Stuck in the hazy nether-region between kung fu grips and 5 POA, what was a boy to do?
There were still innumerable toys beating around in the 1970s, despite the fact that the very next decade—a decade that can be carbon-dated by the sheer tectonic amounts of toys that we rummaged through in the bright and shining memory safehouses of the toy aisle—had yet to happen to our parent’s wallets. But the toys looked different than what they would eventually become. Evolution was occuring in miniature, sometimes quite literally over time by incremental differences in what grabbed our attention.
The “action figure” as we know it now was born out of a need for boys to buy things that weren’t for girls. G.I. Joe and Ken were separated more by wardrobe than alacrity, but try telling that to a kid on the playground. But these times weren’t my times. I was further along on the tupping point of evolution. There were not quit wars in the stars to alter the very nature of how and why and when I played.
Playtime in the 80s was decidedly cleaner. But before all that, it was…dirty.
Dirty, and sponsored by Tonka.
Oh yeah. Before Luke and Vader, I was a Tonka kid.
It was those five points of articulation that moved me out of the dirt. Not completely, but little by little, I stopped making roads. I stopped making piles of dirt. I stopped pushing small piles of thick red dirt around into larger piles that would then become smaller piles. But before the Force and droids, I spent days and days with real rubber treads and yellow metal and scrapes. Before the Constructicons allowed you to make robots from construction vehicles, I was using dump trucks that came up to my knees and moving dirt from place to place until my clothes and shoes and the palms of my hands were as red as the dirt I was moving.
I lived in a place of rich dirt back then, when all you had to do was toss a seed into the dirt and wink at it and a garden would explode out of the ground. And there’s me never much caring for vegetables. But while my parents “played” in their garden—my mother watering and seeding and plucking and pulling and digging my father working that terrifying rototiller (the one that looked as if it had a face and was leering at me, that dared you to stand in front of it as it munched the earth)–I was making vast roads with my Tonkas.
It was a small point of pride that whenever we passed a “real” construction area I could point out the vehicles I owned. That road grader, that dump truck, that back hoe. These were thrilling to me as a kid in ways that I have trouble processing now. As a jaded adult, I don’t get a kinetic jolt at seeing real treads at work, emulating the way the tiny ones on my Tonka bulldozer moved. I just don’t.
But I did back then. And as always, I made the sounds with my mouth as I moved around the piles of dirt, shifting those heavy metal chunks of toy around in the mud. I didn’t care if my toys got dirty then. Tonkas were tough. A little mud caking the treads didn’t matter. I left one out in the rain? Fine, it just washed the dirt off. Now I dust my toys like an octogenarian. If I dropped a toy in the mud now I’d probably freak out. Was three year old me made of sterner stuff? Probably; he banged his toys together and reveled in the satisfying metallic clang, uncaring that he might chip the paint. I lay my toys gingerly on top of each other if I’m packing them away, and sometimes even use bubble wrap. Oh the humanity. The friggin’ humanity.
Back then I could kill a kid with a Tonka. I could bash his brains in with the heavy metal thunder. Now? I’d be lucky to bruise a banana if I chucked one of these delicate figures at it. They’d bounce off the skulls of newborn babes.
I outgrew mud and dirt and making my own path in the world. If there was ever a small part of me that wanted to operate the real world versions of those tiny construction vehicles, that part is long gone. But I remember him well. He predated a huge part of my toy-collecting years. He was primal in his needs and brutish in his methods.
He shoved dirt around.
He was a Tonka kid.
