So what did the rest of you kids get…?<\/p>\n
Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. And that gun is in no way collector’s grade. I played with my toys and it shows on the ones I kept for memories. The cylinder on the little cap gun (it’s about half the size of a real single action Colt) barely turns anymore.<\/p>\n
I still have two of my two boyhood rifles. One is a boy’s sized Winchester lever action replica that took the old cap rolls and had a trigger catch on the lever you could flip out so that every time you worked the lever action the gun fired. Somewhat like Chuck Conner’s was tricked in The Rifleman<\/em>. The other is a Daisy 660, which wasn’t a BB gun, (I might shoot my eye out) but made a loud pop whenever you pulled the trigger via a strong spring loaded mechanism inside the gun. You cocked the spring via the lever action, but the spring in that thing is so darn strong that to this day I cannot work the lever holding the gun in my arms. A kid had to put the gun muzzle down on the ground and push the lever forward with all his weight to get it cocked. Which was probably how I discovered dirt clods made entirely satisfactory projectiles.<\/p>\nThat was a different world. A kid could arm himself to the teeth back then and nobody gave it a second thought. Wish I still had my Man From U.N.C.L.E.<\/em> gun….<\/p>\n<\/p>\n…and my James Bond Attache Case…<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThat thing had tons of nifty finger candy. The code book had an invisible ink pen. The wallet with the fake money and passport came with little business cards…Bond’s cover was he worked for Universal Import\/Export…that had 007 printed on them in a yellow ink that you couldn’t see when they were tucked in the wallet (note the translucent red plastic card holder). Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it was fun. The case itself took the standard roll caps. That’s because it was booby trapped. If you opened it with the wrong combination a cap would bang. It was an open question among us kids whether that was cooler then the Secret Sam attache case, which could shoot plastic bullets and had a real camera concealed inside you could snap pictures of people with surreptitiously. Or as surreptitiously as a nine year old kid walking around with an attache case could be.<\/p>\nIn retrospect, you have to wonder about selling kids James Bond toys considering that your typical kid couldn’t get in to see the Bond movies back then because of the scant (by today’s standards) nudity. Being on television, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.<\/em> couldn’t do that. But I guess you could sell kids James Bond guns so long as you didn’t sell them the sex that usually went along with the guns in the movies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAnd then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…<\/p>\n<\/p>\nDig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThey all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So what did the rest of you kids get…? Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[110,42],"class_list":["post-2584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kidhood","tag-toys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
That was a different world. A kid could arm himself to the teeth back then and nobody gave it a second thought. Wish I still had my Man From U.N.C.L.E.<\/em> gun….<\/p>\n<\/p>\n…and my James Bond Attache Case…<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThat thing had tons of nifty finger candy. The code book had an invisible ink pen. The wallet with the fake money and passport came with little business cards…Bond’s cover was he worked for Universal Import\/Export…that had 007 printed on them in a yellow ink that you couldn’t see when they were tucked in the wallet (note the translucent red plastic card holder). Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it was fun. The case itself took the standard roll caps. That’s because it was booby trapped. If you opened it with the wrong combination a cap would bang. It was an open question among us kids whether that was cooler then the Secret Sam attache case, which could shoot plastic bullets and had a real camera concealed inside you could snap pictures of people with surreptitiously. Or as surreptitiously as a nine year old kid walking around with an attache case could be.<\/p>\nIn retrospect, you have to wonder about selling kids James Bond toys considering that your typical kid couldn’t get in to see the Bond movies back then because of the scant (by today’s standards) nudity. Being on television, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.<\/em> couldn’t do that. But I guess you could sell kids James Bond guns so long as you didn’t sell them the sex that usually went along with the guns in the movies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAnd then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…<\/p>\n<\/p>\nDig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThey all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So what did the rest of you kids get…? Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[110,42],"class_list":["post-2584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kidhood","tag-toys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n
…and my James Bond Attache Case…<\/p>\n
That thing had tons of nifty finger candy. The code book had an invisible ink pen. The wallet with the fake money and passport came with little business cards…Bond’s cover was he worked for Universal Import\/Export…that had 007 printed on them in a yellow ink that you couldn’t see when they were tucked in the wallet (note the translucent red plastic card holder). Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it was fun. The case itself took the standard roll caps. That’s because it was booby trapped. If you opened it with the wrong combination a cap would bang. It was an open question among us kids whether that was cooler then the Secret Sam attache case, which could shoot plastic bullets and had a real camera concealed inside you could snap pictures of people with surreptitiously. Or as surreptitiously as a nine year old kid walking around with an attache case could be.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, you have to wonder about selling kids James Bond toys considering that your typical kid couldn’t get in to see the Bond movies back then because of the scant (by today’s standards) nudity. Being on television, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.<\/em> couldn’t do that. But I guess you could sell kids James Bond guns so long as you didn’t sell them the sex that usually went along with the guns in the movies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nAnd then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…<\/p>\n<\/p>\nDig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\nThey all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So what did the rest of you kids get…? Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[110,42],"class_list":["post-2584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kidhood","tag-toys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
And then there were these little nightmares for today’s school administrators. Behold…the original Transformers…<\/p>\n
Dig it… A transistor radio that became a rifle when you pressed a little button by the handle. There was also a camera that became a pistol and a jack knife that became a pistol…<\/p>\n
They all took the standard cap rolls I think. And to make matters worse, the jack knife actually had a little plastic blade on it two you could flick out. Looking back on it you have to wonder what the adults were thinking watching the neighborhood kids run around blasting each other, playing dead for a while, then getting back up and blasting each other some more. But in those days it probably wasn’t the sight of kids playing with guns so much as the civil defense siren silhouetted in the sky behind us that would have worried them. We had one of those right in back of our garden apartment complex and you could see it from just about everywhere we played. Leading us through our duck and cover exercises probably disturbed the grown-ups a lot more then our playing with cap guns. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So what did the rest of you kids get…? Still have my Shootin’ Shell cap gun. It’s down in one of the storage bins in the basement, along with a couple of the spring loaded brass cases. Alas I lost all the little plastic bullets long ago, and they don’t make the stick-on caps anymore. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[110,42],"class_list":["post-2584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-kidhood","tag-toys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}