Stuff My Parents Threw Out

"You don't play with this anymore. It's going in the garbage."

And, with that abrupt dismissal, some toy or game of mine winds up in the garbage. Or even worse...the Salvation Army. Now I look at some of those childhood relics on e-Bay and watch as one man's trash becomes another man's...well, refuse. But, nevertheless, money changes hands here and it's just one more opportunity for me to be reminded to say...

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Take, for instance, the Game of Life pictured on the right. It was an education in itself. You moved your little convertible around the board. You went to college, you got married, and you had kids. All the while you are trying to achieve the American Dream. Unfortunately, the game didn't include real life dilemmas. Divorce, illness, and probate. You will note that this original version has a picture of Art Linkletter on the box and his picture, for some bizarre reason, was also on the game money. Did he indeed endorse this? No clue, but it all led to a rather tragic irony years later when his drug-laden daughter fell off a West Hollywood building terrace. The joke became this: Art Linkletter's daughter played the Game of Life and lost.

My neighborhood friends and I loved the home version of any TV game show and Password was no exception. We fought over who got to be Allen Ludden and we also picked celebrities we wanted to be. Nobody ever selected Peggy Cass. The problem with this game was the little leather packets the secret words came in. It used that red 3-D nonsense and, if the plastic got dirty, the password would indeed be secret to everybody.

I can't blame my parents for tossing the 1964 Met yearbook. I'm the culprit there. Who knew that this revised edition of the first Met season at Shea Stadium would be worth so much money to collectors? If I had known the dough I could have made from it, I wouldn't have ripped it up in disgust during a July 1965 losing streak.




Puppets provided the very first forum for me to put on shows. Not for an audience. For myself. I would have these things talking to each other for hours. And belting each other in the head. I had three of the four pictured on the right. I didn't own a blonde bombshell. I can't believe there was ever such a thing as a Jayne Mansfield puppet. Imagine the jokes you could do about where you put your hand.


When I got a little older, I graduated to the ventriloquian action figure. More commonly, the dummy. I would carry Jerry Mahoney everywhere. At one point, his arm fell off and my grandmother took him into her bedroom for the "operation." I waited outside the door and held my breath as she threw Jerry under the sewing machine needle. But, the body, just as in life, eventually failed him. Plastic, however, is forever. I still have Jerry's head and it sits atop the microwave oven in my NY apartment.

These little Disneykins are also worth a lot of jack on eBay these days. For me, they were again characters that would play out on the storylines in my mind. My favorite spot to play with them was during the summer around the big fan in the kitchen. Each part of the window around the fan was another apartment in this big building that was cooled by this huge spinning machine. I told you I was weird, didn't I? The cast list for this drawer always decreased over July and August as, one by one, each of these Disney characters fell during the fan and would reside inside the fan screen until my father would take it down in September.

Around the time that Sean Connery got hot as James Bond, they made some action figures from some of the characters. Oddjob was the killer in "Goldfinger." He would kill people by flinging his derby hat at them. And the action figure worked the same way. You snapped the arm and the hat went flying. I think it was two good snaps before the hat fell down behind my grandmother's couch and wasn't going to be retrieved until it was time for spring cleaning. My father was happy to see me get tired of this thing. He had some concerns. "You're playing with a Chinese doll?"

Ages before Alex Trebek and countless computer games devoted to the TV show, there was this home version of Jeopardy. It had the all-encompassing label of "for ages 10 to adult." Is that to say that a ten-year-old could actually match up with an adult in intelligence? While today's version is easily loaded on any PC, this game was actually a bitch to set up. You had to manually slip in the dollar tabs on each and every question for each and every category. By the time you were ready to play, it was either time for Soupy Sales or bed.

Dinner last night: Grilled chicken sandwich at Islands.