There is an amazing ocean of change that has occurred in playthings and toys - what I think is necessary for my grandchildren, what I thought was necessary for my children, and what I actually played with when I was a child.

Myself, I had very few toys - some balls, some jacks, clamp-on roller skates when I was 8 (you tightened the metal clips with a key – my sister and I shared the skates and I had fits when she lost the key on the dirty string that we alternated wearing around our necks), a bicycle (bought used and refurbished and painted with red enamel by my father) when I was 9, a tennis racket as a young teenager.

We also had some games - Monopoly, checkers, chess.  No TV (until I went away to college).

I asked for books for every celebratory occasion, birthday, Chanukah, well, I think that was it. I had a bookshelf with my cherished stories – Little Women, Black Beauty, Robin Hood, The Secret Garden, Strawberry Girl, What the Moon Saw,  A Child’s Garden of Verses.  Mostly I walked to the library twice a week - either the one on Glen Oak or the one across from the post office on Main Street.

No stuffed animals. No puzzles. No doll houses or farm sets or castles unless we made them ourselves out of oatmeal boxes (if we could wrest them away from our mother who used them to store, oh, spools of thread or whatever) or out of tin cans or string and wire scavenged from my father's shed.

Few dolls (not quite true, I had a small collection of “Storybook Dolls” my favorite aunt sent me for my birthdays) except for a kewpie and a Shirley Temple doll.   My mother never had to tell me to put away my toys as the few I had were precious and I kept them very well.

We were not a poor family. Pretty much middle class (my father was a chemical engineer, my mother a housewife most of the time).  The point is, my friends didn’t have many toys either. Nobody did. If you didn’t have a bike or skates, then you probably were quite poor.

At school, at recess, we played softball – a few lucky ducks had their own baseball mitts but mostly we played barehanded.  Or box hockey (I was very competitive at that game and had a lot of bruises to show for it).

The best toys were those we made ourselves. My girlfriends and I sewed doll clothes out of fabric scraps our mothers gave us. My friend Mary Dayhuff’s mother taught us how to embroider in Girl Scouts.  And we made our own paper dolls. Out of catalogs. Or occasionally, we’d receive a book of paper dolls  (like this Sparkle Plenty paper doll book)

as a gift or we saved up our pennies from our allowances.

Mary and I would spend hours at the 5 and dime choosing a paper doll book from the dozen or so different ones on the rack. They’d get new ones every month, we waited anxiously to see which new movie star was going to be featured. Or fat babies – we thought those fat baby paper dolls were so cute.

We’d use the clothes we cut out of the books as patterns for our own crayoned or watercolor creations - never as perfect as the ones in the book, but satisfying anyway. We spent hours and hours after school playing on her front step, until my father whistled for me and I’d scamper away home, a block away, to flop in front of the radio and listen to my stories – and then to sit down to a family dinner at 6 sharp.

I can’t be remembering this properly. There must be rose-colored glasses through which I'm seeing. And hearing aids that filter out all negativity.  Nonetheless, that’s how I’m remembering it today.