Here's some toys that should be recalled

Published November 2007


I know you've picked up on this trend, too. It's hard to miss. And frankly, now I think it has reached a point where the trend is kind of feeding on itself -- the bandwagon effect.

Toy recalls.

First it is some lead paint. Then some small parts. Then a head that comes off a doll. Then beads that act as "a date rape drug when ingested" (no, I am not making this stuff up). Dora the Explorer has even had her reputation sullied by a recall. Not to mention the average Chinese toy maker, who can no longer show his or her face in Wal-Mart with pride.

Parents magazine says there have been 22 major toy recalls in 2007.

Maybe some flaking paint off the Elmo musical keyboard (one of the 22) is bad -- I don't want to minimize the problem -- but where were all these recalls when I was kid?

You want to recall some toys? I'll give you some toys to recall. Let's start with the Slinky. What a dumb toy. Once down the stairs (and they only make it halfway before tumbling willynilly, let's be honest) and then they get tangled into a massive wire spiral mess -- unfixable. The plastic ones are no better and, in fact, are less likely to make it down stairs and more likely to get tangled up. After 30 minutes of "play," Slinky was in the wastebasket.

Cooties. What was this one about? Was it a board game? Was it a puzzle? We are making oversized ants out of plastic legs for what reason again? Give me a good game of Twister, but keep your Cooties.

Do you remember your first electronic game? Think hard. The first electronic (read: battery-operated) game I can remember was a basketball game with little cardboard figures that vibrated on a thin metal surface painted with basketball markings when it was turned on. Remember this one? The cardboard characters (about an inch and half high) just vibrated their way around the board until they were all bunched in one corner, all the while the surface vibrating and humming loudly. And that was it.

I don't suppose there was a single one of these toys that ever made it past the first pair of batteries. That "toy" was old after five minutes. Some agency could have recalled that one and no one would have batted -- or vibrated -- an eye.

Pick Up Sticks. Here's a toy that screams for a recall, a toy whose name is both a noun and a verb, and the directions for use. It is simply a cardboard tube with a lid on it, filled with multi-colored giant toothpicks. The purpose was to shake them out and, ahem, pick them up. Forget the obvious lose-an-eye reasons to recall this toy, just recall it for causing intense levels of boredom.

Lite Brites. Recall that toy from my childhood, won't you? A hot light bulb just right for touching/burning and a million super-small plastic lights that end up rattling around in the vacuum.

Give me a Thingmaker any day. Now, there was a toy. And my giant Battlewagon battleship, which took all the batteries in our house -- and on our street, as I recall -- to make it rock gently as it crossed the living room rug, firing a variety of rubber and plastic weaponry.

As long as we are recalling things from my childhood, can we recall the black-rimmed glasses with the tape holding them together? My family was on the one pair of glasses per year plan at my house growing up, so when my pop bottle-bottom glasses broke -- an inevitable event, as regular as an early frost in Randolph -- I had the big wad of tape or the not-so-subtle addition of epoxy accessorizing my eyewear.

Can we recall that day in May -- second grade -- when someone warming up for their turn at the plate cracked me just over the right eye, swinging full bore with a bat? It was also my birthday. I think I can still feel that goose egg.

Can we recall the nasty asparagus that was offered weekly in my elementary lunch line? Everything else was thumbs up, but the asparagus made milk carton stuffers of dozens of kids. To this day, I haven't eaten asparagus.

I can remember Butch Wax and picture day. I can remember a classmate -- who I had better not name, for obvious reasons -- going down the slippery slide with his pants down. I remember sneaking a transistor radio with an earphone into my desk and listening to the Dodgers beat the Yankees in four games in the 1963 World Series.

Though the elementary school I attended has long since been leveled -- not sure why. Some fictional earthquake danger, undoubtedly -- I have overwhelmingly warm memories of the place, almost as warm as the water from the short, porcelain fountain in the hall.

Besides excellent and friendly cooks and their offerings, I can remember dodgeball, giant black pencils (why did they have to be big? My grandchildren use regular-sized pencils today), huge cuffs in my Levis, and tetherball. I remember the tearful reaction of my teacher when the principal came in and announced Pres. Kennedy had been shot.

Do your children and grandchildren know how different your elementary school experience was from theirs? They need to know. They need to know what makes you tick and follow your many tangled roots. If you have never written down your own personal history -- writing would be best -- at least talk about it. Take some time this Thanksgiving holiday to share stories that shaped you, because they will shape your progenitors, too. It will be fun. It will be educational. It will be enriching.

And it will be a heck of a lot more fun than Pick Up Sticks.