RetroIndy: The toys you loved the most, through the decades

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Looking back at our favorite toys from sleds to the Slinky. Wochit

How many times have you said, “If I had only kept my old toys, I’d be sitting on a gold mine today”?

The catch is you would have had to have kept them in the original package or in pristine condition - and that’s nearly impossible for a child. 

The memories of poring over catalogs from Sears-Roebuck, J.C. Penney or Montgomery Ward are priceless. Some of us circled the toys and left the catalog open to strategic pages for all to see. Or tore out pages and added them to a list as a visual aid for Santa Claus. If times were tough, frugal children gave Santa a price list comparison of local department stores. Every penny counts, even to Santa.

Just like Ralphie Parker fixated on a Red Ryder BB Gun in A Christmas Story, there was always that toy, no matter what decade or what was going on in the world - each Christmas everyone had to have that toy. From Lionel Trains to Barbie, Nintendo and Star Wars toys, there have always been a must-have toy that left shoppers lining up and even fighting over them.

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1900s: Joshua Lionel Cowen created a toy train as a display for toy stores, but the idea caught on and by 1906, they were circling Christmas trees in homes across the nation.

1910s: The Teddy Bear, velocipedes, and the Erector Set was first marketed in 1913, as a toy that could be put together as one thing, taken apart and built into something else. According to several legends, Indianapolis’ Johnny Gruelle’s daughter Marcella was playing with a faceless rag doll she found in her grandmother’s attic. Gruelle and Marcella combed through the books and combined The Raggedy Man and Little Orphant Annie to create Raggedy Ann. Marcella Gruelle died at the age of 13 from a smallpox vaccination, ironically as her father had been granted approval for a patent for his doll called Raggedy Ann.

1920s: Radio Flyer, Lincoln Logs, pedal cars, Tinker Toys, and the Gilbert Chemistry Kit that included an experiment for explosives. (Definitely, pre-Homeland Security days).

1930s: Buck Rogers Rocket Pistol and anything else that related to “the future," little green army men and the View-Master. If you thought the Sock Monkey was a relatively new fad, think again. They’ve been around since the early 1930s, when the Nelson Knitting Co of Rockford, Ill., began including a sock-monkey pattern with every pair of its red-heeled socks.

1940s: The Slinky was originally designed to keep equipment steady on ships. But when creator/engineer Richard James knocked it off a shelf, he saw it “walk down” instead of fall. His wife dubbed it the Slinky. James demonstrated the Slinky in 1945 at Gimbels Department store in Philadelphia during Christmas season and it became an instant hit with kids. The Dy-Dee and Betsy Wetsy dolls you could feed and change its diapers were popular in the late 1930s but really took off in the post-war boom. 

1950s: Sci-fi movies were all the rage in the 1950s and the classic Forbidden Plant spawned Robby the Robot toys and metal spaceships. 

1960s: Barbie made her debut in 1959, grew up in the 1960s and became a cultural icon before the age of 50. She was an adult toy rather than a baby doll and it helped that she had great clothes. Barbie was marketed with various careers designed to show that women can take on a variety of roles in life, such as astronaut and doctor. Later Barbie would embrace ethnic identities and various skin tones.

G.I. Joe came along in the 1960s as well - and in some households, was a frequent boyfriend of Barbie. While Matchbox cars made their debut in the 1950s, Hot Wheels cars and their signature orange track became a hit with boys in the 1960s. Kenner introduced the Easy Bake Oven in 1963 and sold 500,000 ovens in the first year. It made terrible cakes but what can you expect with two 100-watt incandescent light bulbs doing the baking? Etch-a-Sketch was so popular that employees worked Christmas eve to fulfill demand.
 
1970s: Stretch Armstrong, Pong, Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle, of course, Star Wars toys. Mattel also added the Barbie Townhouse, Country Camper and Dream House to its inventory of Barbie accessories.

We’ll end this retrospective with the 1980s, a decade that sent parents into a frenzy and even brawls. Teddy Ruxpin, Transformers, Nintendo and of course Cabbage Patch Kids which had shoppers camping out overnight outside stores and sold on the black market for upwards of $2000. 

Follow IndyStar photo coordinator Dawn Mitchell on Twitter: @dawn_mitchell61.