Childhood toy soldier memories (1 Viewer)

[marco55]

I remember having having the grreen army men.I also remember getting FFL at a store and loving them.I had ACW and I use to get my grandmother to get me those Revolutionary war soldiers that had ads in the comic books.I had a lot of these and I saw Wee Willie Winkie and just loved the British sun helmets so I would melt the hats on the revolutionary war soldiers and shape them into the sun helmets.Got pretty good at it too^&grinSo I was proud of my Brits marching in their sun helmets not even knowing or caring that they were wearing 18th cen. clothing^&grin. My prized possession was my Fort Apache set.I have always loved toy soldiers.And baseball too.:salute::
Mark

 

[Louis Badolato]

The Marx Guns of Navarone Playset and Airfix HO Scale plastic soldiers were my first foray into the hobby.

 

[Scarlet Pimpernel]

Unfortunately, all my earliest memories of toy soldiers now result in traumatic neurological flashbacks and uncontollable flinching.

My earliest memory is from the age of five in South Africa...Christmas morning...opening a W. Britains plastic Overland Stage Coach (you know which one...it was a beauty!). In my excitement, I knocked over a lamp, causing a severe burn to my wrist, which as I grew travelled up my arm, the traces of which could still be seen into my early 20s.

Shortly after this I moved to the Britains plastic farmyard range and amassed an eclectic managerie (which included an ibex and hippo...weird farm), but of which the vast range of pigs fascinated me. I am sure I had 30 or so. My father had a sadistic colleague who would visit us often, look for my farmyard setup and immediately knock over all the pigs, driving me to tears each time. Now in his 80s, he still calls from time to time to remind me and laugh...the sadistic bugger.

Flashfoward a few years when we had moved to Surrey, I would make my weekly trip with my grandmother to Nobs toy shop (now gone...sigh) or Guildford Dolls Hospital (which I think is still there). Both had lovely assortments of the Britains' Deetail ranges, and each week my collection of Naps, Foreign Legion, AWC, and WWII grew. One summer my parents decided that we would take a trip to the States (by ship), and I brought my little blue woven case filled with my soldiers to play with on board. I had made a friend on the ship, a little girl a couple of years my junior, and we had been playing on deck. I turned my back momentarily (don't ever do this when you are playing with girls), and she was tossing my beautiful soldiers overboard one at a time just for fun. She almost joined them.

This put me off soldiers (and girls) for a short time, and I began modelling ships. My first "masterpiece" (at least in the eyes of a 10-year old) was a fully functional, battery-powered model of the German battleship Tirpitz. Having spent a week building and painting it, her maiden voyage was to be straight across the local pond. For those of you ever considering doing this, those little rubber bushings that go around the propeller shafts...be sure not to omit these during assembly. I gently placed her in the water, little pond waves lapping against her bow...turned on her battery switch and off she went zipping across the pond...well about 75 feet anyway, when she began taking on water. From the shore I could see hundreds of little 1:200 scale men manning life boats and plunging from the stern railings. To this day, I still fanastize about dredging that pond, or possibly contacting James Cameron to organize a dive. Next time, the boat pond at Bognor Regis.

Now I have a seven year old nephew, and he wonders why I won't let him touch my toys.

The image below is a facsimile of that lost treasure.

 

[Terp152]

A lot of memories of Marx sets, Alamo, Ft Apache, farm set with big barn, western town, even the Flinstones village and lots of plastic army men.

Anybody else have the Cape Canaveral set?

 

[wadepat]

Gentle Friends,

These are truly beautiful stories of days, lives, and times gone by. Reading them has touched a nerve with me and memories of my own childhood have come flooding back.

Like most of you, my childhood days included playing and battling with toy soldiers. My mother was an avid gardner and she had beautiful flower beds throughout the back yard. Our neighbor was a horticulturalist and she had wonderful piles of potting soil and sand in her back yard. In short, the immediate environment was rich with many opportunities for a young lad to imagine all sorts of military events, especially if the lad were armed with a goodly supply of toy soldiers.

The piles of potting soil and sand provided incredible settings in which to enact imaginary battles between Axis forces and the Allies. Most of my figures were Marx figures and Dimestore figures. The scale mattered not. My childhood imagination overcame all the trivial issues regarding the sizes of my figures.

The flower beds became the islands of the Pacific and deadly battles were waged in the jungles of my mother's flowers and shrubs. Often, since becoming an older citizen, I have wondered why she let me play in her beautiful and prized flower beds. I will never know her reason for allowing me to play there, but, whatever it was, I am glad she had it.

Living on the Texas Gulf Coast included many rainy days in which I could not take my soldiers to the piles of soil and sand or to the flower beds. On those days, I would "borrow" an old brown army blanket and spread it on the living room floor. I would then proceed to raid clothes closets to obtain a variety of shoes. The shoes went under the blanket to form hills and mountains, where soon, new battles were being fought.

Unlike some of you, I never shot my soldiers with a BB gun. I never threw rocks at them or blew them up with firecrackers. I always knew if I damaged them or destroyed them, I could never replace them. In fact, they had become friends of a sort to me. They provided me with entirely too many hours of joy and pleasure for me to risk losing them.

I would never trade my childhood toy soldier experiences or my memories of those experiences for any of toys prized by today's children. Instead, I choose to relish my memories as I admire the many figures that compose my present collection. Even as an older adult, I still enjoy a powerful imagination and, when I admire the figures in my collection, they come alive and, once again, they become my friends.

Thanks, Chris, for starting this thread and allowing me to share with other Gentle Friends the memories of earlier days and many joyful playtime battles.

Warmest personal regards,

Pat :smile2:

 

[Go for Broke]

Pat's childhood memory of a TS world without scale and accuracy was a simpler time where everybody got along. Maybe that was what I was really looking for when I started collecting TS in my adulthood. A simpler time.

 

[Sans Culotte]

Back in the early 50s, my father built a large table in our basement for me to lay out my American Flyer train set that included a substantial Plasticville town. As a change of pace, I could dismantle everything, and set up various forts & castles, including many Marx Playsets. Always short on "period" troops (except for some combined Marx Civil War sets) I thought nothing of combining whatever was handy. By the way, that's when the local five-and-dime store sold Britains sets for no more than $5.00.

 

[nysoldiers]

Great stories bring back a lot of memories.
Marx play sets (Robin Hood, Johnny Tremain AWI, French Foreign Legion, Prince Valiant castle, Blue and Grey ACW, WWII), Britains and Hausser/Elastolin.
I would try to recreate battles from my favorite movies: Gunga Din, The Conqueror with John Wayne (now considered one of the worst movies made), To Hell and Back, Ivanhoe, El Cid, Beau Geste, The Longest Day, Taras Bulba (Tony Curtis and Yul Brenner), The Vikings, Charge of the Light Brigade and many more.

My favorite childhood figures that I saved until this day were Britain's Swoppets War of the Roses, Elastolin knights and Landsknechts and Britains lead cavalry regiments.

 

[Martin Tabony]

The mention of lighter fuel reminded me, I discovered (goaded on by friends) that if you set alight to the plastic nozzle and squeeze the tin, it made a flame thower! I've still got a scar on my thumb from were a burning German tank dripped moulten plastic!
Or when "Bonfire night" came round and "bangers" we easy to get. Sticking one in under an Action Man as a mine.
Thinking back it's no wonder the changed the rules!

Martin

 

[THE SHOOTIST]

It's funny how some of us still have soldiers being given up by our gardens and play areas. I grew up in a small lakefront cottage in Maine. To one side as you walked from the house to the lake was a large hill of sand. My friend Ken and I wouls spend summers building elaborate cities populated by every type of green soldier, tank, jeep and field piece. Tunnels, roads, bunkers and every sort of imagineable structure. We then would make a huge impoundment at the top, and carry up several five-gallon pails of lake water to fill it. Naturally, the dam would break and the city which we spent hours on would be destroyed by the ensuing floodwaters. Hundreds of our soldiers would be buried, and we'd manage to rescue most, but there were always ones that escaped us. Over the course of time this hill would be like a blueberry muffin, just filled with soldiers. I moved away from there when I was ten, and we used the home as soley a vacation place and a rental income property. Two years ago, looonnng after we sold the place I stopped by and spoke to the owner, he was delighted to show my family around, and I asked him if I could take a photo of my family on the granite stairs that led to the lake. He agreed. I set up my family on the stairs and walked into the lake to take a few pictures. As I walked out of the lake, and up the sand pile next to the stairs I kicked up a soldier, I picked it up and gave it to Bill, the owner of my old house. He laughed, and told me that every time it rained, the sand hill would give up a soldier or two, and his two sons who now had moved away and are raising families of their own would always look for soldiers after it rained, and how now his son's son's are doing it when they come for a visit. He always wondered as to how the soldiers got in the sand pile in the first place. I then told him of my friend and my daily adventures building the city, only to be washed away by a flood.

 

[tallyho]

mixture of britains airfix and timpo , loved having the forts, birthdays i used to get a set of britains , used to be 24 figures i think in the large box , best i had of those was the foriegn legion / arab set

 

[lancer]

The mention of lighter fuel reminded me, I discovered (goaded on by friends) that if you set alight to the plastic nozzle and squeeze the tin, it made a flame thower! I've still got a scar on my thumb from were a burning German tank dripped moulten plastic!
Or when "Bonfire night" came round and "bangers" we easy to get. Sticking one in under an Action Man as a mine.
Thinking back it's no wonder the changed the rules!

Martin

This is a spooky story because I also discovered the same thing about lighter fluid in a squeeze can. When I was 10 years old, my friends and I had set up an entire desert war scenario in the sandbox in my backyard. Wanting some realism, we had set fire (matches) to a plastic jeep, making the cool black smoke. I decided more would be better, went inside and snuck my parents lighter fluid back to the sandbox. I thought a flamethrower effect would be neat, struck a match and squeezed the can. A brilliant stream of flame resulted, in fact, a lot more than I bargained for. The fire was everywhere and the flames started to creep back up the stream of lighter fluid. I was so scared that I took off running, trailed the whole way by a line of fire, still holding, and because of fright, squeezing the can. Left a trail of burning grass across the yard to the garden hose at the rear of the house. Got to the water and put out the conflagration, going all the way back to the sandbox. Needless to say, my friends had all scattered and there were many TS casualties from the unintended inferno. All ended ok for me as I suffered no physical damage. I was lucky fear had me squeeze the can all the way as the continued pressure kept the fire from creeping back up to the can. If it had, the outcome would probably have been tragic for me. The result of this fright was a healthy, learned respect for fire and learning to never underestimate the ingenuity and stupidity of kids (read, me). Never did it again and later became a firefighter. Karma, I guess. -- Al

 

[jomartvr]

One of my happiest memories is leaving Hebrew school on a winter evening and getting into my dad's car. He handed me a long cardboard box. It was the Britains swoppet Union gun and limber set. I was delighted! It still brings a smile to my face when I think about it today.
Benjamin

 

[modwalls]

These are great stories, I grew up playing with mostly Marx and MPC figs. My brother and I would get Marx playsets just about every year. I wish I still had my childhood imagination that turned Marx CW figs into Britsh 24th Soldiers. Indians MPC Zulu and even Marx Vikings were the thousands of chargeing Zulu comming at our make shift Roukes Drift tissue boxes. Lincoln logs slippers belts turned sideways became barriers to fight of the hordes of Zulu. I spent hours on our living room floor lost in my imagination. When I looked at those figs, they were all dressed in bright red coats and all defending their positions. The toys of today all have to be perfect detail, but I don't think the kids really want to play with plastic figs with all the high tech stuff there is today. Then again, you really can't blame them, the toys get cooler and cooler, I really enjoy looking at the 1/18 scale guys, I have bought many. I wish I could go back some times and have these new things so I could replay again, but I can't. I really do enjoy now, making scale buildings and walls that go with them. I miss my older brother and those days of watching War movies, then running up in our room and slideing out the Marx playsets and acting out what we wathed.

 

[bromhead]

My favorite aunt who totally spoiled me tho I tried to conceal the fact..would take me to Vaughns seed store in downtown Chicago at Christmas and my birthday,,blinding excitement with a floor of Britains and every military toy known plus an incredible front window display,,the obvious problem being what do I pick and how many can I manage.

 

[The Military Workshop]

I grew up with a lot of plastic 1/72 and 1/35 Airfix and a pretty good selection of Timpo (awesome figures). I still have most of them and my son had a few good years with them.

I can still remember the war to end all wars when I was about 10 and had Ancients, Robin Hoods merry men V the Sherriffs mob, Naps, ACW, WWI and WW2 all over the dining/living room floor. Had understanding parents as the battle lasted for days.

First Toy Soldier type figures I bought were on a Europe school trip when I was 11 (believe it or not to sing in the Montreux Music Festival !!). Still had money when we got to Ostend and saw some Naps 54mm in shop window and spent all I had on a few. Even my curtains in my bedroom had Napoleonic soldiers on them.

My battles were usually to the sound of war movie music (Where Eagles Dare, Great Escape, 633 Squadron, Magnificent Seven etc).

Regards
Brett

 

[Currahee Chris]

Great stories fellas- thanks for the 5 STAR vote- first time any thread I have ever put together scored so high.

STANDS ALONE!!
CC

 

[Leadmen]

My favorite aunt who totally spoiled me tho I tried to conceal the fact..would take me to Vaughns seed store in downtown Chicago at Christmas and my birthday,,blinding excitement with a floor of Britains and every military toy known plus an incredible front window display,,the obvious problem being what do I pick and how many can I manage.

Yes, Vaughns Seed Store was where I spent many hours looking at all the figures. My best memories is that store at Christmas. John

 

[lancer]

There were two toy stores and a general variety store that were instrumental for me, as a kid. The stores were Lowen's, close enough to ride my bike or walk to and Sullivan's, which was down in DC and was a special car ride away. I say special because my dad would take us once or twice a year. Both these stores stocked all sorts of TS, especially Britains of metal and plastic. I lived at Lowen's.:wink2: The variety store had a plastic model section, as did the two toy stores, but the special thing about the variety store (Bruce's was the name) was the selection of Dinky toys it carried. A great selection and very much within walking distance. Spent many hours at all the stores, drooling over the selections. -- Al

 

[bromhead]

Yes, Vaughns Seed Store was where I spent many hours looking at all the figures. My best memories is that store at Christmas. John

We may have crossed red boxes,,,the castle displays,,the turntable parade in the front window,,about 250 W Randolph?

Take the point Chris,,