This week we take a nostalgic look back at the happier times of my childhood and all of the toys and hobbies that I enjoyed. I highly recommend you check out the YouTube version of this episode because it has lots of photos and video clips embedded. I was going to post photos here as well but there were just too many. See the video instead.

Contemplating Life – Episode 24 “To All the Toys I Loved Before”

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 24 of Contemplating Life.

Over the past several weeks we’ve covered some of the darker moments of my junior high and high school years struggling with the loss of friends and wrestling with my own mortality. This week I’d like to take a detour to a lighter topic. This episode will not be as dramatic or poignant as some have been but we need a break.

I want to talk about other childhood memories away from school. I want to talk about all the fun summer things I did and take a nostalgic look at my favorite childhood toys and my hobbies. No drama this week. Just fun. And there is a point to make at the end so stick with me and leave your handkerchief behind for a change.

When I was young, I didn’t seem to lack any friends. Lots of neighborhood kids would come to play with me because I always had a great collection of really cool toys. Until I was eight years old, I was an only child. Also given that my parents didn’t think I was going to live very long, I was quite spoiled.

My extended family is small – Dad had only one brother and Mom had only one sister. I only had 4 cousins, 2 on each side, and all of them are younger than me. That meant that my grandparents could afford to spoil us all as well.

I still had to count on friends to come visit me. I never went to their house to play except for an occasional Monopoly game with Mike Tillery next door. However, he would cheat me. I could only reach about halfway across the gameboard. Sometimes I would land on “Chance” and he would have to read the card for me. Way too often it said, “Go to boardwalk” and his cards way too often said, “Advanced to Go”. He would stuff the card back in the deck before I could read it. I finally had to insist that he show me the card. Decades later, Mike is now my dentist. I just saw him for a dental visit this week and we reminisced about those days. He conveniently forgot how he used to cheat me.

Mike played varsity basketball at Northwest High School while I was there. When we were in the state basketball tourney, I recorded the radio broadcast of the games he played in. When we won the Sectional Round and they cut down the basketball nets, he gave me a piece of the net. I still have it pressed in my high school yearbook. Unfortunately, we were defeated in the first round of the Regionals.

As I mentioned in previous episodes, my school gave me the use of a motorized wheelchair when I was 10 years old in the fifth grade. Unfortunately, for the first year or two they did not have a lift-equipped bus that would run through my neighborhood. There was a wheelchair bus at Roberts School but it only ran on the east side.

The bus driver would lift me out of my manual wheelchair at home in the morning onto the bus. Then upon arriving at school, he would lift me into the power chair and reverse the process at the end of the day. I was able to take the wheelchair home over the summer but throughout the school year, when I was home, I was stuck in a manual wheelchair that I couldn’t push.

Occasionally, mom would be at the school on a Friday afternoon doing some sort of volunteer work and I would persuade her to take me home in our van which had a ramp. She would then have to drive me to school Monday morning but it meant I got to use the chair over the weekend.

On a couple of occasions, I got sick on Friday and they had to call my mom to pick me up. They accused me of faking it when it happened the second time. I don’t really think I was consciously faking illness but I have to admit, it might’ve been my body just reacting to my desire to take the chair home. I think in a case of mind over body I really did get sick but it was just emotionally triggered.

When they finally got the wheelchair bus running sometime around seventh grade, having the power chair at home all the time gave me phenomenal freedom.

My friends would get on their bicycles and we would get in a small area like a one-car garage and play tag. They were fast but I was maneuverable in the tight confines of the garage.

Whether it was at my house playing with my toys or at other friends’ houses having a good time, I led a very enjoyable childhood.

My friends were quite accommodating to my needs. When a group of them built a nonpowered go-cart to push each other around in, they asked my mom for permission to lift me out of my wheelchair into the cart. They lined the seat with a bunch of pillows. I have a photo of me in the go-cart that you can see on the YouTube version of the podcast.

When I was a teenager, the guys built a clubhouse in Mike Goodlett’s backyard. It was about an 8 x 8 shack but they made sure that the roof was tall enough for me to get inside because I couldn’t duck. And the doorway was wide enough for my wheelchair.

In preparing for this episode, I did a lot of research on some of my favorite toys that I had while growing up. I was surprised to see that many of them were collectibles selling for high prices on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. I usually put links in the description of this podcast to items that I mention. This time there are just too many. Instead, this time I direct you to the Contemplating Life website where I post the transcript of the podcast. It will include links and photos. You can also see photos of these toys in the YouTube version of the podcast.

Some of the toys I had, you couldn’t sell today because they would be considered too dangerous. Three of them had an electric hot plate that was very dangerous. One of them was the Mattel Vac-U-Form. You would heat up a small 3 x 3” sheet of plastic over a hot plate until it was soft. Then flop it over onto a mold and pump a pump handle to suck out all the air and shape the plastic around the mold. Today if I want to make something out of plastic I use a 3D printer. I guess this was a kind of 2D printer.

The same hotplate was incorporated into another toy called “Creepy Crawlers”. You had negative molds made from aluminum in the shape of spiders, snakes, and other creepy things. Then you would pour in some liquid plastic called Plasti-goop and the heat would harden it into a wiggly rubber worm or insect.

You were supposed to pour in the liquid while the mold was at room temperature and then put it on the hotplate. I discovered that if you heated the mold first, you could drip drops of plastic in strategic locations, let it cure, and then add different colors on top of that. Sometimes I would add a little wadded-up piece of paper to block off part of the mold so that I could fill the mold in selective sections. Then I would cut that part out and fill in the rest with different colors making striped worms or spiders with different colored legs.

They also had a different formula that was editable. They called that “Incredible Edibles” and you could eat the worms and bugs. The candy liquid used in that toy was called Gobble-degoop.

I also had a small power woodworking toy that could be converted from a table saw to a drill press to a lathe to a disk sander. I had lots of fun with it. It came with a supply of balsa wood and pine wood for making toys.

For my eighth birthday, I got a small reel-to-reel tape recorder that was a big hit. We would make pretend interviews on tape. I also used to take that tape recorder with me to the drive-in movies to bootleg music. I had recordings of all the music from Mary Poppins, and The Beatles films A Hard Days Night and Help. Of course, the little window speaker at the drive-in movie had terrible sound and my cheap tape recorder did a terrible job of recording it but it was free music. These days, people take their video cameras or phones into the theater to bootleg the movie. I was doing audio back in the early 60s. A criminal ahead of his time

I later replaced the reel-to-reel recorder with a cassette recorder that included a built-in AM/FM radio. It wasn’t yet the era of the big Boom Box. It only had about a 3-inch speaker. The quality wasn’t bad all things considered. In addition to buying pre-recorded cassettes, you could record music off of the FM radio with reasonably good quality. My dad had to attach a lever to the knob that changed functions between rewind, play, stop, and fast-forward. I had a heavy weight that I would sit on the record button because it was too hard for me to push it and turn the lever simultaneously. I would wait for my favorite song to come on the radio and hit record. Sometimes I would just sit there and hit record every time the DJ stopped talking. Then if it was a song I didn’t want or already had I would just stop, go back, and erase it. By the time I was in high school, I had a box of over a dozen mix tapes that made me very popular.

The Kinley family a few houses down the street had a basketball goal that my friends would play at. I would record myself as a radio announcer calling the game. Then we would play it back and have a good laugh.

I had a lot of the really popular toys of the day. I had the 12-inch tall poseable G.I. Joe complete was a pup tent. I collected little six-inch action figures called Astronaut Major Matt Mason. I had his space station which was basically a three-story dollhouse for action figures. I also had his battery-powered moon crawler and the moon suit accessories.

I had a remote-controlled battery-powered blimp called Helios-21 that you could fly around the house. It wasn’t radio-controlled. It was connected to your controller by a very thin wire. It came with an extra “space capsule” which was just a free-floating mylar balloon in the shape of a capsule.

Another favorite toy was Johnny Astro which was a battery-powered fan built into a gadget that looks like a radar dish. Your spaceship was an ordinary toy balloon that you would just blow up with ordinary air, not helium. The fan would blow the balloon off the ground and make it hover in midair. It had a joystick and throttle control. I would practice making precision landings on a target.

When I was about 12 or 13, we visited our family friends the Byrum family. Their son Jimmy was my age. He had a paper route and he used the money to buy a massive HO-scale slot car racetrack with four lanes. When I was about 6 or 7 I had toy trains and I had a very small two-lane oval slot car track but neither was as cool as the four-lane road course with bridges and crisscrosses that Jimmy had.

I had to have one.

I got a pretty good starter set as a birthday present and then used other allowance money and gifts from Grandma to expand it. My dad had a home-built ping-pong table in our garage and we set up a huge track on that table. Decades later when I go in the garage and smell the familiar smells of oil, grease, and paint I have flashbacks to our days of raising the slot cars.

While researching the podcast, I discovered that the brand of slot cars I was using was an Aurora Thunderjet series with pancake motors. One Camaro slot car I had is selling for $70. Other toys I researched are selling for hundreds of dollars and I threw them all away when I was a kid.

I really enjoyed building model cars and airplanes. My uncle John would frequently buy me really complicated large 1/12 scale model cars with working suspension, steering, and a small electric motor. that unfortunately was too weak to make the car roll. You had to pick the car up and just watch the rear wheels spin. During my research, I found the cars I built. They were futuristic-looking prototype sports cards called “The Lindberg Line SC-100 and SC-101“. An original SC-101 unassembled kit is selling for $299 on eBay.

I also built lots of standard 1/24 scale cars. My favorite was a 1969 Pontiac GTO “Judge” painted bright orange. I found a diecast 69 GTO with the Judge paint scheme for sale for about $40. I might have to buy it.

I remember I did some kitbashing on a Chevy or Lincoln model car and made my own Batmobile that looked amazingly like the one from the 1960s TV series. I used my Vac-U-Form to make the windshield using a model airplane cockpit as a mold. I used the cap off of a bottle of nose spray as the mold to Vac-U-Form the red light on top of the car. I painted it black and applied orange pinstripe tape. Someone later brought me an official Batmobile model and I didn’t like it nearly as well as my kitbashed version.

I built and painted transparent anatomy models of both male and female humans as well as a transparent V-8 engine. Those models made by Ravell are still available as collectibles. The Visible Woman anatomy model has a special optional feature they called “The Miracle Of Life”. It was a separate set of pieces you could install to make the woman appear about eight months pregnant. While all of the other pieces in the kit were stored in clear plastic bags ready to be assembled and painted, this optional set of parts was in a brown cardboard box. I asked my mom why the parts were in a separate somewhat secret box. She explained that some parents might want to remove those parts from the kit if they didn’t want to have to answer questions about where babies come from.

I thought that was ridiculous then and now. For the first eight years of my life, my mom was constantly pregnant. I knew an awful lot about pregnancy at a very early age. But more on that in a different episode.

I built and painted superhero models of Superman and Batman, Universal monsters such as Frankenstein, Wolfman, and the Mummy. I was surprised to see the exact models I built for sale online. An unassembled Frankenstein kit exactly like the one I had was for sale for $2000. That’s not to say they found someone to pay that much but I was amazed nevertheless.

Online I found a really cool model of a Mercury-Atlas rocket exactly like the one that I built at a very early age during the Mercury space program. It included a launchpad with a ramp leading up to it. There was a transporter/erector gantry and some tiny fuel trucks. It brought tears to my eyes when I saw it available for sale. It was the first display model rocket I ever built. I also found the exact Gemini capsule model I built.

I had a 3-foot tall 1/100 scale Saturn V display rocket. I went looking for one of those but all I found online were “50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing” models and I’m not certain this rereleased version was identical to the one I built in the late 60s. I also built a larger-scale model of the Apollo spacecraft that included the enclosure for the Lunar Module, the Lunar Module itself, as well as the Command and Service Modules.

All of the above were simply display models. I also very much enjoyed building and flying cardboard and balsa model rockets. I got a starter kit and launchpad from Estes Rockets and then used allowance money to buy more and more rockets. Estes sold a kit called “Cineroc”. It was a tiny custom-built super 8 mm film camera that would sit atop a D-engine model rocket. The custom film cartridge would shoot about 30 seconds of footage. I launched it twice. You had to send the film back to them to be processed. A friend of the family had an 8 mm movie viewer like they use to edit movies. They warned you to only shoot your film in the middle of the day in full sunlight. I didn’t pay attention to the warning and my first launch was about 4:30 in the afternoon. It looked sunny enough for me. The film came out very dark. My second attempt was much more successful.

My pride and joy flying model rocket was the Estes Saturn V. I just recently found some old photos of me and my friends flying that rocket in the big field behind the Coca-Cola plant on 30th St. just two blocks from my house.

When I was at Northwest high school, we had a bicycle race each May called the “Little 500” modeled after a famous similar race held at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. My science teacher, Mr. Stan Irwin was the faculty member in charge of the event. I volunteered to do a rocket launch during the opening of the race right after the national anthem. I had damaged my Saturn V on previous launches so I wrote to Estes and asked for custom replacement parts. I explained I needed to do a rebuild for a demonstration launch at my school. They didn’t normally sell these replacement parts. I included a check for what I thought was a reasonable price for the parts. They sent me the parts and a voucher for a couple of dollars refund I had overpaid.

With the help of friends, I repaired and rebuilt the model. A few days before the event, we went out to the football field and I did a demonstration launch for Mr. Irwin. He approved and I launched a huge model rocket in front of about 1000 people. I really wish we had had camcorders in those days. I don’t have any still photos from that event.

Estes had a Space Shuttle design contest a few years before the real shuttle was designed and flown. I entered it with a design I made and I helped my friend Mark Heron prepare his submission. He earned an honorable mention in the sixth grade and under category. I think I was in eighth or ninth grade at the time and I didn’t win anything. Mark had a form of muscular dystrophy. It wasn’t SMA and it wasn’t the common Duchenne MD. He had a name for it but I don’t recall what it was. He lived around the corner from me less than a block away. We rode the same bus for many years.

When I was about 12 or 13, there were older teens and young adults in my neighborhood who could afford to build and fly radio-controlled model airplanes. I really wanted to fly RC aircraft but they were just too expensive. A six-channel digital proportional transmitter and receiver with a decent airplane would run about $600 which was even more money in the early 1970s than it is today.

I did try flying a control line airplane with a small two-cycle 0.49” motor. You held a handle in your hand and it was connected to 2 pieces of nylon kite string. As you tilted the handle up and down, it would make the elevator of the airplane go up and down. You had to spin around in circles. I would drive my wheelchair with my right hand and fly the plane with my left hand. It was hard to spin around in my wheelchair fast enough. Sometimes the plane would go faster than I could turn. It would be flying around behind me. At one point when the airplane was behind me where I couldn’t see, I gave it a full up elevator hoping it wouldn’t crash. They tell me I did a loop before crashing but I didn’t see it because it was all behind my head.

Many years later when I was an adult and after my dad retired, he started flying RC aircraft. He built one for me to try to fly but we couldn’t get the joystick control adapted in such a way that I could do much with it. I can’t move my head around very well so I wouldn’t have been able to see the airplane unless I flew it way out in front of me. I think it was the only bit of assistive technology Dad and I ever failed to successfully solve. Even though I was never able to fly, I certainly enjoyed watching Dad build and fly his airplanes. Our favorite was a beautiful yellow Piper Cub to which he attached pontoons. He flew it several times over Cordry Lake where we used to have a cabin.

My dream of flying a radio-controlled aircraft had to wait until just a few years ago when my friend Bill Binko created some assistive technology that allowed me to fly a quadcopter drone using my wheelchair joystick and some VR goggles. Video link in the description.

At this point, I’ve probably lost most of my audience. Except for my dentist cheating me at Monopoly, there were no funny anecdotes. There were no poignant tear-jerky moments. No philosophical discussions about theology. It has just been a nostalgic look back at all the toys I loved before.

But that’s the point.

Even though I didn’t play ball, ride a bike, have a sleepover at a friend’s house, or have any friends sleep over here (I wore diapers at night) in most other respects I did the same kind of things other kids did. I played with the same toys. I hung out in the clubhouse in the backyard of a friend. I played games, played with action figures, and built model cars and planes, and rockets. I forgot to mention I flew lots of kites – many of which ended up in trees or on roofs.

I didn’t let my disability get in my way of having a very fun childhood.

One of my mom’s favorite sayings was, “The only difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. Little boys… little toys. Big boys… big toys.” She was very much right.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.