Weekend finds - toy edition

[1918ColonialRevival]

I'm not a serious toy collector, but I always feel the need to rescue a piece if I see it in a situation where it may be threatened. These came from secondhand shops and flea markets last weekend:



First up is probably the best find of the group. It's a large toy steam shovel made by Keystone of Boston, MA. There's a 1925 patent date on the label and I have seen this toy in several catalogs of the mid to late 1920s. It's big enough that most adults at the time would have considered it an "outside" toy. Condition is pretty good considering.



This is an O scale dining car made by Ives of Bridgeport, CT. This version of the No. 130 Buffet car was made from 1914 to 1916.




Another O scale Ives car, this time a No. 129 Saratoga. The color of the body dates this one to 1919 or 1920.




This set of three Ives cars has had the roofs repainted at some point. One day, I'll try to get the new paint off. The orange bodied cars with this style of trucks date to 1923 or 1924. The original roof color will determine the exact date, though I think the Observation car without journals on the trucks is 1924 only.



These are the shorter bodied O-scale Ives cars, numbers 60, 61, 62, and 68. The green bodies with orange lettering and green roofs date to 1926. Only one of these cars still has its original roof color. The car with the observation deck is lighted.




Two Ives No 135s and a No 136 Observation car from 1927. These cars are lighted.




An Ives No 135 from the Patriot set of 1930.


Once we get our living room finished, we plan to use these and some of the other toys of the 1910s and 1920s we've amassed in a Christmastime display. One of these days....

[heartwood]

I love old toys!
for someone who says they're not a serious collector, you sure do know a lot about these pieces...
hard to believe most of them are almost 100 years old...
they will look especially nice around the holiday--all lit up!
enjoy....
....jade

[phil]

Careful with those toys , they look pretty addictive! some have retired to their basements where they create their own miniature towns and cities and are never to be seen again !

I saw a road race set for free. i couldnt resist so .. I picked it up and was completely taken aback to my childhood. I remembered every detail of the cars, even how the transformers and such were made. what the motors looked like and how the brushes attached and so on. the cars were all hand painted, I remembered doing that as well so it was sort of like taking a trip back in time. the paint jobs look like a kid did them and I remembered producing such similar results with a little bottle of testors paint that was too thick and a brush that was too stiff to produce anythign smooth. I wondered if they were once mine but maybe I wasn't the only kid to paint my little race cars. ?

your steam shovel reminded me. I had a sandbox with a shovel like that. It had hand levers to control the bucket and a seat to sit on. It had a pivot under the seat. it was painted red and made from plywood and the paint was all peeling. If you manipulated the handles you could dig up sand and put it in the toy trucks and so forth.. what a great toy. I dont think I remembered it since I was a kid and its fun to remember stuff that is lodged so far back in our memories.

does the steam shovel use steam or is the tank just for show? I also picked up a little steam engine and got a bit fascinated with memoroies of playing with the one my brother had. The same company made some that were working models so they would chug around the back yard while burning that solid fuel that cam in little chunks. .. I actually feel privileged that we were allowed to have dangerous toys like that. the science kits were fascinating. one I remember was lead soldiers where we would melt lead in a pot with a ladle and pour the little soldiers and paint them , probably with leaded paint. some of the soldiers had little cigarettes that you could light and stick in a hole in their mouth they would burn for quite a while..

its funny how our brains work , it amazes me how we can forget stuff for decades and then when we really think the right way these old long forgotten memories come back.. many are not of any significance but it makes me wonder how much we really have in our heads that is only retrieved by some certain condition. I sometimes even wonder if maybe there are exercises to resurrect these memories. I find myself asking questions like what did the bathrooms look like in kindergarten? or what kind of car did the neighbors two doors over have when I was a child. I think its fun when they do come back clearly and to think gee I haven't thought of that for 40 years. maybe that's the cause of the addiction

[Gothichome]

Phill, it’s called regressive memory, according to my nurse daughter it’s something that happens when you get old. Not that it has happened to me of course. But let me tell you a story.
I recall as very much younger adult, setting fire to a closet under the stairs. At the time we lived in England (my dad was in the navy stationed there) the electricity was on a meter and you put coins in a meter to keep the electricity on. Well I recall we (my brother and I)were watching the Lone Ranger on the ‘telly’ and the power went off. Now I did not want to miss the end of the show so I struck a match, with coin in hand I climbed on a box of news paper trying to insert the coin in the meter, well of course I dropped the match into the stack of old paper. As you can expect it didn’t go well from there. My mum, was soon to run down the stairs on smelling the smoke and had the fire out in no time. I never did get to see the end of that Lone Ranger show.
Good thing I don’t have age related regressive memory problems, I may never have recalled this story.

[phil]

I was taking a course in instructing recently. some of the reading suggested that we remember things and store them as normal but during a time of stress these memories are stored a bit differently. memories you store under stress are easily retrieved. also as you recall a memory you tend to put it back where you can find it , sometimes memories get altered slightly each time and that can result in slightly fictional memories I guess like data getting retrieved and recorded multiple times it can get a bit corrupted. If you were in a car accident you might retrieve and store that memory frequently but also change it slightly in doing so. Someone at the side of the road who was only a witness may actually have a clearer picture of the event some time after because they stored it when they were calm and didn't keep retrieving it and putting it back so often as the person involved in the accident.

they try to plan courses so that the student gets a manageable amount of stress. that might be like giving someone a task but rather than writing out every detail , allowing them to think through how they will complete it in the assigned time. If you work under extreme stress then you tend to use the tried and true methods that have worked for you in the past as you are in a reactionary mode. In that state you aren't learning you are reacting. As we dream we sort of reorganize our daily events and store the memories more logically and discard some that are less relevant like where you put your keys three days ago or what you ate for breakfast. I find it interesting how I sometimes work out solutions to problems around the house as I dream.

I look at it this way: we all have the function of forgetting memories. If we did not have that ability our minds would be clogged with useless garbage. This ability is often considered a human flaw but it isn't a flaw, it is an important function of our minds. Some of us are better at it than others. with age we get better at forgetting things but it's as much a blessing as a flaw. One way to reduce our stress level is to get better at forgetting

maybe Alzheimers and dementia are different. Memories get lost and people get confused. a week ago I took my aging mom out for a drive and went by some of the houses that she lived in , that my dad built. sometimes she's more clear and sometimes more confused but it is getting more debilitating over time. we had to make the decision to put a wander guard on her so it sets off the alarm if he leaves her care home without an attendant. . I guess it got necessary for her safety but we of course didn't want that before it was necessary for her safety. I wondered if seeing some of the older houses and the areas she lived in would trigger memories but she didn't actually seem as interested as I thought she might be. At least we had a nice day out.

Another bit that resonated is that as we get older, in order to learn we need to have the reason to learn. We question why we need to know this? we tend to refuse new input unless it seems interesting or important. When instructing we can organize the introduction to include why we need to know this. without that you tend to get the eyes glazed over look because they aren't listening because they dont recognize the reason to gather the input but when we recognize good reason why we need to remember things, we then focus our attention.

I was trying to practice a bit so I tried to teach my girlfriend trigonometry. I actually had a hard time remembering it myself since I really dont have a need to use it. I found she was very disinterested in my little experiment. later I realized it was because she really could not see a reason to use it. Maybe I would have a better attempt if I could think of a situation where it could help her. Myself I found practical math easy to learn but when it came to more advanced math were I could not see any physical relation to what I was learning it got harder to focus on..

lucky mom got the fire out. we had a neighbor across the street where after a power outage the kids started playing with candles. Fire gutted the house. I found it surprising they rebuilt it because it was severely damaged throughout the inside. there was very little salvageable.