Back in the mid-1940s

Back in the mid-1940s, my wife’s dad, a physician in Hamilton, IL, had acquired a couple of toy metal cars. My wife, Karen, said her dad gave the “sporty one” to one of his patients, a boy about 6. Karen, about the same age, got a sedan.

Although she doesn’t remember many details about playing with the car, she kept it, and it eventually followed us to our present home in a large box with other “old stuff.”

Metal car

The metal car measures 14 ½ inches in length. It’s five inches wide and about 4 ½ inches high. Its body is painted a dull green, which survives in fairly good condition, and it has its original white rubber tires. Several parts are missing, including an open area that appears to have been a battery compartment. The battery may have powered the headlights and a single taillight. A flat-spring motor in the rear of the car would have made it go, but it’s no longer functional.

Old Geography Book

One of the few records of my grandfather’s early life and that of his brothers is an old geography book I re-discovered recently in a cedar chest full of other family history. The book, “Cornell’s Intermediate Geography,” was published in 1879 by Appleton and Company in New York. It was described on the title page as “Forming Part Second of a Systematic Series of School Geographies by S.S. Cornell, Corresponding Member of the American Geographical and Statistical Society.”

The book offers some fascinating looks at the world as it appeared – or was perceived – in 1879.

Beginning with definitions of geographical terms and explanations of the science, the book went on to show illustrations or “scenes” in various locations, combined with appropriate maps.

Typical of the time period, the maps indicate principle waterways, mountain ranges, and other physical features. Manmade features include railroads and towns, reminding the reader that in those pre-automobile days there were no major roads or highways.
To me, one of the more interesting maps was Florida. In 1879, the only railroad in the state was the Yulee Line, from Ferdandina in extreme northeast Florida, to Cedar Key, on the Gulf (the line to Cedar Key was abandoned in 1935, with part of the original right-of-way now serving as a nature trail). The Southern half of the state had virtually no towns — Miami wouldn’t be incorporated until 1896. For many years, other attractions in the state were accessible mainly by steamboat, and later by short-line railroads.

The Midwest was similarly bare, with only a few major towns. Kansas City was barely legible. There was no Branson, but Hartville and Forsyth were shown. Kansas City’s population, appearing in a listing near the back to the book, was given as 32,736, and could barely be seen on the map. In the upper part of the state, there were no towns north of Hannibal. Keokuk, IA, long important as a steamboat and railway terminal, was shown prominently. In Kansas, the area west of Topeka was mostly devoid of towns. Wichita wasn’t mentioned: although incorporated in 1870, it was little more than a trading post when the book was printed.

 

Bored Youngster

When I was a youngster, we would occasionally spend Sundays with my dad’s stepmother and his two sisters in Hamilton, IL, across the river from Keokuk, IA. I remember it was a bit boring for a pre-school-age kid, as there were no other children around. There were no toys, but I could keep busy looking at their collection of magazines – mostly Life and Look, as I recall.

Now and then, my aunts would bring out a jigsaw puzzle, one of their entertainments in those pre-TV years. The puzzles caught my four-year-old eye, as my elders magically made colorful pictures appear from a pile of various-shaped pieces. The one I recall was a reproduction of an old painting, “Adoption of Flag of the U.S.A.,” according to a handwritten note on the cover of the box. Made by the Tuco Workshops, my aunts’ puzzle had a 1933 copyright.

Jigsaw puzzle craze

According to antique writer Harry Rinker, Tuco was a product name of the Upson Company in Lockport, NY, a maker of 3/16 inch wallboard. When the Great Depression hit, the company decided to take advantage of the jigsaw puzzle craze in the early 1930s and used its wallboard to make inexpensive puzzles that it sold through Kresge stores for 69 cents each. The puzzles were cut in wavy horizontal and vertical lines, meaning there were no interlocking tabs, and each piece was different.

My family’s “Adoption of the Flag” puzzle was well-used by the time I came on the scene. Two pieces had been lost, and one of my aunts had carefully recreated them, coloring in the missing scenes so carefully that the substitution was barely noticeable.

When my parents died and I acquired their things, I found that I was the owner of the old puzzle I had seen as a four-year-old. I put it in a closet and forgot about it for more than three decades, but recently I decided to try my hand at putting it together.

It was a challenge. Not only are all the pieces different, they don’t interlock, unlike modern puzzles. Many of the pieces have straight lines but aren’t necessarily border pieces, which added to the challenge. Worst of all, there was no picture to go by. I tried looking up examples of old Tuco puzzles, and found quite a few, but not the one that matched mine. A search for the painting, “Adoption of the Flag of the U.S.A.” yielded several versions, but none matched the image in my puzzle. (I later found a copy of it on WorthPoint.com.)

 

My first books

One of my first books – saved by my mother over the years – recently turned up in my attic. “Three Little Pigs” is a nursery rhyme classic, and it was fun to rediscover this gem many decades later.

My book contains four nursery rhymes. Besides the pigs’ saga, there is “Puss In Boots, Cinderella,” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Like most books of its type, this one features large type and detailed line drawings: 64 pages of black & white newsprint within a colorful cover.

The book was one of many produced by the Saalfield Publishing Co. of Akron, OH. According to a 2014 article in the Akron Beacon Journal, the company’s fortunes as a publisher of children’s books took a giant leap in 1902 when a Chicago housewife, Francis Montgomery, submitted a first manuscript, “Billy Whiskers: an Autobiography of a Goat.” The book (along with follow-up versions) was a stunning success, and the company went on to become the largest publisher of children’s books in the world.

Reading “Three Little Pigs” and the other stories in today’s era of political correctness reveals how far the genre has come. All the stories contain various forms of violence: the wolf ate two of the three pigs, and the third pig “had the wolf for supper.” “Hansel and Gretel” depicts abandoned children who save themselves from a cannibalistic witch when Gretel shoves the old lady in a blazing oven. Nice.

In the early 1940s, when I began my studies at Black Oak, a country school a half-mile from our Missouri farm, I was treated to the “Dick and Jane” books. The urban family of Dick, Jane, Baby Sally, their pets and straight-arrow parents was depicted with syrupy sentences, usually of fewer than a half-dozen words. Although my classmates probably enjoyed them, I thought the simplistic “Dick and Jane” stories were incredibly boring.

Compared to the mayhem and violence I’d discovered in the “Three Little Pigs,” maybe they were.

As a youngster, one of my favorite comic-strip characters was Donald Duck, a creation of the Walt Disney Co. in the 1930s. Like many of his contemporaries, Donald was a purveyor of innocent fun, his pompous personality inviting the many situations he found himself in. Over the years, Disney added his family of nephews; his forever girlfriend, Daisy; and eventually his rich uncle, “Scrooge McDuck.”

I was one of millions of kids who helped fund the Disney empire, buying many Donald Duck comics at the Zumsteig drug store in Memphis, MO, our county seat. I was also in the crowd of youngsters at the Saturday matinee at the Time Theater, where westerns starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy were eagerly devoured, along with 10-cent popcorn. But we always cheered when the cartoons came on, and appreciated our weekly ration of Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and other favorites.

According to Wikipedia, Donald Duck has appeared in more films than any other Disney character, and was included in TV Guide’s list of the 50 greatest cartoon characters of all time in 2002. Outside the “action hero” genre, Donald is the most published comic book character in the world.

In the early ‘40s I was given a wooden pull toy featuring Donald Duck. Made by Fisher-Price, it was 10 inches high, and featured Donald as a parade leader, twirling a green baton. A noisemaker near the rear axle produced a deep “quack” when the wheels turned. It’s likely the mostly-wooden pull-toy was a practical way for the company to stay busy at a time when metals and other wartime materials were scarce.

The pull-toy was one of the few I still have. It still looks like it did in the early 1940s – there’s no fading and the baton is still intact. But the noisemaker no longer “quacks.” Frankly, I don’t think I gave it a lot of hard use, as my favorite toys in those days were metal cars and trucks, and later a Lionel model train set.