Toys in the 1950s, you gotta love them. The one pictured above, the machine gun that shoots wooden bullets, is a weapon I could never get my paws on. I did manage a Fanner 50 western pistol and a Colt snub-nose version that shot plastic bullets, but nothing like a machine gun. That would have been the ultimate weapon for our neighborhood battles against each other and “the hard guys” across the railroad tracks. All of these potentially lethal weapons were advertised in comic books. Did any responsible adult ever check these ads before the book was printed? Hard wooden bullets mowing down kids; talk about shooting an eye out or death. These weren’t ads dreamed up by New York Mad Men, but ones from back alley shops that made money off the gullibility of children, me included. My buddy Georgie ordered a so-called real hand grenade from the back page of a Richie Rich comic. A month later, he got a real steel WW2 surplus hand grenade in the mail. It wasn’t live with explosives, but damn, it gave his parents a shock. His father had thrown more than a few of them when he fought at Guadalcanal.
I ordered the Super Man X-Ray glasses from my Super Man comic book. The first pair I ordered for $1.49 called “Magic X-Ray Glasses,” got me into trouble. I told two girls from my neighborhood baseball team that I could see their bones and guts, even though I couldn’t see a thing. They ended up giving me a beating with their Hula Hoops! Who knew a Hula Hoop could hurt so much? I had the word WHAMMO imprinted on my back for a week. My mother dispensed the fake glasses to the garbage can in the alley and saved me from further assaults. Most everything bad that got me in trouble wound up in those alley garbage cans.
Faster Than A Speeding….
Yep, I had to have one, so for Christmas, mom coughed it up. It was a cheesy-looking costume, not much better than cheap pajamas. My Aunt Norma, a seamstress extraordinaire, added tufts of foam and cotton padding to give the appearance of super muscles. She made gold material covers for my PF Flyers and made a new cape. I was hot stuff. Naturally, all my buddies assumed this suit would enable me to leap tall buildings in a single bound, fly faster than a speeding bullet, and all that super stuff. I actually believed I could, so I climbed to the second-story roof of our house, stood on the roof line, cape blowing in the wind, and stared at my buddies thirty feet down in the backyard, awaiting my takeoff. Down the roof, I ran and launched off the edge into the spring air. I landed on top of two of my friends, which saved me from injury. Mother, who saw the whole performance immediately busted my butt with a Tupperware container while dragging me into the house. The suit was in the alley garbage can the next morning. I never flew again.
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Notes From The Cactus Patch 
Wooden bullets, Hula hoops, Tupperware containers… Dangerous times!
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Yes they were. We weren’t afraid of much, except our parents and butt whoopins. Well, maybe The Mummy, The Werewolf and Frankenstein.
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It’s ironic that most kids had some sort of toy weapon to play with back in the day, but didn’t go on to use real ones to massacre their classmates. Anyway, your mother was a creative hoot when trying to knock some sense into you. 🙂
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The Tupperware container was one of better ones. A flyswatter, an aluminum pan and a Mimosa Tree switch were also handy. The mothers on our block would take turns busting our butts because their arms would wear out by the afternoon. It’s not that we did much wrong, the busting’s were because we would commit some form of delinquency before the day was over.
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And yet we remember these “no second chance” and “no nonsense” acts of discipline without bitterness.
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None at all. I had a good laugh with my mom when I became an adult.
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Don’t try this at home?… my mom grabbed fly swatters and hair brushes and swung away at us, but hardly ever connected at all. She said a few choice words while doing it which I dutifully reported to my father. He wasn’t impressed with that. She’d swing at us in the back seat while driving, but could never reach us. She was a great mom. We tried the patience of Job.
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A blessed child you were.
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Right now, all of us are asking, “Does he still wear Superman suits?” I won’t say what I think until I find out whether I won the raffle. 🙂
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Nope, I don’t have a Superman suit, but if I could get my hands on one, I might wear it to Walmart.
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Oh that is so cool about the hand grenade…can you imagine rolling that baby in a crowd somewhere?
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Yes, it was the real deal, I got to hold it. Georgie had it only a few hours, then his dad confiscated it. The things we could get our hands on back then is scary.
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My mom would grab anything that came to hand. Tupperware would have been a blessing, lol.
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Yeah, my mother was quite inventive when it came to butt bustin weapons. Clothes hanger, wooden spoon, spatula, PF Flyer shoe, plastic doll etc.
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