They Don’t Make Them Like This Anymore

For several years now I’ve been watching my toddler grandkids play with their modern toys. They have been provided a steady flow of soft or semi-plastic items, mostly modeled after characters and vehicles they watch on their cartoon shows.

As with all toddlers, ours give these toys a real workout, throwing them around, stomping on them, and sometimes using them as weapons of combat. The vehicles especially take a beating. Within weeks there are routinely wheels missing, roofs crinkled, and holes punched. When the toy reaches a certain level of punishment, the children lose interest and move on to the next batch.

Today’s toys are brilliantly designed to be clever, entertaining and educational all at the same time. They are also safe……very safe……painfully safe. No sharp edges, no hard surfaces, nothing that could pinch or squeeze or cut or scrape.

All well and good. Except in order to make toys this safe, you can’t make them to last. The soft materials just can’t hold up to a three year old stepping on it and kicking it across the room.

One day as I was observing the daily demolition, I thought back to the toys of my childhood. And then I remembered. Somewhere, stashed away decades ago in the deep recesses of the attic, are two of my favorite childhood playthings, toys which, for some mystical reason, I was compelled to stow away. I had to go find them.

Or rather, I had to do what all married men do when they want to find something in the house. I asked my wife Sharon to find them. Women have this uncanny ability to know where things are, no matter how long the items have been in obscurity. It’s probably because they are the ones who wound up putting them away when the men neglected to.

It was a good thing I went to her right away, because she promptly informed me the ancient toys were not in the attic at all, but rested behind decades of odds and ends in the closet of our spare bedroom. I would have never, in a million years, thought to look there.

After rummaging through the debris for several minutes, Sharon emerged holding my two precious keepsakes. They were spectacular. A dump truck and a bulldozer (I guess today they call it an excavator). My first impression was of how huge they were, compared to the smaller toys of today. These suckers were made of solid cast iron. Each one weighed about twelve pounds. They came from the hardware store my Dad used to own and operate back in the 1950’s.

The ‘dozer had an adjustable plow on the front that lifted up for traveling down the road, and then dropped when you wanted to move something. The plow was complete with sharp, pointed edges and corners. The dump truck had a lever connected to the bed, and when pushed down, the lever caused the bed to lurch free, and then slowly, hydraulically, lift up and dump its load. It was, and still is, the coolest thing ever. Plenty of ways small fingers could get pinched and scraped. After I triggered the truck bed upward a few times, it started leaking some sort of old lubrication fluid out of the hydraulic pipe. And, unlike modern toys, neither one talked, buzzed, rang, played music, or attempted to teach multiplication.

Golly, I thought. These two toys probably violate every safety standard in today’s book. They are injuries waiting to happen. And yet, I clearly remember spending much of my childhood playing with them in our backyard sandbox, and I don’t recall ever hurting myself.

What would happen, I dared to think, if I presented them to my grandkids? Would they immediately be rejected as being too big, too heavy and too solid? I couldn’t resist. After getting permission from my daughter (their mother), I gave the two relics to my two grandsons, aged four and almost three. Much to my surprise, they were instantly big hits! The boys couldn’t stop plowing and loading and dumping everything they could find. Making them even more gleeful was the fact they could rough house the toys to their hearts’ content and yet nothing could dent, crush or scratch them. The wheels were inseparable and the moving parts beyond incapacitation. Every time they come over, they rush to the old toys and fight over who gets which one.

Before you ask, nope. Not a single injury or mishap. I guess I’m probably a terrible Grandpop for exposing my little loved ones to these archaic but so realistic toys, but the joy I see on their faces takes me back to my days in that sandbox, and I guess I wish I could go back there. So, at least for now, the dump truck and bulldozer will remain out of the closet.

Just please don’t report me to the Consumer Product Safety Division.