We continue with my trial run of Share Your Nostalgia, an idea suggested to me by some fellow bloggers. The topic for this feature is “The Toy of Your Life.” Was there one toy that you considered the “best?” When you think of yourself as a child, what is the toy that immediately pops into your mind? What was the toy that you brought to Show and Tell or took with you everywhere?
Today, we shine the spotlight on Christian. Christian is another one of the great music lovers I’ve connected with here on WordPress. His blog is loaded with all kinds of musical writings. He has a love for 1960’s and 1970’s music, but his blog is far from just those decades. You can check him out at Christian’s Music Musings: https://christiansmusicmusings.wordpress.com/
Take it away, Christian –
When fellow blogger Keith (Nostalgic Italian) reached out to me the other day to see whether I’d like to participate in his call for contributions about the “Toy of Your Life,” I immediately accepted. Then I thought, ‘oh, oh, what am I going to write about?’ After all, I really can’t point to one specific object that was THE toy. As such, I decided to take a bit of liberty and write about my (childhood) obsession with toy cars.
I remember my mom often told me that when I was a toddler back in Germany, I would always walk around carrying stuff in my hands. This included all kinds of pens in different colors and a Tonka-type plastic toy truck. At some point, I guess by the time of first grade, I had discovered Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. I couldn’t get enough of them. And I found an ingenious way to increase my supply!
During much of my early childhood, I had blood anemia and needed to take iron in liquid form – yuck, not a medicine I can recommend! The condition also required frequent blood
monitoring. This meant my mom had to take me our primary care doctor where they always stuck my finger to collect blood.
I was very afraid of the little needles the assistant used to take my blood and always made a big scene. On one such occasion, out of despair, my mom once told me if I would be brave, she would reward me with a Matchbox car after the doctor’s visit. While I still dreaded the needles, that sounded good to me!
And so I began accumulating Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. I played with them all the time, alone and with my best friend who I met in second grade and who I’m still fortunate to call my best friend to this day. At some point, we began building roads in the sandbox that was in the backyard of his house and taking our cars there – safe to assume a few of them got buried forever!
At some point as I grew bigger, so did the toy cars. Matchbox and Hot Wheels were out, and I started collecting cars that were about twice the size of a Matchbox car. I remember one of the brands was called Siku. One of the cars was a BMW 630CSI like the one pictured below, though I believe mine was silver.
During my early teenage years, I started collecting even bigger toy cars (1:18 scale) by Schuco and other toy car makers. Those cars had many more details and looked way more sophisticated. One, a red Mercedes 280SL convertible even had a working steering wheel. I also had a red Porsche 911 (still my favorite sports car to this day!) that looked similar to the below model, though it wasn’t a Targa.
While I kept my bigger cars on display in my room well into my late teens, once I started getting my first guitar and taking lessons, guitars became my new toy of interest, and the toy cars on the shelves started collecting dust.
While I’m older now (at least on paper!), I will say my fascination for toy cars has never entirely disappeared. When my son was a toddler and the Pixar movie Cars came out, it didn’t take much to convince papi (as he usually called me) to start collecting die-cast models of Lightning McQueen, Tow Mater, Doc Hudson or Sally Carrera. In fact, oftentimes it felt papi was more excited than his son!
Even to this day when I happen to spot toy cars in the pharmacy, I sometimes stop and glance to see what kind of makes and models they have. If I were a kid, I’m sure I’d like some them, especially muscle cars.
Since I’m a music blogger, I can’t wrap up this post without some music. As such, I’m leaving you with three car/driving songs, including one titled Matchbox Cars, though it’s not about toy cars but real cars looking like Matchbox cars from the 52nd floor of a skyscraper – but, hey, close enough!
Deep Purple/Highway Star (1972) – perhaps the ultimate driving song!
Golden Earring/Radar Love (1973) – another contender for best driving song!
Coot/Matchbox Cars (2012) – from the eponymous debut album of this New Orleans-based rock band who are completely new to me – I guess they passed the audition!
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 
I think I’ll enjoy this series! 😀
I think I knew more about cars when I was a nipper than now. All thanks to Matchbox and probably more so, the slightly larger scale Corgi cars. Corgi would do ‘specials’ like James Bond’s Aston Martin and The Batmobile and Green Hornet’s car. Oh and Man from UNCLE!
Matchbox though were wee works of art. So much detail and in metal too … none of your plastic rubbish you get these days!
😀
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Corgis! right, I forgot about them but had a few of them too – very British, and like you said, a bit bigger than the HW and Matchbox. Can’t remember exactly what ones but I think one was a London cab!
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I think we all need to build a time machine, so we can go back to our childhood toy cars! :-)
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YES!!! I had the Aston Martin. It had the ejector seat, the machine guns in the front, and bullet shield in the back. I loved the 007 pictures and playing with that car! :-)
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my brother loved his toy cars and we had tracks all over the house!
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Those tracks were fun to build. They were not so fun when it was what my dad used to whoop us!
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we would run around the house smacking each other with them )
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Thanks again for participating, pal. I also had a ton of Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars. My neighbor’s mom decided not to do a garden one year and we built an entire city in it. We dug holes for the garage, used a putty knife to make the roads, and I think we made a lake, too! What a blast!!
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Thanks again for having me. And, wow, that sounds like quite a large scale construction. All we (my best friend and I) ever did was street construction in the sandbox! :-)
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This was on my radar as well as a kid. I favored Matchbox over Hot Wheels for some reason as a kid and I had a couple of huge cases of them…I did have some Hot Wheels as well though. I would get the race tracks with the orange track and race them with friends for hours and hours.
Great write up Christian…I like the songs as well.
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Oh, I remember the orange tracks. At some point, I had some as well! :-)
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Well….a few years ago we went to an out of town wedding. We stayed overnight at a hotel and we were bored in the middle of the day so we went to yardsales. I am the proud owner of a huge box of those orange tracks…I want to put a big racetrack together.
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Alright then! :-)
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It also has some small buildings with it…I’m looking forward to it lol.
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:-)
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Great stuff Christian and I suspect, not to be sexist about it but most little boys develop an obsession with vehicles at some point. Sounds like you had an impressive collection! My grandson plays with a few of my cars that survived my childhood, including my Tonka trucks.
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I wouldn’t say I had a massive collection, but it was pretty decent. I no longer have any of the toy cars. I believe my parents gave them away when I move to the U.S. Hopefully, they made some other kid(s) happy! :-)
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Awesome Christian! We have some things in common there – I was sick a lot as a kid too, had Hot Wheels and matchbox cars (mostly Hot Wheels but I had some Matchboxes too, my favorite of which was a Greyhound bus though it irked me it was the same length as their Volkswagen!) and enjoyed playing with them immensely. I managed to keep quite a few into my adulthood and actually made decent money selling some on E-bay as I really kept my toys in good shape! And like you, the Porsche 911 is my fave sports car. My brother’s always been ga-ga for Ferraris but to me, meh… but the Porsche is pretty cool.
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The 911 rules! :-)
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Now, that kinda looled familiar – thanks again for inviting me, Keith! :-)
As I was writing the post, my obsession with toy cars all came back to me. Good times!
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