From the useful to the Inane, a multi-part series…
I think one of the funniest things you can do when you’re 60 is to look back at the inane, ridiculous toys you played with and wonder what kind of lunatic dreamed the crap up.
I’m going to try to touch on some of the neat and stupid stuff they pawned off on us sixties kids.
First, let’s look at caps.
Caps were red paper rolls with little raised lumps of ‘gunpowder’ every inch of so. Although dirt cheap, they were problematic from the start. The cap itself was not on a perforation, so you had to tear it off. The paper was very thick, almost cardboard, so you frequently bent the cap beyond usefulness, or ruined one cap just to get a used one off the roll. The roll was also very easily dampened, so if you left caps out on a humid night, they rotted. Also, laying caps out on a hard surface couldn’t work if there was a breeze. The paper was tough to rip, but flimsy enough to blow away if an ant sneezed.
Your reward for all this work was a little pop that was as loud as a bubble wrap pop. The most surefire way to pop a cap was dad’s hammer. Ask any kid from that time, you could bang on a cap with toy guns, rocks, hulks of wood, but a hammer was most reliable,
Caps fed every toy gun, from army guns to cowboy pistols. How exciting to pull out the roll, rip off a cap, put it in your gun, pull the trigger, and find the cap wasn’t centered. Try again–this one is damp. New cap, this one is a dud. So you just yelled, “Bang! You’re dead!”
Eventually, caps came in perforated rolls. But by then, companies put out guns that made their own noises. They tried making guns that held a roll of caps and advanced them as you fired, but ask anyone. The caps never advanced correctly, and you either wound up pulling the trigger and getting ‘click’, or you had a yard of unfired caps hanging off the gun.
On the fourth of July, I was banging caps on the sidewalk and daddy decides he’s going to set off these fireworks that he smuggled into the US from Canada with accompanying drama. Except these fireworks were smaller than an infant’s pinkie. I retreated to the house so I wasn’t associated with this embarrassing escapade. Sure, enough, they go off with a spurt as loud as a cat fart. Seeing the humor (a rare thing, lemmee tell ya!), he sets off the whole pack. You can barely hear them over the neighbor’s lawn mower. I could have made more noise with a ‘George-Carlin-artificial-fart-under -the-arm.’ He retreats, I’m back outside with caps.