We’ve lived in this house now for some 35 years, but there were other families before us, as the house itself is nearing a hundred. We’ve worked hard to remove the remnants of former tenants, including multiple layers of linoleum, wallpaper, asbestos and lead-based paint. Yet artifacts remain in the yard, as I have discovered while digging holes and trenches here and there. In particular, I’ve unearthed a lot of lost marbles, along with an assortment of children’s toys. Where are those children now, I wonder? Do they remember their childhood playthings? More poignantly, do these toys miss the children whose imaginations once animated them?
Basically, I would separate them into two categories: Post War and Prehistoric. The tin fire chief car, for example, is typical of the cheap toys my friends and I played with in the Nineteen Forties. In those days, if you wanted to belittle someone’s possession, you would point out that it was “made in Japan.” Made for a good laugh then; however, by and by, American consumers stopped laughing. For example, the camera I used to take these pictures was made in Japan, and it’s a far better camera than any camera ever made in the U.S.A.
I suspect the wooden whistle and wooden dolls may also have been imports. I mean, the guy in the engineer’s cap definitely looks European, while his lady friend could be Chinese.
The legless horse could very well have been patterned after Roy Rogers’ palomino Trigger. Except that Trigger’s hind end would never have been shot off, because both horse and rider were bulletproof.
I’m guessing the rubber rat dates back to the Jurassic period, since it’s almost as large as the stegosaurus. Like the palomino, the stegosaurus is missing its hind end, so all I can say for sure is, it was never ridden by Roy Rogers.