Summer is here and even though it no longer has the length or importance that it did when I was growing up, it is still summertime. Recently, I ran across a little pinback button that reminded me just how different the activities we busied ourselves with were and how the toys that we played with have changed. My Schwinn Greenie-Meanie bike with the ape hanger chrome handlebars, banana seat, wheelie popper, and sissy bar backrest jumped so many rickety wooden ramps and jagged culverts that it is a miracle I’m still here. But that seems tame compared to the toy being advertised on this little pin. It was a toy that I had never heard of.
The 2 1/2″ wide yellow and black pin featured a cartoon bumblebee wearing a tam o’shanter cap with a marijuana leaf on its front. The bee’s eyes are drooping and it is holding what looks like a pan with smoke wafting up from the middle. The pin, which was obviously from the 1970s, featured the slogan Catch-A-Buzz Toss & Toke. Further research reveals that it wasn’t a pan at all, it was a Frisbee-style flying disc. And it wasn’t on fire, it had a pipe in the center. Yep, you gotta love the Seventies. More on that later.
Even though this is the environment many of us were raised in, it didn’t mean that our parents weren’t watching us and that the adults didn’t care. In late 1969, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Toy Safety Act, the first national safety standard for playthings. Consumer activists thought that thousands of American children were being hurt and maimed by unsafe and psychologically damaging play things. The act authorized the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to test, ban, and order the recall of unsafe toys and seize hazardous toys in stores whose owners failed to remove them from their shelves. A year passed before the department ordered any toys removed from store shelves. On Dec. 22, 1970, it announced a ban on 39 toys, including several archery sets, some squeeze toys with easily removable squeakers, dolls with barely covered pins or wires, and some breakable baby rattles.
In 1973, the Federal Consumer Product Safety commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System indicated that nearly 515,000 injuries associated with toys, tricycles, and bicycles were treated in hospital emergency rooms. By 1974, more than 1,500 toys had been banned by the newly established Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Commission reported that bicycles were the number one safety hazard in the country. Bike riders and manufacturers alike railed against (and sometimes ridiculed) the commission’s mandates and suggestions for improved bike safety.
It didn’t help that the changes enacted and suggested seemed comical or ineffective, notably one requiring an extensive reflector system on every bicycle sold after the first of this year (1974). And of all things the commission targeted banana seats, claiming their tendency to encourage children to ride double. Bike makers like Schwinn, Huffy, and Sears trotted out industry spokesmen to counter the new reflector mandate with statements like “They don’t help unless it’s dark,” and banana seats with “You could even say riding double makes bikes safer—the kids can’t go as fast.” In response to critics, Schwinn, which invented the banana seat in 1963, said that the company was “very pro safety,” and if the seats were “that unsafe we wouldn’t make them.”
Other banned toys included a Smokey the Bear tent that ironically was highly flammable; several brands of xylophones, whose keys had sharp edges; and a Betsy Wetsy doll partly held together with a straight pin. Both the government and the toy industry began to point to parents as part of the problem, charging they weren’t always doing their jobs in protecting their kids. They determined that not all hazards came from poor design, some came from the consumer’s improper selection and use of toys.
Some people thought the regulations went too far. “I believe the decision as to whether or not Junior ought to be allowed to play with a sharp-eyed Sniffy Dog or a Talkie Tiger whose squeaker is removable is a decision that in a free society ought to be made by a child’s parents and not the federal government,” wrote syndicated columnist John Lofton in 1973. “Why, pray tell, ban a battery-operated ‘Cheerful Daschund No. 256′ simply because it has a sharp-pointed nose? Should it not be assumed that the average buyer will notice the shape of the nose and decide for himself whether or not it is too dangerously sharp?”
The controversy surrounding toy safety created Ralph Nader-like watchdogs like Edward M. Swartz, a Boston lawyer who wrote books the “Toys That Don’t Care” and “Toys That Kill.” Swartz (who died in 2010) founded the nonprofit World Against Toys Causing Harm, or WATCH, which created a curriculum for elementary school children about toy safety and liability laws. For many years, Swartz’s WATCH group issued an annual “10 Worst Toys” list to alert parents and other consumers to the dangers in unsafe toys.
Mr. Swartz cited as among the most dangerous toys the Etch-a-Sketch, whose glass top can shatter and spread the aluminum dust contained inside; rockets with sharply pointed cone noses, dolls with sharp pins in their hair or with easily removable and swallowable eyes, cap pistols so loud they can deafen a child, toy electric ovens and irons that can easily burn hands and fingers, and guns that shoot plastic projectiles at high speeds. Swartz railed against swords and spears, proclaiming rightly that “You could take out an eye with that” or a boomerang sold as a toy with no warning label, saying “this is a weapon that can kill.”
In the board games department, Swartz’s favorite target was “Operation,” introduced in 1965. Well duh, the box showed a Mad Magazine-styled operating table manned by a grinning surgeon jabbing a knife into the thigh of a prone patient while another surgeon, cigarette holder clenched firmly between his teeth dropping ashes onto the patient’s face, is about to plunge another knife into the patient’s chest — a scene that Mr. Swartz described as “ghoulishness and sadism.”
Mr. Swartz also warned against the hazardous line of electrical hobby kits for young children. Case in point, the “Thingmaker”: a kit for making (or baking) toy monsters by Mattel, Inc., the nation’s largest toymaker. For those of you who don’t remember, the “Thingmaker” came in a few different variations. The “Creepy Crawler” created bugs and worms: “Fun Flowers” created, well, flowers: “Picadoos” created pendants, posters, panels, belts and wallets: and the penultimate: “Fright Factory” created skeletons, skulls, bones, and shrunken heads as well as teeth, scars, eyes, tongues, claws, and lips for costume play. Each kit contained 30 different molds and four bottles of Plasti-Goop.
The heart of the Thingmaker system was a hot plate with an internal heating element that reached approximately 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The kit came with squirt bottles filled with a proprietary liquid chemical, called Plasti-Goop. Pick a color and squirt it into various die-cast metal molds, pop it into the piping hot heating tray and watch as the liquid plastic cured and changed color to become firm and glossy. Once the transformation occurred, the mold was then placed in a cooling tray filled with ice-cold water. This caused the Goop to harden so the creation could be removed using the provided prying tool.
The Thingmaker stood out because, right out of the box, it just LOOKED frightening. Blazing hot metal plates plugged into a wall unit to insure that it would stay smoking hot for an extra-long time. The kit included tools that brought little underdeveloped fingertips and knuckles into almost constant contact with every “thing” it made. One look at the examples shown on the box lids proved irresistible to every kid that encountered one. I never had one myself (my parents wouldn’t let me) but my buddy Jimmy Butterworth from IPS Lew Wallace school 107 had one. I wonder if he survived? For their part, Mattel brought out a consultant, Mrs. Jerri Jorgenson, “Sure, you can burn your hand on the “Thingmaker,” she said, “My little girl burned herself several times, never seriously.” She closed by saying that her daughter “had a great deal of fun with it.”
Not only was the WATCH group concerned about physical safety, but they were also especially concerned with the growing number of “psychologically harmful” toys, such as “The Pendulum,” an assemble-it-yourself plastic guillotine; both instructional and educational kits containing simulated or exposed human organs with painted blood dripping from them; and games such as “Headache” and “Bounce Your Eyeball” and “Bash,” which all suggest “gore, violence and mayhem.” One ill-advised toy was an imitation hypodermic needle called “Hypo Phony,” whose package proclaimed it “good for a million laughs.” The package featured a drawing of an arm being injected with the needle. Oy Vey!
Howard Fishlove, president of the needle manufacturer, H. Fishlove and Company, pointed out that it was only a harmless joke item. However, Fishlove did acknowledge that it could be viewed as psychologically damaging in the era of drug abuse among youths. Asked why the company continued to manufacture “Hypo Phony”? Fishlove said, “Because we can still legally make it and it’s a profitable item.” The toy was introduced in 1958 and is still being marketed today.
However, for anyone over the age of 40, the “bomb” of all dangerous toys, literally, were the “Clackers” a.k.a. Clankers, Ker-Bangers, Klick-Klacks, Whackers, Ker-Knockers, Whack’os, Bangers, Poppers, Bonkers, Clack Clacks, K-Nokkers, Super Clackers, Whak-Kos, Kwick Klacks, Quick Wacks, Zonkers, Popper Knockers, Crackers, Wackers, Knockers and various other names that could blow up your Internet search engine. Introduced in 1968, these Clackers featured golfball-sized tempered glass (later changed to polymer) attached to a finger tab by a sturdy string. The objective was to hold the tab with the balls hanging down, move your hand up and down in a motion that makes the two balls swing apart and back together, making the distinctive clacking noise that gives the toy its name.
Forgot what they look like? Google Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album cover, Mick Fleetwood sports a pair hanging from his belt as Stevie Nicks dances near him. Trouble was, Clackers could eventually shatter, sending shards into the face of the user and anyone else nearby. Seems that American toy makers never mentioned that Clackers were very similar in appearance to bolas, the Argentine Vaquero’s weapon used to lasso an animal’s (or opponent’s) legs.
All of this hubbub left most of us late-stage Baby Boomers and early Generation Xers with a feeling of invincibility born of surviving the sixties, seventies, and eighties. A bulletproof confidence that manifests itself daily in a sea of social media memes. But for me, my lasting memory of this era comes from Irwin Mainway. During season two of Saturday Night Live, a holiday season episode aired on December 11, 1976. It featured the SNL OG Dan Aykroyd playing the role of a toy company president. His character, a slimy, pinky ring-wearing character named Irwin Mainway was asked by that week’s guest host, Candice Bergen, to explain his company’s new offerings on a TV talk show called the Consumer Probe.
Aykroyd’s character comically tries to defend the safety of his holiday toy line. Bergen holds up a clear plastic bag of glass and proclaims, “Mr. Mainway, this is simply a bag of jagged, dangerous glass bits.” Aykroyd oozes sleaze as he twists his pinky ring and tugs at his tie while bobbing his head and hiding beyond a pair of sunglasses. “Yeah, it’s broken glass. It sells very well, you know. We’re just packaging what the kids want. It’s a creative toy. It teaches the kids about light refractions, prisms, and that stuff.” To which Bergen responds, “So you don’t feel this product is dangerous?” Mainway slurs his last “s” like a snake and says, “No. We put a label on every bag. It says: ‘Kid… Be careful… Broken glass…’” He closes by promoting other offerings in the “Bag O’” product line, including nails, vipers, and sulphuric acid. “They’re decent toys, you know what I mean?”
But what about the toy that kicked this article off? The Buzzbee? Well, tune in next week for the answer to that question and more.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
