Lost relics of your childhood
 

When my wife was a girl, they came out with this brand new thing called the Barbie Doll, and she got one. At some later point, probably when she was in college, her mom gave the Barbie away to a kid in the neighborhood. Now that original Barbies are fetching huge sums of money, my wife hasn't forgiven her mom for giving it away.

I've been interested in stereoscopic imaging for some time. I'm now actually starting to take stereo photographs (I may post some samples once I'm comfortable moving it into the digital world). A mid-70s era Talking Viewmaster is quite a collector's item now (though probably not as much so as an original Barbie) and would be a worthy addition to the collection of anyone interested in stereo imaging. You guessed it, I actually owned one of these, along with a couple sets of talking reels and a larger number of traditional "silent" reels. It probably went at a garage sale sometime around 1985 or so.

Is there some lost relic of your own youth that you wish you had kept?

All my teenage mutant ninja turtle action figures. And my G.I. Joes. More for nostalgia sake then anything, and I have this frightening thought that if I havekids, they are going to grow up in a world where action figures will be considered the devils tools.

I've contented myself with images of old favorite toys gleaned from collector's sites...anything from *my* childhood era is pretty damned expensive at this point.

If you would like an introduction to a old friend of mine who's been doing stereo photography for many years, let me know.

He's an editor at Adult Video News these days. ;-)

The Mickey Mantle rookie card last seen in the spokes of my bicycle.

OK, hands up – Who remembers putting cards in their bicycle spokes to hear that lovely tud-tud-tud-tud-tud sound?

If I had kept those cards in mint condition, rather than using them to create an illusion that I was all grown up and riding a Harley, I could trade them today for a real motorcycle to experience again those feelings from my youth.

Instead, I'm putting cards in the spokes of my kid's bike and re-living my youth by sharing those feelings with the next generation.

Will he hate me for this? :)

to cam, and slowly nodding-
 

kwack. call paramedics
c ya' real soon
i m o k

:)

To have preserved your basball cards, all you would have needed was a "Vroom!" engine to turn your bike into a play motocycle. Shaped like a motorcycle engine and battery powered with a handle bar control for revving (and a classy locking key garaunteed to fall out and get lost first time you hit a bump) this had one feature you'd never get with basball cards: the ability to let your engine idle when the bike wasn't moving.

The bicycle noisemaker of choice in my childhood was a mechanical siren driven by friction with the front wheel like a bike generator...with a chain attached to the handlebars to let you rev the siren up and down by pulling the siren away from the wheel.

Ahh the glory days of baseball cards, I still have my collection stuck in a box somewhere back home. I really should take them out and stick them in a safe place my mother can't get to. Then years from now I can give them to my kids to make the motorcycle noise. Except by then bikes will come standared with a noise maker. Damn I have a depressing out look on the future of toys. :)

I've kept all my childhood toys stored away in boxes. They used to be too important to me to just throw them away now.

My brothers and I had a ton of Transformers -- the original, die-cast ones, plus some of the newer ones. When we got bored with them, we had "one last battle" which involved smashing most of them with hammers and throwing them against the concrete. Then we threw most of them away.

Ouch. That one still hurts.

Shit...I've sold off:

--Voltron (all 5 lions and the characters that went with them)
--Empire Strikes Back figures
--Trans Formers (I had about 80 at the time)

Now, I still have my baseball cards (along with some old card collecting magazines), but I'm probably going to have to sell them off soon. I look at them now as an investment that could pay some nice dividends.

My old high school buddy (and former music partner in Sycamore) collects comics and all kinds of nostalgic shit. Some of the items include a never-opened Welcome Back Kotter dress-up kit (I think that's what it was), unopened Star Wars stuff, and IIRC, some of the old Colorforms sets. His dad is the same way with Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention stuff.

I think I still have the Michael Jackson doll circa 1984 back in St. Louis, along with a "picture disc" version of Thriller.

For the "motorcycle" noise on bikes, we used to use aluminum cans...they slowed you down a bit though.

Anything from the 80s with Michael Jackson's picture on it has got to be worth something!

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com.../mdf148570.jpg

Vroom-
 

looked and sounded very nice on my Huffy. I never will forget my AM radio with horn and microphone as I made my rounds around the hollywood hills looking for some sort of trouble to get into and out of, and I hardly ever got caught anywhere but the local community center. Which, by the way isn't there anymore but I would gladly give up all of my toys just to go back to that place and do it all over again. Only this time I would have the defect corrected AT birth and sacrifice the "human radio" gig.

: )

the two things i miss the most:

voltron (the vehicle one, ill try to find a decent pic)
a die-cast x-wing fighter.

~james

Goddammit syc, you old fart.. you sound like my mom. Transformer! <B>Transformer</B>! One word! And you should know better, if you had 80 of 'em!

Grrrr...

Back in the day, if I remember the boxes in which they came, the term "TransFormers" looked like two separate words. Apparently, it is indeed one word, based on the TransFormers site. Regardless of this, Tob, you can still kiss my ass...you word nazi. ;)