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.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 