Musical Wanderer

Just like one doing regular day-trading of stocks, I made bad picks and barely broke even or even lost on some.  Frequently I made I made several times what I paid.  I even kept a couple things I never would have considered buying, partially because some things were not available when I was a kid and were, I have to say it, sort of cool. Who bought the items I sold on ebay?  I sold to a few dozen folk, mostly to guys in small towns across the US.   Some people bought multiple items.  One buyer I looked up on the ebay community page was a goth woman in Pennsylvania (well the person in the picture looked like a woman).  One item made its way to Athens (Greece, not Ohio or Georgia) and another to lower Manhattan—I looked up the address on googlemap photo: it was a sketchy warehouse near the East River.  Ebay maintains feedback on sellers and buyers so a buyer can see if they can trust some stranger to send something after the buyer sends payment....

I ran across some of my toys from my childhood, stored in boxes under the bed and in the closet of the spare room of my parents' place.  Most of my childhood things were destroyed in a fire a couple decades ago, but some toys and papers somehow survived.  It was a trip through memory lane.  Matchbox cars, crafted animals, school projects, some old lego blocks, remnants of some plastic models.  Among the boxes were sets of plastic toy soldiers of different sizes.  One of the most famous lines in the history of movies is in the Graduate when a family friend, Mr. McGuire, provides counsel to the young confused Benjamin Braddock played by Dustin Hoffman.  The reader doubtless is shouting out the magic word as he/she reads this: Plastics.  Mr. McGuire’s suggestion for Benjamin’s future was correct, as the metal and wooden toys available when my brother and to a lesser extent I were boys have been replaced by plastic toys.  Today metal toys are more u...

The 1960s was the golden age of plastic toys.  It was the first full decade of mass produced plastic toys of a wide variety.  Yes, toys are still overwhelmingly made of plastic, but if you look through toy stores, there is a tendency to have nodes of toy lines, Lego, Disney, Fischer Price, Thomas Trains, etc, frequently tied in with movies and television.  Back in the 60s shelves were awash with inexpensive, royalty-free toys of different kinds even if they were manufactured by a couple companies.  Toy vehicles were a favorite for boys, and, before the growing awareness of the Vietnam War reduced their popularity, tanks and other military vehicles were a favorite subject.  A particular favorite toy set of mine was, and still is, the Miniature Military Vehicles produced by MPC.  They came in a set of 40 different items, each vehicle about an inch long, representing the armies of the US, Germany, UK, USSR, and France.  Most were a single molded shape,...