Christmas toy repair, 196? ©The Tribune
Christmas Toy Repair
Toys used to last longer. My dad and uncles built bridges with an Erector Set that a generation later was entertaining their sons. Some time during our lifetime toy makers discovered plastic and the idea that kids have no sense of quality. Metal tricycles were replaced with plastic Big Wheels that looked cool under the Christmas tree, but if you skidded the tires your younger brother would inherit a worn out wreck. Then it was off to the dump. Big family? Buy a new one pal.
No recycling wheels into home made downhill racers.
Today kids learn about planned obsolescence at an early age.
In the 1960s there was a generation that still remembered the Great Depression and how little they had as kids.
This negative is from a box that has mid-60s negatives and is marked Xmas Toy Repair 20 Dec.
Who or when? Post a comment if you know.
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Today’s toys certainly don’t last as long as their predecessors, and cheap materials and shoddy construction are often to blame. And they’re not that exciting, either. Sometimes the most attractive thing about the toy is the packaging.
I long for the days when a child’s playthings were treated with as much respect and care as adults’ possessions.
Jack Krege called with this update after seeing this at a public library computer. His father Emil, was an engineer with the SLO Fire Department and for many years the department fixed toys to be distributed to disadvantaged families. The tradition began in the 1930s with the Rotary Club and later the fire department joined in. The program took a hiatus during World War II then came back in 1946. Jack remembers his mom washing sinks full of dolls and firefighters repainting toy metal trucks to look like new. Later, in the 70s inmates from CMC were involved but the program was eventually eclipsed by new toy drives. Jack thinks the photos are from 1964 or 1965 and that firefighter Stan Mello at Station 2 is in the bottom photo.
Plastic–as bad for the imagination as it is for the body. (Written as I sit here at my plastic keyboard.)