Betty Boom's
Top Ten Boomer Toys (part 2)

Earlier I posted the first half of my top boomer toys list. Toys 1-5 were Barbie, Etch-a-Sketch, GI Joe, Slinky and Tonka Trucks. The following are my next five all-time Boomer favorites. The coolest thing I discovered when researching these toys is that most are still made and all are still collected. There are thousands of Boomer-age fans BUT a growing number of younger devotees.

As I mentioned before, there is a reason these toys are as almost as popular today as they were when we were young. They have staying power and, most of all they were (ahem, are) fun! Here’s the second five of my list of toys culled from the lists of boomer-aged family and friends.

6. Matchbox Cars

Another toy considered a “boy toy” back then, Matchboxes were tiny little cars, trucks and other vehicles. Everybody I knew, boys and girls, had at least a few. Some kids had huge collections complete with display/carrying cases. In fact, the first Matchbox car was made by a guy named Jack Odell in 1953. He made a small car called the Road Roller out of brass and put it into a little matchbox so his daughter could take it with her to school.

The early relationship between Matchbox and the British toy company, Lesney (named for two unrelated Smiths—Leslie and Rodney) is a little unclear to me but as far back as 1947 the Lesney Toy Company was manufacturing tiny “matchbox” versions of their diecast toy vehicles and this company introduced the Matchbox line, including Odell’s Road Roller, in 1953. Lesney sold off Matchbox in 1982 and it changed hands a few times before landing with Mattel who still makes the tiny cars today. In fact, Mattel sells 100 million Matchbox vehicles every year!

For more on matchbox check out Dr. Toy's Toy History and the official Matchbox website.

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7. Silly Putty

Silly Putty boasts the most interesting history on my top toys list. According to About.com, the fun, stretchy, bouncy goo was created in the General Electric laboratory by a scientist, James Wright. During the WWII shortage of rubber, scientists were asked to come up with a synthetic alternative. The putty Wright created, didn’t exactly have all the properties it needed to replace rubber, but it was fun to play with, stretch, mold and bounce.

Wright sent it to other scientists, hoping to find something useful to do with it. It was played with and passed around for awhile before a toy seller was convinced to offer small amounts of it in her annual toy catalog. After it was dropped from the line despite it’s strong sales, advertising consultant Peter Hodgson picked it up in 1950 and named it Silly Putty. He put it into one-ounce balls in red egg-shaped containers.

At first marketed to adults as a “novelty” toy, by 1955 children discovered the stuff and sales soared. Today Binney and Smith, the makers of Crayola, markets the still very popular goo. According to Silly Putty U, more than 300 million Silly Putty eggs or 4,500 tons have been sold since 1950!

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8. Play-Doh

Our first Play-Doh, introduced in 1956, was known to adults as a non-toxic, reusable modeling compound. It came in only one color, white, but by 1957, the manufacturers added three more colors—blue, red (pink to me!) and yellow. Most Boomers remember the three-color or four-color pack. The Fun Factory®, which grounded out all sorts of shapes in a sausage-maker looking “factory,” came along in 1960.

It was good this stuff was non toxic because I know countless kids who ingested tons of the salty stuff. We made Play-Doh everything—peas and carrots, elephants, houses, flowers, you name it! And, indeed Play-Doh was reusable IF you remembered to put it back in the can and put the lid back on the can. Otherwise, you had a fairly permanent sculpture…which was not a bad thing if you wanted elephants and the like to put around your room.

Play-Doh now comes in brighter colors and the line includes all sorts of themed play sets in which to use it.

Play-doh is marketed by Hasbro nowadays. Their site claims that 700 million tons of the secret-recipe stuff has been sold since 1956. Another interesting factoid I picked up on the site was that if you put all the Play-Doh ever sold through the Fun Factory ® it would make a “snake” that would wrap around the world 100 times!

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9. Mr. Potato Head

Mr. Potato Head was born in 1952, created by inventor George Lerner who first made the tiny plastic parts and had planned to market them as a toy premium to be put inside a cereal box. Lerner met up with the Hasbro folks soon after he made this deal and saw that there might be a better way to sell and market the toy. Fortunately, he was able to get out of the deal and sold the toy to Hasbro.

My first Mr. Potato Head was a box of parts—eyes, noses, lips, ears, hats, a pipe—no body. We used a real potato for a body. Sounds cool but not for my mom. She was always finding discarded, moldy potato bodies under the furniture. Roxy says her family had too many mouths to feed for potatoes to be used as toys instead of food. I’m sure these were among the top reasons Hasbro came out with a brown plastic body around 1960.

The Hasbro folks say Mr. Potato Head has the honor of being the first toy ever advertised on television. They still sell Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads and a variety of games and toy sets based on the famous couple. In fact, Mr. Potato Head has become a well-known celeb used in anti-smoking (He had to get rid of the pipe first) and get-out-the-vote campaigns.

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10. Frisbee

The history of the Frisbee is legend. It goes that a small Bridgeport, Connecticut, pie company, called Frisbie’s Pies, sold pies on nearby college campuses. Students found that the empty pie plates made pretty good “flying saucers,” and it became common to see a group of students throwing Frisbie pie plates at each other on the lawn.

On the other coast, Walter Frederick Morrison had come up with a plastic version he called the Pluto Platter. He hooked up with Rich Knerr and A.K. Melin, the owners of Whamo, the toy company that brought us the Hula-Hoop. After trying awhile to market the toy as the Pluto Platter, Knerr, who had heard about the college kids and the Frisbie pie plates, renamed the disc in about 1958 and Frisbee as we know it was born.

I never really mastered a good Frisbee throw but a lot of my friends were master throwers. A lot of dogs became master catchers as well. While I was in junior high, a group of New Jersey high school students invented Ultimate Frisbee and it quickly caught on—today it’s considered a genuine sport. Later, in the late 1970s, Frisbee golf was invented. Whamo and Mattel won’t say how many Frisbees have been sold in all but it’s in the hundred-millions, and folks are always finding new ways to play Frisbee.

For more on Frisbee, see the About.com inventors site.

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What’s on your top toy list? We invite you to share your list and/or your favorite toy memories on Boomerang. Above all, never stop playin’

Betty