Toys

I had very few bought toys. Plastics were in the future so toys were made of wood or metal or soft goods. Parents fashioned toys from what was at hand. String was passed between two holes in a large button and the two ends were tied together. The button was pushed to the center of the string and twirled several times. When the ends of the string were pulled, the button spun. Match boxes became containers to store valuables. Matches came in small cardboard boxes. Kitchen matches were larger and came in larger boxes. By sewing a small button on the front of each box and fastening the boxes together with a paste made of flour and water, you had a miniature bureau. There were marbles and baseball cards. For a penny, you got five baseball cards and a piece of bubble gum. I collected hundreds of baseball cards in cigar boxes. The last I saw of them was under the back porch at 3326 Ingleside Avenue.

I loved to read and as a reward, I would be given a book. My father worked several doors from Pippen’s Used Bookstore and would purchase books for twenty-five cents each. This was a lot of money when you consider that the first minimum wage in 1935 was twenty-five cents per hour. During the summer I would take a book and a pitcher of ice water and lie under a tree on the lawn and read. There were the Rover Boys, the Ranger Boys and Tom Swift series. I am certain that there were others but I can’t remember them.

As I grew older, there were other “toys.” A rusty skate was a treasure. We would separate the two ends of the skate and nail each piece to the two ends of a three foot piece of board. There were always pieces of board and nails lying about. An orange crate and a piece of wood nailed to the board provided guidance. Voila! We had a vehicle to ride.

A softball, a bat and an empty lot provided hours of exercise and entertainment. I lived in a new neighborhood; our house was built in 1924. There was an empty lot between houses. The ball cost twenty-five cents; I don’t remember the cost of the bat. We used a softball because gloves were needed with a hardball and we did not have money to buy gloves. Ingleside Avenue had just been paved and when the ball went down into the sewer, several of us lifted the grate (it was heavy cast iron) and the smallest one scooted down into the sewer and retrieved the ball. I can remember travelling under the street to the manhole and up and out onto the middle of the street. We had no problem with traffic; there was none.

My parents had no debts other that the house mortgage. If you did not have the cash on hand, you did not buy. We did not consider ourselves poor; there was enough to eat, clothes to wear and a house to live in. For us, that was enough.