Toys,Toys and more Toys

Today I was a child playing among the toys.  My first stop was the Toy Museum in Wheeling, West Virginia.  They had all sorts of toys but I realized that most toys are designed for boys.  There are more soldier types, cowboys and Indians and knights of all sizes.  They have all the extras like forts, castles or ranches.  Then there are the trains, every size, every type of car or engine that you can imagine.  They had two different setups, one seemed to be a night scene of a city, the other was a simpler scene which was well lit.  I'm not sure whether they had just not turned the lights on in the "night" room.

They were doing a special on Monopoly.  They were showing some of the many variations that Milton Bradley has created for Monopoly.  I didn't see any other games but I may have missed a whole floor.  The book said there were three floors but I only found two.

There was a whole room for Barbie in her various iterations.  They also had Barbie imitators.  Then there were several walls worth of Doll Houses.  The houses changed through time but the ones they had were the more modern types.  One was a ranch style house with Swedish modern furniture.  Another room had stuffed animals and plastic animals.  There was a lovely older woman volunteer and we got to talking.  For some reason I told her the story of my mother giving my brother my favorite lamb toy when I was very small.  My brother threw the lamb out the car window and that was the end of the lamb.  Why they had to give him mine never made sense to me and my mother would never discuss it.  They didn't have a single stuffed lamb in the entire museum.

I followed up the visit to the museum with a visit to a museum of the largest toy manufacturers from the 1950's to the 80's, the Marx Co.  The company was started by Lewis Marx from Brooklyn.  They made a lot of plastic toys that were recognizable, like a huge series of Roy Rogers sets, a few Lone Ranger and a Zorro.  They even had a stuffed Flintstones series.  They also had a series of Doll Houses.  I wound up talking to the docent at the Marx Museum in Mountville too.  I was counseling her on decluttering.

I realized how few toys I had as a child and how it never bothered me.  I looked at all those toys and didn't want any of them nor did I feel like I had missed anything.  I did have games and as a family we would occasionally play them together.  Books were always more my thing.