I should have set the time frame better in the first blog. I was born in 1930 and spent childhood in Richmond Hill, a section of Queens County of NYC. My father was always employed through the depression as a NYC teacher so we were really unaware of the financial pressures on many families around us. The flying model time of Blog#1 was probably from 1937 to 1942, my age 7 to 12. These were pre-war days in the USA.
One of the most amazing recollections I have is the toys we had around then. Of course I can only relate to what Jack and I, boys that is, had and were used to. Girls were different, I suppose. (Weren't they always?) To begin, we always had knives, penknives whose blades folded into the handle. It was important to always have access to a sharp blade for all sorts of things: sharpening a pencil, whittling a block of balsa wood, cutting off a promising fork in a bush to make into a slingshot, cutting a string to the right length, playing mumbledy-peg by tossing it the air and hoping the point would stick into the ground. Countless necessary applications.
Next was the aforementioned slingshot ('catapult' in the UK). These could be bought in any 5 &10, many toy stores and candy stores for a few cents. They had a wire frame and a leather socket to hold the projectile, connected by thin rubber bands to the frame. But, these were considered lesser tools. What was a real slingshot consisted of was a cut from a sturdy wooden branch forming a Y. The power was supplied by strips of rubber cut from inner tubing to a width of 1/4 to 1/2 an inch. This had power! You could launch a rock half an inch or more in diameter that could break a bottle at 50 feet. It could also thrust a home-made parachute wrapped around a small toy soldier high into the air so you could see the chute open and the soldier carried safely to the ground.
But what really surprises me today were some of the toys we were given as presents for birthday or Christmas. Pistols with holsters and gun belts studded with wooden bullets were common. Most of these merely made the hammer slap against th frame with each pull on the trigger but others could accept astrip of caps, which were little pockets of explosive in a regual sequence along a paper strip. These cap guns would produce small pops as the hammer struck each cap in turn. I remember one Christmas when we were given a 'sound studio' with which we could theoretically produce a radio program will 'real' sound effects. This was a cardboard stand with sound effect devices including a handle which rotated a metal wheel over bumps in a metal plate to simulate train track clacking, a double horn which simulated a fog horn, bells, rachets, gongs, and what not to make sounds. Other than a set of toy drums, what more disruptive noisemakers could the adults have been thinking of? Even better were the chemistry sets, which grew larger each year. These had the direction and ingredients for gunpowder: sulfur, charcaol, and potassium nitrate. A set always had an alcohol lamp (a pretend bunsen burner) which we were directed to use to heat a glass tube to redness when by pulling on the ends would neatly stretch into a very fine section of hollow tube suitable, I suppose to make your own hypodermic? Alsowe learned that by closing the end of a glass tube and the adjoining half inch you could blow into the open end a blow the molten glass into a globe. Of course if you blew too much the globe might shatter into ultra thin shards of glass. But the Christmas gift I rmember best (or worst) was the little foundry. We we directed to plug in the furnace and insert small ingots of lead which were then heated to the molten state. We would then tip the vat of liquid metal to pour into a mold. One mold produced a thin military tank, the other produced a small toy soldier. Let me point out that supposedly intelligent adults gave ten year old and eleven year old boys a device to melt and work with molten metal.
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