BACK IN THE DAY...:

Stick, skateboard, Baby Doll enter Toy Hall of Fame (AP, 11/07/08)

The lowly stick, a universal plaything powered by a child's imagination, landed in the National Toy Hall of Fame on Thursday along with the Baby Doll and the skateboard.

The three were chosen to join the Strong National Museum of Play's lineup of 38 classics ranging from the bicycle, the kite and Mr. Potato Head to Crayola crayons, marbles and the Atari 2600 video game system.

Curators said the stick was a special addition in the spirit of a 2005 inductee, the cardboard box. They praised its all-purpose, no-cost, recreational qualities, noting its ability to serve either as raw material or an appendage transformed in myriad ways by a child's creativity.

"It's very open-ended, all-natural, the perfect price -- there aren't any rules or instructions for its use," said Christopher Bensch, the museum's curator of collections. "It can be a Wild West horse, a medieval knight's sword, a boat on a stream or a slingshot with a rubber band. ... No snowman is complete without a couple of stick arms, and every campfire needs a stick for toasting marshmallows.

...when tv's were mostly black and white--though we had a color one (with a radio and turntable built-in)--and got less than 10 channels of broadcast tv (if you lived near enough a city and turned the rabbit ears just right) and there were no computers or video games and there wasn't a youth league for every sport known to man, kids used to have to use their own imagination to come up with games to fill the long empty hours.

Sure, you had to have a basketball to shoot hoops; a bat, a ball and a couple gloves for Hit the Bat; and a football for Smear the Queer, but for a lot of games you just used what was to hand. Thus, games like tag, hide and seek, and Get Whitey require no equipment at all (though the last does necessitate a token honky), while the part needed for Kick the Can is obviously easily acquired. And then there was the stick.

We had a catalpa tree in our backyard and not only were its "beans" ideal for cracking over each other's heads, but it served as the "game board" for quite possibly the most boring pastime ever created (okay, second to soccer). We'd scour the neighborhood looking for the most gnarled and misshapen sticks we could find and then each toss our barked beauty into the upper branches of the tree. Whoever's stayed aloft the longest won. This was a contest that could take not hours but days, weeks, even months. If you got your hooked just right it would stay up there until an especially vicious storm or even the occasional Nor'Easter. Heck, for all we know, the Other Brother's twisted marvel from that one week in June 1968 may still be up there.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2008 8:04 AM