Olden Days

 I have written here in the past of the wistful, slightly disappointed look on my mother's face when all three of her sons came trooping back through the front door after being sent down to the meadow with a set of YarDarts. For those of you uninitiated, these were foot long plastic projectiles with a steel tip, purportedly to be played "like horseshoes." The closest to the center ring wins. But as we know from our prior reading, horseshoes are like hand grenades, and it was only a very short amount of time before three boys changed the rules to a sport best retitled "Death From Above."

Parenting was different back then. They were less fans of Progressive Parenting and more aligned with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Helicopter parenting in those days meant that you were just as likely to be found driving around a station wagon fully loaded with children not properly strapped down as you might be flying a helicopter fully loaded with children hanging from the landing struts. 

It was, as they say, a different time. 

Which brings me to another dance with potential death and disfigurement: Mattel's ThingMaker. In what might be considered a marketing masterstroke, the folks who made Barbies figured it would be neat if kids could make their own plastic toys. To do this, they packaged a bunch of die-cast metal molds along with a cleverly named liquid called "Plastigoop." How did the goop turn into "plastic?" Heat. So you plugged in your open-face hot plate, placed your goop-filled mold on the plate and a few minutes later, you were rewarded with vulcanized rubber playthings that were often tasty treats for dogs. And children. But no matter, since Plastigoop was labeled as being "non-toxic." In an era before potential poisons from plastic and lead were widely understood. What we knew probably wouldn't kill us. For a while, anyway. 

Sometime around 1973 the newly minted Consumer Product Safety Commission decided to pull the plug on the ThingMaker, insisting that the temperatures used to heat those die-cast molds were not safe for children to handle. Three hundred ninety degrees. Well heck, that's why they supplied young toymakers with those metal tongs to pry their new bugs or army men or colorful flowers from the "warmer."  Later versions of the original set added a plastic cover to those tongs for "safety." 

There were a lot of kids in my neighborhood who had ThingMakers. None of them ever burned down their house or anyone else's. Again, perhaps to the profound disappointment of their parents who had recently purchased additional homeowner's insurance along with the ThingMaker for their little darlings. 

Those were the days.