All This Is That: Growing up: Hillbilly home-made toys

click young John/Jack to enlarge

If you've read any of these growing up stories, you remember I grew up poor. That didn't necessarily mean we didn't get toys (which my parent's generation would call "store-bought"). We did get toys for birthdays and Christmas, and in between, we played with toys my dad made (he also built boats, bikes, and even campers). There are a few he made I can't quite remember, but I know they involved bobbins, and wooden thread spools. He could create dozens of objects from rope. His Navy days had left him a master knotsman, and some of my favorite toys were his ropework. Here are some of the toys he made, and we played with. This is only a small part of his toys--the others are lost somewhere in the haze floating over the Green & White River Valley.

The Paper Hat. He could fold several styles of paper hats from newspapers. One was the one below--almost a Papal hat; another was a skull-cap sort of affair; and he could also create an excellent Pirate Hat as well. E-how tells you how to make your own, if you'd like to take a crack at it.

Dad also made several varieties of bathtub or pond motorboats. The illustration below shows one of his standards.

This was no work of genius, but he also made us tin can telephones (and tin can puddle jumpers):

One of my favorites was the Monkey Fist. It wasn't that useful if you weren't climbing mountains or tossing a rope from a ship, but it had this heft and symmetrical coolness that made you want one. We always had one tied to the dinner bell on our back porch (how tarheel is that? How many of you had a "dinner bell?").

There was a very simple toy called a Buzz-toy, that John, Sr. called a "zippo." This was possibly my most beloved toy. I could even make one myself when he showed me where to find the cord. He always used a kind of hybrid thread, with cotton and some sort of synthetic like nylon. You could really get these zippos zipping! If you had a strong cord, you could really get these things moving, and it generated a great low, rumbling whirring sound: