The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys | Cracked.com
I’m kind of divided here. On the one hand, in the clear light of 21st C day, these toys are totally *insane.* On the other, I was born in the mid-1970s and grew up in the suburbs outside Detroit, and I *remember* kids just a little older than me casting their own lead soldiers, for example. As middle schoolers we’d buy calcium carbide (used to power the Austin Magic Pistol in the embedded video) from the hardware store and make acetylene lamps from baby food jars and fire-balls with party balloons and soda bottles (I haven’t the foggiest what the approved use of calcium carbide was in the 1980s; it isn’t like I grew up in coal country).
The final bit of nostalgia: The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory.
Did I own one of these? Sweet Monkey Jesus *NO*! But I *did* take to rock collecting in early elementary, which lead to my mom giving me her old rock collections–mostly bought as little pre-boxed souvenir sets while on family vacations (she grew up in the West). Right in the middle of these was a little off-white chunk of stone; it could have been an especially pale chip of concrete, except for it’s red, all-caps label: URANIUM
No lie. Welcome to the Atomic Age in America.
I haven’t the foggiest where that rock set wound up. Part of my *really* wants to know, but the rest just hopes it isn’t kicking around my basement office where I sit typing most days.
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