated the big disc, onto which blank paper was retained by 3 little ears. The two wheels along the left side have pins protruding which engage holes in the V arms. The top wheel rotates with the disc but is "settable" location-wise in the curved slot below the wheel. The bottom wheel rotates also, but is fixed in location. As the crank is turned and the disc rotates, the "wobbly" motion of the wheel moves he arms about, the pencil describing a line on the paper which may be wavy, curly, straight, and eventually meets itself after one complete disc rotation. A bit difficult to quite picture how those moving part interacted; it was amazing to see! Below is one just begun. I seem to think used colored pencils to create some really neat stuff. I think I got the thing at 8 or 9. Frank "In the 1930s, Magic Designer was a popular precision drawing toy geared towards kids and adults – and was likely an inspiration for Spirograph 30 years later. The toy was originally called “Hoot Nanny” by its inventor, Howard Bevan Jones, and manufactured at his Chicago-based company. In the mid-1950s, Saukville, Wisconsin-based Northern Signal Company acquired the rights and gave it the more marketing-savvy name, “Magic Designer.”
@Ken Anderson I remember having fun playing croquet as well. I believe they still sell croquet sets today but don't think it's nearly as popular anymore.
@Shirley Martin and @Ken Anderson You two will be glad to know that both horseshoes and croquet are still played at our Family get togethers (mostly horseshoes)...and both games are still sold in Sporting Stores, etc. My Honey and I even play both of those games on our Wii.
Lincoln logs was one of my favorite toys to play with...as well as baseballs, footballs, and basketballs. If you had any of those you could always round up enough kids in the neighborhood to make two teams and play ball!