Don't deny it, you know you did......

Growing up on the farm I had all sorts of fun things to play with.  I had chainsaws, electric fences and a 250 gallon overhead tank of gasoline.  But beofre I was allowed to play with these things I had the privledge of playing with some childhood classics. I did have a lot of the normal childhood toys as others of my era. Things like Lincoln logs were a perennial favorite; I would dump the canister that looked like a giant Quaker Oats container out in the middle of the living room floor and construct.  I will admit that I was pretty good at building log cabins and corrals and the other standard fare, it was the spaceships that I built out of Lincoln Logs that were hard to do.   That and I noticed that after you sucked on them for a while they developed a funny taste.

 One of my favorite toys growing up was my erector set.  Introduced to the public in 1913, this toy would become the cornerstone of many hours of play.  I think that this toy set was responsible for my current mechanical abilities and love of tools.  I would build homes and then with the introduction of bearings, I made vehicles and machines.  I would sit in the sun on the living room floor on Sunday afternoon while my father yelled at the television set.  Seems that the Green Bay Packers of the day needed a small town coach and my father must have volunteered.

 Released one year after the Erector set was another classic, Tinker Toys.  I could build all sorts of really nice structures and cars with these.  The wheel that was included allowed me to make cars and then play smash up. Smash up was a game that I invented and it was played by building the most complex vehicle like thing that I could and then run it along the kitchen floor as fast as I could and slam it into the wall on the far end.  The trick was to come up a design that minimized the number of pieces that would come off.  Come to think of it, I should have been a crash test engineer or maybe a crash test dummy.

 Today, kids seem to have departed somewhat from the tactile sensation of playing with Tinker Toys and now they are spending more time with games like Roller Coaster Tycoon.  The first videogame that was construction based that I played was Sim City. Released in 1989 this game was a huge hit and has spawned dozens of spin offs.  Whatever your building game was, be it blocks as a child or Roller Coaster Tycoon, the message is still the same.  Go out there and build something.

Next week's Retro may contian a interesting story as it looks like I will be bringing home a new arcade game home to the Farmer Dave Arcade and Milk Museum.

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