Managing Editor Scott Wright has been with The Post since 1998. He is
a past winner of the Society of Professional Journalists' Green Eyeshade
Award for humorous commentary. He is a native of Cherokee County.


The Wright Angle
Dec. 24, 2007

Hold on to those Christmas toys

By Scott Wright

I ran across a story in the Dec. 24 edition of Newsweek that soon had me digging through the boxes of old toys crammed in the corner of my bedroom closet. The column told the story of Stephen Brown, who in 1998 decided he couldn't let his mother throw away the toys he used to play with as a child.

Nine years later Brown, 34, who lives in Atlanta, has spent over $5,000 adding to the toy collection he once walked out of his parents' house holding onto so tightly. He's bought a Pac-Man lunch box, a Mr. T Chia Pet, and “enough childhood (trinkets) to fill a man-size closet,” according to the story. Another guy, a 40-year-old from Dallas, told Newsweek he recently spent a mint on a mound of electronic toys, including a hand-held electronic football game that pits opposing teams of tiny red dashes against each other. Total cost for a boxful of old video games: over $1,000.

That's not a typo, folks: one thousand dollars. I dug through the boxes in my closet until my knuckles were raw. I couldn't find my Mattel football game, or my old Tiger Electronic Football, or my Atari 2600. Just about the only toy I had left that was still recognizable was Super Toe – what was left of him, anyway.

You remember Super Toe. He was 10 inches tall, block-toed and capable of kicking the world's hardest plastic footballs (ask my grandmother) halfway to the moon whenever you whacked him on top of his helmet. I've still got the red spot on the palm of my hand that proves I could play with the contraption for hours at a time.

Apparently, though, at some point during my childhood, Super Toe had his gourd pounded one too many times. When I found him last week his neck was permanently lodged between his shoulder pads, his leg forever frozen in the “up” position. Poor guy looked like he'd been tackled by every member of the starting defense for the 1975 Pittsburgh Steelers. Simultaneously.

This toy wouldn't be worth a dime to a single soul, I thought, looking at old Super Toe. Neither would any of the other flotsam from my childhood that occupied the boxes someone had erroneously labeled “toys.” All that was left from all those years of fun and merriment was a pile of dismembered arms, legs, and wheels, a handful of Lite-Brite pegs, the business end of a water gun, and a single, rusted length of track from a Lionel train set.

Where did all my toys go? I seemed to recall that after thousands of Saturday mornings spent watching cartoons and soaking up the marketing savvy from the accompanying commercials, my little brother and I had finally finagled just about every cool 1970s-era toy there ever was.

I remember lying in the floor for hours, winding and winding, then hitting the release button that sent Evel Knievel's empty rubber skull into the wall at the scale equivalent of what must have been 500 mph. Hot Wheels cars and plastic army men met their doom whenever we found one of dad's hammers or cigarette lighters lying around. By the time I was 10 and Cory was 8, we had already worn the contacts off our Tyco slot track and gone through a dozen of those little cars apiece. We also learned how many pokes with a sharp pencil it takes to get to the center of a Stretch Armstrong; how many power slides, on concrete, it took to wear a hole completely through the rear tire of a Green Machine; and precisely how long a Super Ball would continue to bounce power line-high if tossed, with all the strength a 9-year-old could muster, from the bed of a pickup traveling along Highway 273 at 50 mph (until it bounced off the windshield of the log truck behind us).

We spent hours building model race cars just so we could sniff the glue and then smash the cars together on the kitchen floor and watch the pieces go flying. A couple years later, we were pummeling each other with lightsabers and shooting at each other with BB guns. Fortunately the lightsabers were made from cheap plastic, which helped avoid concussions. And the only thing of any significance we ever managed to hit with our BB guns was mom's brand-new sliding glass door.

After we watched dad stomp those rifle barrels flat as a flitter, tie them into a knot and then weld the whole thing together with the laser beams he was shooting from his eyeballs, we started to worry that he was getting too much model glue in his lungs. As a precaution, we packed up our racing shop and moved it to the basement.

Dad still has one of the few toys we ever owned that apparently wasn't crushed to bits by either him or us. On a shelf in the shed behind his house, he still has the Tonka ladder truck with working snorkel hose that Cory and I were using to extinguish the imaginary blaze on mom's new stereo system when we first learned the awesome conductive power of electricity.

You know, I think I realize why Mr. Brown felt the way he did about all those toys his mother was thinking of throwing away. And even though I'll never get a thousand dollars for the scraps that used to be mine and my brother's toys – or even a hundred – they're priceless to me for memories that went unremembered for years until last week, when I pulled open the top of that box.

Since I won't get to see my brother at Christmas this year, maybe I'll pour the rest of those boxes of junk toys out on the floor sometime this holiday season and see what else I can remember. I might even grab my toolbox and see if I can un-wedge old Super Toe's head from between his shoulder pads. Goodness knows my grandmother, rest her soul, would get a kick out of that.