Copyright 2003 T. Sheil & A. Sheil All Rights Reserved
I had lived in both city and country as a kid. Only years later did I ponder the contrasts.....
There was a time when cities were safe for kids. The chances of stray bullets were rare, and criminals were as apt to protect the young as law-abiding citizens. There were fewer cars going through the neighborhood. The neighbors knew every child on the block.
For kids playing soldier, a city was a great place. While it might not have afforded the open spaces of the country, it had its own advantages. Back yards and alleys were the terrain of the urban play warrior. A porch could be a command center, a fort or a castle's parapet. The stairs leading to the basement door might be a foxhole or dragon's lair. It was all a matter of perception.
Playing at war was not difficult. It was not a matter of making adjustment. Kids know how to play in their environment as it is. They don't even have to think about it. A sidewalk might be the main route to anywhere, but it was all the alleys and porches and porticos along the way that provided "terrain."
The actual size of the play world was limited by a child's age. The younger the child, the less he was allowed to range. A five-year-old could only range up and down the sidewalk on his street, but not into the street. A seven year old was allowed around the corner, and by age ten you could range all over the place. Age determined how many of the local features you could use in your game. You only had open to you those that were within your allowed range.
One of the hazards of play was the neighborhood crab, and every block had one. In days when parents expected kids to respect adults, we could not be mean to the crab. Of course, just being seen playing was enough to set some crabs off. I had the misfortune of living next door to a real crab, and it was funny how the mere presence of children upset him.
One day, the old crab had gotten ill and he was being taken out in a stretcher. My sister was very small, and very much amused. She was jumping up and down, shouting, "Mr. Cunoe is dead! Mr. Cunoe is dead!" My mother stopped her, saying something to the effect of "What if he heard her?" The kids did not think Mr. Cunoe merited compassion, although Mrs. Cunoe was nice and we didn't want hurt her feelings.
Just around the corner was a crab lady who occasionally called the police when kids played ball in the street. The police response was always the same. The officer would say, " Wait a few minutes after I'm gone, and go back to playing ball."
Crabs were one of the hazards of city living. A kid's best weapon to annoy crabs was any toy that made noise. Cap pistols fit the bill, with a fully-loaded cap-firing Tommy Gun being the weapon of choice. The Tommy Gun was a masterpiece. One neighbor, a World War I veteran, said, "I wish we had those things when I was in the war. That would have made the Germans sit up and take notice!" Of course, we thought he was cool. For every crab, there were at least ten cool people.
Occasionally, the old veterans would offer advice. They were amused by the kids playing soldier. Kids thought this advice was priceless. The advice was innocuous, such as wearing a helmet right. Kids loved it, though.
The urban landscape provided all that was needed because it was all the kids had. They saw it as limitless potential. The same porch that was a fort for modern soldiering could be a castle parapet for playing Knights, and a station for playing Spacemen. The alley next door was a secret trail and a castle passage and a Western gully. Whatever the era, the cityscape provided adequately.
It's a long time ago, that I think of it. Our toys are now high-priced collectibles, and our World War I vets are long gone. Neighborhoods aren't the same, and folks don't feel as safe these days. I don't see kids with their toy guns any more, at least not like we were some four decades ago. Some stores won't even carry toy firearms.
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Playing Army was easy in the 50s and 60s, because war toys were competing tio mimic the real thing. Safety rules were not as restrictive, and red nozzles did not have to be fitted to toy firearms. War toys were considered acceptable, perhaps because military service was common and respectable. The "draft" was in effect, and men were conscripted or volunteered. Doing a hitch in the military brought good results all around.
Our war toys were getting very realistic. There were more plastic .45 automatic pistols out there than the Army had! The only pistol more prevalent was the Western-style cap pistol. As for guns, they just kept getting better.
In 1960, every boy wanted or had the Mattel version of the Thompson submachine gun. This little beauty could rip off a string of caps like the real thing. Even without caps, it made that classic chattering sound. Two versions were available. One was traditional, having brown stock and gunmetal-colored barrel. The other was green, with camouflage made from blotches of a lighter green. Marx made two M1 rifles - one "traditional," the other a "camouflage" mint green. Another popular weapon was the battery-operated 'burp gun" which resembled a Commie submachine gun. Battery weapons were not as popular, because on those days batteries did not last long AND were prone to leaking badly. No Duracell, No Energizer, just plain old Ray-O-Vacs with the silly cat logo.
The weapons just kept coming. There was Monkey division, a set of some of the most realistic ordnance of the day, including a miniature state-of-the-art tanker's helmet. They made bazookas, machine guns and a kiddie land mine - a veritable playtime Bouncing Betty. We had plastic cap-firing grenades and tripod-mounted toy heavy machine-guns. Plastic army helmets abounded, too. Marx even made a German helmet, and every neighborhood had a kid or two who wanted one.
Every year, the Sears Wish Book would include the new costumes for kids. These were very real kid clothes made to look like uniforms. They had a set of fatigues for children, along with full cowboy suits and Civil War uniforms. Kids could look like real soldiers.
Training for all this was as easy as watching television. Old World war II movies were best. If it was in a movie, it was true. One very educational movie featured a tank that could knock down trees. Wow!
The occasions for watching that movie was when our cousins stayed over after they had a house fire. We were all watching a show with soldiers and a tank that went through walls and trees. This was awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, every so often commercials would interrupt. One was for a beer. "It's distinct," the announcer said. In frustration, cousin Bobby retorted, "It's the stinkies!" We didn't know what distinct meant, but anything that interrupted the tank show was indeed stinky. We were laughing so hard, it took effort to pull ourselves together when the movie resumed. Tanks were serious business, after all.
For little boys, three things reign as supreme attention-keepers: tanks, heavy construction equipment, and trains. A work site and a busy freight yard are part of Nirvana, but for most kids the only place to see tanks was television.
On any given day, you might see a pack of little boys in plastic helmets, brandishing toy versions of World War II weapons. Playing Army was serious stuff and it was fun. It was also safe. Unlike real combat, nobody was injured. Kids did not understand the true meaning of casualties.
Vietnam rolled onto our television sets, and after a couple years the attitudes changed. The last hurrah was the emergence of the toy M-16, a fairly accurate copy of the CAR-15 "shortie" version of the weapon. That one didn't last long, because Vietnam and other things were eroding the popularity of war toys. By then, most of us had outgrown our toys, and were thinking of the day we might be drafted.
Toy guns and helmets were fun. In a way, they gave us some idea of the things we might encounter if we entered the Army. Fellows like myself could recognize a few weapons because of our toys. The real Army is not playtime and it is not always fun. Lugging a real light machine gun is wearisome, not fun. Oddly enough, the real guns on which our toys were based were outmoded by the time I entered the Army. The Tommy Gun, M1 rifle and 30 caliber machine gun were long gone by then.
I remember a day in the 1980s when the little boys in the neighborhood were playing "army." How different it looked. They did not have anything like the "burp gun" or Mattel Tommy gun. Their weapons were plastic Uzis and Mac 10s - small machine pistols. It looked different, but the game was the same as had gone on for generations. The toymakers keep up with the times, insofar as armaments. So do the kids.
And what of us? In our day, we looked like the current "modern "soldier with his steel helmet and green fatigues. Nowadays, kids regard that type of soldier as "old fashioned." Soldiers do not look like that any more. The soldiers of my generation are in the history books of today's young generation. The toy guns of my day are collectibles for adults. Even the real weapons are becoming museum pieces.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the Western genre was the unrivalled leader. Westerns were everywhere: movies, television, toys. Put a Cowboy on anything and folks knew what it was. There is no equivalent in today's world. No genre has the power that the Westerns held in the old days.
Film makers loved the Western genre because it allowed so many themes. You could have almost any type plot in a Western, from a love story to an adventure to a work of philosophy. Westerns could be humorous, serious, sad or surreal. They ranged from the slick gunplay of "Maverick" to the family business of "Bonanza" to the stylized combats of the early Clint Eastwood flicks. The genre could abide the green plains of "Big Valley" and the sizzling deserts of Sergio Leonne's "Fistful of Dollars."
Children loved the Western genre. It was simplistic, with idealistic heroes and the antics of their sidekicks. For children, a whole range of shows were produced along with an acceptable set of heroes. Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry were heroes that a parent could love. Shows like "The Lone Ranger", "The Cisco Kid" and "Rin Tin Tin" were hot properties. We could identify with these heroes, and thanks to the toy industry we could play along.
But I must digress: the Wild West of the children's shows was a "made for T.V." kind of thing. It was a stylized Old West: a clean-cut, chivalrous and downright moralistic place. Everyone's place was easy to identify. The lines between good guys and bad guys were thick, shown in their behavior and attire and general demeanor. The good guys were always honest and played fair. The bad guys were always dishonest and possessed of ugly habits. The bad guy gunfighter would shoot someone in the back. The Indians were always planning something sneaky. Good guys were forthright.
Western garb was stylized, too. It involved a wide-brimmed hat, the narrow-toed cowboy boot, and clothing cut to look like the current Country & Western fashions. They cleaned up the cowboy and made his traditional attire more fashionable. The addition of fringes made it seem to us that a fringed shirt or trousers were the working clothes of the Old West. They were actually an affectation of 1940s Country & Western singers.
The toy industry produced all the other equipment. Plastic sheriff's badges were a dime a dozen. There was a big market in child-sized Western gun belts, and an even bigger one if toy versions of Western firearms. Long-barrelled toy revolvers were produced in great abundance. Many companies made them, the most common being diecast cap pistols with plastic grips. Cap pistols loaded in various way. Back then, caps came in paper rolls, with five rolls to a box. Loading a cap pistol was not much different from loading a movie camera or projector. The rolls was set on an axis, usually a pin or small rod, and the end was fed to the gun's hammer. Every time the trigger was pulled, the paper advanced one pip and the hammer fell, smacking it on a metal tab. Some guns used "perforated" caps, which fed with a little more reliability. The roll had a line of perforations into which a gear inside the gun could fit. Pull the trigger and the gear advanced the roll of caps.
Alongside the cap pistols were a variety of lever-action cap rifles. One popular model was based on a show called 'the Rifleman," and kids tried to imitate the show's gun tricks.
There was another common item, the toy bow and arrow. These were commonly made Indian style, complete with feather trim. There was a little bow with string and a few arrows fitted on one end with a rubber suction cup. These bows had a very short range and were very inaccurate, but they were common playing that favorite Western game, Cowboys and Indians. In the game, Cowboys and Indians did battle. There were blazing cap guns and toy arrows and the occasional thrown rubber tomahawk. It was about as much fun as Cowboys and Bandits. The Western genre allowed everything from Indian fights to stagecoach hold ups.
Cowboys and bandits had one drawback. The hold-up men had to wear their kerchiefs over their faces. That was a problem, since little boys at age five generally can't tie them right. We had to ask a parent, friend's parent or neighbor for help. Being a cowboy holdup man was not something you could do alone.
A porch or an alley would be the "bank," with one child stationed inside as the banker. He might have a cigar box with a few plastic coins as his strongbox. The sheriff's office and jail would be another porch. The bank robbers came and robbed the bank. They ran away, and were pursued by the sheriff. If caught, they got put on the porch which served as jail. You had to hope that the boy who owned the plastic coins did not have to go home all of a sudden. The coins were the loot.
Alongside toy soldiers were bags of plastic cowboys and Indians. Many companies manufactured them. Every boy had some, along with a toy wagon or stagecoach and some Indian teepees. Along came a big surprise one day: Fort Apache. The Marx company came out with a toy set that included cavalry and cowboys, Indians and a plastic fort with tin-litho headquarters building. Inside were tepees and camp tools and other accessories. This was a big thing, and it sold like hotcakes back then. Other companies made their Western Forts to compete with Marx. Ideal made one that was also a folding vinyl case. Tim Mee made a simpler version of a fort, while Marx came out with a version that was a tin fort and carry-all box all in one. Kids understood Fort Apache and the whole concept of cavalrymen, Indians and cowboys.
Toward the end of the 1960s, the Western genre started losing ground. Science fiction helped by offering a new genre which could abide a host of different plots and themes. Star Trek could do in space what Bonanza did in Nevada: provide a milieu for human drama. The science fiction themes was one thing among several.
Another was revisionist history. During the 1960s, people started taking another look at what really happened in the late 1800s. The Indians were suddenly treated as victims rather than villains, and brave General Custer started slipping from hero to stooge. A new, realistic, gritty type Western show emerged that challenged the typical cinematic horse opera. It was less attractive, and less interesting.
Technology jumped in. Westerns were a fine genre, but they did not have the technology which some story lines required. The Western had its limitations, and these were exaggerated with the new advances in technology. Writers started shifting more to the science fiction genre, which could abide any technology and address the most modern of situations. Westerns faded quickly. Likewise, the demand for Western toys diminished because children were no longer used to the theme. Without abundant television and movie Westerns to prime their interest, the children had no connection to the Western theme. The Western six-gun and tomahawk were alien; a light saber and phaser rifle were familiar.
Fort Apache was a hot item forty years ago. Today, remakes of the set languish on store shelves, unrecognized by the children. The little ones just do not know what to make of it. Times have changed that much!
A fellow was helping coach a football team in a league for kids. In explaining how to wear the hip pads, he said, 'You buckle it on the same way you would with a cowboy gun belt." The boys had no idea what he meant. What would have been common knowledge in 1960 was unrecognizable in 2000.
Maybe Indians were not that bad, and cowboys were not that good. Maybe gunfights were more chaotic in real life, and the towns of the West were far from clean and orderly. Maybe the genre was based on perception more than fact. Maybe. And maybe the folks who wanted to revise history and just as wrong in their revision, if not more so. Maybe the real West was not too far from our television version. The sad thing is that there is no version any more, realistic or not.
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In those days, every neighborhood had one. He was the fellow who was always a child, playing with the kids despite being well into chronological adulthood. He was a fixture on the block, and all the neighbors knew him. Kids grew up with him, and then outgrew him while the next batch of young ones got to know him. In those days, the medical profession knew very little about mental retardation. Fortunately, the neighborhood could accommodate it.
Ours was a roly-poly man named Joe. Called "mongoloid" in those days, Joe had Down's Syndrome. He had a limited vocabulary, mostly making sounds that were half-words. We all knew what Joe was saying, though. For Joe, childhood never ended. He was always five years old, and kids accepted him as part and parcel of the way things were.
Joe gravitated toward the kids because he was intellectually a kid. He was there to play street football, stickball and hide-and-seek. He was there to do whatever the kids were doing. He would help set up plastic soldiers or play with toy trucks in a sand pile. Joe was occasionally called home by his mother. She would shout for him, and he'd reply with a loud "Mama" and head home. He would then look at us and say, "Mama" before departing. That was Joe's way of politely telling us why he had to go.
After a while, kids understood that Joe was simple and could be fooled. They made concessions for Joe. If, during a game of Hide and Seek, he hid his wide frame behind a too-narrow tree, kids would purposely overlook him. It was a small kindness repeated frequently, and an initial sign that the latest bunch of kids were outgrowing their large playmate. No problem: there were always younger kids who found Joe ideal. Joe would easily move on to the younger group of kids, as he had done many times before.
Joe was close to my father's age, I found out. Joe had been in the neighborhood since anyone could remember. He lived with his mother and a much younger brother. He came around the block, gravitating to whichever kids he saw first that day. They might be the kids around the corner, or the kids down the block, or us. Wherever Joe went first, he played.
We outgrew playing with Joe. Like the kids who were older than us, the day came when we were too old for him. Joe never seemed to notice, because he usually shifted to the next younger bunch by then. What did not change was that Joe was always your friend, even if he wasn't your playmate.
A few years later I was on leave from the Army, and while walking through the neighborhood I saw Joe playing with the latest bunch of kids. It was a game of street football, just like Joe had played countless times with us, and the kids before and after us. They were all having fun. That was the last time I saw Joe. His mother passed a few months later, and Joe was sent to a home. As I heard it, he died shortly afterward. Joe was at the age when natural causes took the life of most folks with Downs. Back then, medicine wasn't capable of extending their lives. Most died by age 50. For all we knew, Joe could already have been falling apart inside while playing the day I saw him.
Amid all the fun of Army Men and other childhood games, there are those elements that don't add up until many years later. A few decades ago, guys like Joe were a dime a dozen. Every neighborhood had someone like him. They taught us to take care of our weaker members, to make a few concessions for those who needed them. Being with Joe taught us to treat folks better. Joe was a happy fellow who was glad to see you, whether you were a current playmate or a past one who outgrew him. The whole neighborhood loved him and looked after him.
I can still remember Joe trying to line up plastic Army men. He concentrated so much, placing each with care. They were serious business, and Joe was proud of how well he had done. We were starting to outgrow him and had already developed that sense that led us to congratulate Joe and compliment his work. Joe's happiness mattered to us. I wonder if we would be as thoughtful today if he hadn't been part of the neighborhood.