Toying with history
I’ll wager that the toys of our childhoods occupy the shadowy, cobwebbed corners of almost everyone’s mind. A Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon set looms large for me. Rogers, dubbed the “King of the Cowboys,” had a Saturday-morning TV show from 1951 to 1957. This set – which includes non-articulated rubber figures of Roy and his wife, Dale Evans, their dog, Bullet, and sidekick Pat Brady – arrived under my Christmas tree in 1955. All things cowboy and Western were the rage back then, and I spent countless hours playing with the figures. At moments of extreme boredom, I tied up Dale with a piece of string and held her for ransom. I mean, didn’t everybody?
Despite this warm, fuzzy memory, I was surprised when I heard about the National Toy Hall of Fame a few years ago, a subset of the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. Founded in 1968 by avid collector Margaret Woodbury Strong, the museum in 1998 began adding popular toys to the hall annually. That inaugural class included, among others, the teddy bear, Barbie, Tinkertoys, Play-Doh and marbles. More mundane inductees from subsequent HOF classes include the cardboard box (2005), the stick (2008), the blanket (2011) and the paper airplane (2017).
People have different reasons for waxing nostalgic about toys. In some cases, envy plays a part. For example, when I was a kid, I was extremely disappointed that my parents bought Marx toy trains for me rather than the much more expensive Lionel models. In an effort to force my mother’s hand, I tied up my father with string one December and hid him in the coal cellar. But after 24 hours, Mom still hadn’t missed him, so I used my Alamo Jim Bowie 15-inch replica frontier knife to set him free. Luckily, Dad was a good sport about it and finally canceled the “Boy Free to Good Home” newspaper ad he’d placed.
The finalists for the toy HOF induction in 2023 are baseball cards, Battleship, bingo, Bop It, Cabbage Patch Kids, Choose Your Own Adventure books, Connect 4, the Little Tykes Cozy Coupe, Nerf products, slime, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Barbie’s perennial boyfriend, Ken. A 22-member committee will pick the three finalists. I can’t say I’m thrilled with any of these choices, although Ken certainly deserves the honor after enduring more than 60 years playing second fiddle to leggy supermodel Barbie. But I was happy to learn that in 1999, Lincoln Logs joined the HOF lineup. I loved them as a child, and they are still sold today and revered by subsets of the GOP, a.k.a. “The Party of Lincoln.” In fact, I’m told that in a bid to retain his position, former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy promised GOP hardliners that he would rebuild the White House using Lincoln Logs, even though it would take roughly 38,000,000,000 logs to do so. McCarthy abandoned the idea after Freedom Caucus members deemed it “silly” and instead adopted Rep. Jim Jordan’s plan to build a giant Paper Air Force One.
The fact that Jordan tied up Rep. Matt Gaetz with string played a large part in their decision.