Among my most beneficial traits, is the ability to be easily amused. My affinity for all things shiny is legendary. On more than one occasion, I have kept myself enthralled for up to ten minutes with nothing more than a spoon and my skill at making goofy faces. My wife has been an eye witness to this rain man-esque potpourri of personal quirks for almost seven years now. She is all but convinced I have some form of ADD. I prefer to think of myself as delightfully eccentric and fun loving. At any rate, this is a trait that has served me well throughout my life.

This trait has its roots in my upbringing. I was born the last of six children in a middle income family. The shepherds of flocks this large become rather adept at providing for the needs of the herd on a budget that could generously be referred to as spartan. My folks could squeeze the value out of a dollar with more ferocity than a bustier struggling to contain Dolly Parton's bosoms. What does this have to do with my being amused? As with other aspects of my childhood, when funds ran short, imagination took over. Now to be fair, as the baby of the family, I probably saw more brand new toys than the rest of my siblings. Still, by comparison, I'm sure my toy box paled in comparison to the treasure troves that kids in today's immediate gratification and pacification world call their own.

Sometimes a kid's best toy is his imagination. One of my favorite things to do when there was no money for a toy car was to make a car, truck, or bus out of an old egg carton. As the pictures included with this entry clearly indicate, I could still use this skill to kill twenty minutes or so. Of course, there were always hand-me-down toys. We employed a pay-it-forward policy on Hot Wheels. Each brother would play with them, add a few to the collection, and pass them on. What did we do when we got tired of playing with the same cars? Why sand them down and paint them of course. Brand new cars, just like that (imagine snapping fingers at this juncture). We all drew the line at Matchbox cars, though. We were of the opinion as a family that Matchbox cars sucked like a Hoover. Matchbox cars were for the poor kids.

Apparently, I really liked cars when I was a kid. When I wasn't playing with toy cars or egg cartons, I was drawing pictures of cars. We kids actually drew a lot. My favorite subjects were horses, dogs, cars, and Santa Claus. I never liked drawing people too much. I could draw animals free hand out of my head, but I generally needed reference material for drawing people. I was pretty decent at drawing people; I just didn't enjoy it as much as drawing other things. Drawing the cars was fun because you could really go wild and let the imagination flow. Radically huge rear wheels and jacked-up back ends, tiny front wheels, and side pipes were very popular amongst me and my circle of fellow eight year old designers. We were no doubt heavily influenced by those Hot Wheels which we so loved.

If I were particularly bored, I could even entertain myself in the living room recliner. With a pair of dad's work gloves and a scarf from the coat closet, I instantly morphed from sedentary child into drag racer. By simply reclining, I morphed again into astronaut preparing for blast off. I was a huge fan of the space program and had seriously considered that as a valid career choice until I researched it and found that test pilots and astronauts occasionally died fiery and gruesome deaths. I would have to settle for one my back ups; trash man or President of the United States of America. Absolute power or a cool truck? Hard decision.

Speaking of fun with furniture, I would be willing to bet almost every person in the world has played "hot lava" at one time or another. This is the game where the floor in any given room in the house is purported to be molten lava, and the only way to safely transit the room is by not touching the floor. This entails acrobatic feats rarely seen above shag carpet in rural Kansas. Orange, deep pile shag carpet, by the way, is a very convincing substitute for lava. The most hazardous challenge of this game is to not let one's mother catch him in the act of playing the game. It was always better to feign ignorance rather than getting caught red handed when mom would ask, "How in the name of all that is holy did foot prints get on the wall?"

Home made and reusable toys were always good ways to have some cheap fun. Squirt guns were always immensely popular in the summer months, and, when the allowance allowed, water balloons were a nice way to escalate the battle. Squirt guns were great because one could refill them until they either broke, or he got sick of them. My best friend Danny's dad, next door, had an enormous garage with lots of tools, and it always seemed to have an overabundance of scrap wood. We made all kinds of things out of the scraps. One of my favorites was rubber band guns. These were incredibly simple. We made the basic gun shape, and a strategically placed wooden, springed clothes pin accounted for the trigger mechanism. A small nail at the front of the "barrel" provided the launch point for the elastic projectile as well as looking impressively like a sight. In the wood and rubber arms race, longer was almost always better. The idea was to stretch the rubber bands as far as possible without breaking them in order to maximize the welt raising potential.

That was another yardstick of a great toy in my youth. The toys that often were the most fun also had the best chance of seriously injuring or maiming a child. I fondly remember clackers. These were toys that were very popular in the early to mid seventies. They were basically two hard plastic balls connected by two lengths of heavy twine to a central ring. A kid would "clack" these together using a swift up and down wrist motion that would be put to much safer use later, during adolescence. Naturally, it was a short leap to deduce that one could inflict some serious pain upon a sibling if one were to somehow manage to sandwich one of said sibling's appendages between the rapidly colliding orbs. Alas, the fun was ruined for all as it turned out that clackers had the pesky tendency to sometimes explode in a supernova of hurtling plastic shards and were, hence, removed from the market.

All really great toys, in my book, had two common characteristics. They were dirt cheap and had some sort of projectile capability. Paddle Ball fell into this category. Although I lacked the hand-eye coordination required for proficiency with this toy, I rarely used it in the manner intended. When used as a self returning rubber missile with a six foot range, this toy was excellent at raising welts on sisters and friends. Also key here was the fact that when using it this way, one only need to be able to hit the ball once. Yoyos also combined the qualities of easy retrieval and maximum firepower. The fact that this was yet another toy for which I lacked the dexterity to use as intended was lost on me. While others were "walking the dog" I was "whacking the sister." Even family recreational items of my youth had an element of airborne danger. We had games like lawn darts and horseshoes.

"I'm getting tired of throwing sharpened metal pikes at you. Let's go get out the two and a half pound hunks of metal and heave those at each other for a while."

Of course, living adjacent to a wheat field, if we ever got tired of throwing professionally engineered toys at each other, we could always have a good, old clod fight. This was the practice of running around the farmer's field when it was fallow and chucking dirt clods at each other. The farmer who worked the land behind our house was a good conservationist and employed the use of terracing. As well as being a sound way to prevent erosion, terraces also provided for natural cover and the back sides of them made for dandy fox holes. It seams that if the activity didn't have a fifty per cent or greater chance of raising a welt or a bruise we weren't interested. As we grew older, the wheat field also made an excellent driving range if we couldn't make it to the Rooks County Country Club.

Sometimes, the best way to a new toy was to alter an old toy. At some point, just having my Evel Kneivel doll jump things was no longer doing it for me. I got to wondering how Evel might handle a flaming crash. I enlisted the help of a lighter from the junk drawer. As it turns out, it was a career ending event for the hapless Mr. Kneivel. He was buried in a quiet sunset ceremony in the alley behind our house. Quiet here means mom was never informed. The odds of receiving the next toy I just had to have would be seriously decreased if news of the stuntman's tragic demise became common knowledge. It was also during this pyromania phase that I discovered what a Tonka truck with flaming wheels looked like. That really was a crying shame. This was back in the days when they were actually made of metal. Who knows? Today it may be a collector's item. Oh well. At least Evel could now be exhumed and buried in style. The burned out shell of a Tonka Truck is quite stylish regardless of what any naysayer might say to the contrary.

I guess the pinnacle of my toy altering days was the time I decided GI Joe needed a shave. Manscaping metrosexuality aside, I can tell anyone who might be wondering, Joe should always wear the beard. Along with the beard, several nice chunks of plastic departed from Joe's face as well. Fortunately, being inanimate, Joe could feel no pain. Unfortunately for me, my father was able to feel pain, as it was his razor I used to groom Joe. I would have to say dad was very animated as well. It's a good thing all the projectiles were put away.