More toys from my childhood

Fisher Price was the master of playsets long before Lego started creating large scale fantasy settings and that uber-expensive Playmobile started cranking out fully fleshed-out scenes.  My cousin Michael had many of the Fisher Price playsets including the Sesame Street set (which my sister also had) and the Main Street USA set (with the dentist chair which even had a spit bowl) and this castle.  The tower where the dragon is sitting had a trap door which would send a little character down a slide to the "dungeon" (the little yellow lift gate at the bottom).   

I actually had two of these at different times.  I don't know what happened to the original one, I think my mother gave it away, but at one point I clearly remember my grandmother giving me one that had the Exxon label at the top.  The little gas tanks were cool, but of course the main attraction was the little lift planks which would propel your Hotwheels or Matchbox car into the waiting elevator.

My sister had this toy, the TreeTot family.  The top was spring loaded so you could hit the button under the handle and the whole tree canopy would lift up to reveal a four room house complete with elevator in the trunk.  There was a swing, a garage, and even a dog house which looked like a bush.  The people would fit perfectly in Fisher Price playsets, but I don't think they manufactured this particular toy.

For those that couldn't afford official Star Wars merchandise, there was the "Star Team" action dolls.  Obvious rip-offs of C3PO, Darth Vader and R2D2.  I only had the robots and didn't like the green-headed guy.  However, the little robot actually lit up and had a revolving interior mechanism and concealed tank-tread tracks on the bottom.

Not only did this stuff stink, it tasted extremely salty.  How do I know what it tasted like?  Well, of course I tasted it since it was non-toxic!  Duh!  For the most part there was nothing you could do with this toy except put it on someone who really didn't want it on them.  I believe it predated the Nickelodeon shows.

I have no idea why this toy fascinated me.  I didn't own it, but one of my friends did.  It was just a plastic oval about foot across filled with two different colors of sand (blue and white).  As you shook it, or turned it in your hands the sand would make sea-like patterns.

Now this toy I really loved.  It belonged to our next door neighbor Susan, two years my junior.  However, eventually she ended up giving it to my sister.  I loved how the entire kitchen was compressed into this six sided toy.  Each appliance could be "motorized" and lit up by turning the entire "karosel" into place and turning a dial.  The oven had three roasting chickens on spits that would turn.  There was even a washing machine/dryer with a spin cycle.  I'm not sure how the room around this Karosel Kitchen would be arranged, but it's still an intriguing design!

When I was about five or six my father took me to visit one of his good friends.  The Adams family (with only one "d") had children that were much older than me.  There was a girl who ended up becoming our babysitter for a while and told me an awful lot about sex.  One of her older brothers who was no longer living in the family home had collected a huge amount of Hotwheels track.  For some reason they gave me the whole shebang.  The photo above is not mine (I downloaded it from the Internet).  I had tons more than this including a service station that you could wind up and it would add speed to the cars passing through it.

A friend of mine told me that his mother used to use one of the long orange plastic tracks to whip him.  Such a bad memory for such a wonderful toy!

At one time I had a really wonderful gift; it was a vinyl-over-cardboard suit case that when opened revealed a molded plastic city with streets and bridges and a tunnel with a few buildings, a lake and park, and a couple skyscrapers (which would pop up and had snaps to make them square).  It was the right scale to use my Matchbox and Hotwheels cars, but was an off-brand.  I played with this city for a very long time.  One year my parents told me they were going to buy me another city-in-a-suitcase that was three times the size and I waited in anticipation.  When the Holiday arrived they brought out a giant box which I assumed was the new suitcase.  It turned out to be empty.  I was terribly disappointed but then my father wheeled in my new bicycle.  I acted extremely surprised and delighted, but I really had wanted the city-in-a-suitcase.  We lived on a dangerous logging-road and a steep hill.  There really wasn't anywhere to ride the bike.