And Now a Word From Our Sponsors...

I know... I know... already I'm distracted from writing Chapter 31. Think of it as a short commercial break.

Something happened in the archives that I missed until this week and it triggered these thoughts

Back in December of 2006, I wrote a post called "Toys of Christmas Past." In that post I talked about a back yard "toy" called a Hump-a-Jump. About the time of these "Unsettled" chapters, my brother Dave and I wanted a Hump-a-Jump for Christmas.

While writing that post, I googled "Hump-a-Jump," but there was simply no internet proof that the large toy had ever existed. I did my best to describe it, and moved on to other posts returning only once in two years.

But lo and behold, a while ago a dialogue started in the comment section of that post and I missed it until this week. Wow! Lots of Detroit-area Boomers remember Hump-a-Jumps. I reattempted a search and found a recent Youtube clip that substantiates our collective memory. (Though I must admit... in my mind, the Hump-a-Jump was bigger and threw kids much higher in the air.) Anyway, our first sponsor is Hump-a-Jump, a product that probably got yanked off the market due to a law suit.

And now a word from our second sponsor: Jarts, a toy that was likewise banned from production and sale in the U.S. in the mid 1980's. Remember this fun back-yard missile game? We had it--millions of American families played it for years. It was sort of like horse shoes...a cold-war, intercontinental ballistic missile version of horseshoes.

Imagine taking all the danger of real, poke-you-in-the-eye darts and making them ten-times bigger and heavier, capable of soaring high in the air and coming straight down to harpoon the earth. Imagine putting them in an attractive package with rules and safety precautions that no child bothered to read for ten years. Imagine leaving these colorful, inviting toys on beaches, picnic tables and front porches all across America. [Imagine John Lennon singing this paragraph.]

Do you see the thoughtful boy in the "banned" image above.? Well, I suppose my brothers and I looked like that sometimes, but typically we were not playing the game by the rules printed on the inside of the box. We played "Three-yard Jarts" (a version of the game where the rings are set up in front of two different houses with a "no fly zone" yard in between), We also played "Over-the-house Jarts" (needs no explanation but sometimes required a ladder), and last and most dangerous… we played "Deep Dirt Darts" where the Jart was hurled with a full-circle underhand swing high into the air only to see how deep the Jart would go into the lawn when it came back down.

My brothers and I were living proof of Fig Newton's Third Law: For every proper use of a toy there is an equal and opposite improper use.

Even more than the Hump-a-Jump, Jarts were the kind of toy that now makes grown Boomers scream, "What were they thinking when they invented that?" Libertarians would say, "Why didn't they ban the game of horse shoes. Throw a three pound Clydesdale cleat into the air and it could kill someone, too." But horseshoes is a "throw-back" (no pun intended) to frontier days and Amish ways. No kid was ever tempted to see how high he could throw a horse shoe.

Jarts, on the other hand, hit the market at the peak of the "jet age" and lunar landings. The same societal urge that prompted engineers to put fins on car fenders twenty years before had now replaced the old-man Coke-sipping game of tossing cast iron shoes with the Pepsi generation game of launching plastic rockets! The front end of a Jart was heavy; the fins guided it like a rocket; Jarts begged to be thrown high in the air. I for one could not resist (any more than I can resist tapping the top of a kettle drum when I pass one on an empty stage).


A month ago, we had an estate sale at my Mom's house on the other side of the state. When I saw our old set of Jarts on table in the garage, we pulled them from the sale since the official ban still reads: "Consumers who find Lawn Jarts still being sold, should contact the Consumer Product Safety Commission on the toll free hotline: 1-800-638-CPSC (2772)."

I brought the Jarts home and hid them, but someday when total anarchy breaks out in these politically divided times, at the peak of the civil unrest...I'm going to whip out my Jarts and start playing right in broad daylight. Try and stop me. I'll wear a photoshopped T-shirt of Charlton Heston holding a Jart overhead and saying "From my cold, dead hands."



This sort of civil disobedience has already begun. There are still tournaments held annually by rebels brandishing these banished missiles

But in all seriousness, I won't be joining any Jarts tournaments. I'm keeping these yard darts only as an example of "What were they thinking." Here is a news story about one of the deaths that helped bring about the ban of lawn darts. There is nothing funny about this topic when you consider how fortunate our generation was not to have caused even more sad stories about Jarts.

I need to wrap up this post. My wife and some friends are having a garage sale here today and she just asked me to come haul some of the heavy items closer to the street. Ah, garage sales...that's a topic I'll have to explore in a future post, but the next post will be Chapter 31.
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Toys of Christmas Past

[NOTE: This post is almost fifteen years old. Until recently in 2020, it was the most viewed post at Patterns of Ink. The new record is over 1,500 views. I did not know this until I learned how to use my blog admin page. One record this post still holds is "most comments on this entire blog." Who knew? Here is another thing I learned on my admin page: Over 35,000 pageviews at POI have come from Russia. That puzzles me. I've updated this post with some videos people in the comment section helped me find.]


Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve. I’ve been away from the internet for a few days and will likely have limited access for a few more so I wanted to squeeze in a Christmas post. I found this old commercial for “Mr. Machine” on Youtube last week, and it got me thinking about toys of Christmas past.

1960 Mr. Machine TV commercial

I got a Mr. Machine for Christmas 1960, the year we lived on Atkins Road in Port Huron, Michigan (the year before we moved to the Detroit area). I also got a sled that year. I still have the sled (no it is not named "Rosebud" for you Citizen Cane fans who may be wondering).

I wish I still had the Mr. Machine, but the manufacturers made the mistake of trying to make it a “hands on” educational toy that a boy could take apart and put back together—just like new. I did not take mine apart for a long, long time…and then I started feeling "educational" and…well you know the last line of “Humpty Dumpty”…it was kind of like that.


The first gift I remember getting was in 1959. I was almost four years old: Paul, Dave, and I each got a red Tonka fire truck. I still have that truck on a shelf in our downstairs TV room.

You still have a toy from nearly 50 years ago? You must have really taken good care of it.

Not really—though it is in very good shape. We played with it for years, and then it sat around in the basement toy box for a couple of decades surrounded by a tangle of toys held together by Slinkies and Kathy’s jump ropes and boxing glove laces and yo-yos.

That's what happens when four kids share one toy box. You reach in to pull out one toy and along come a dozen others. My writing here is sometimes like that. Especially these past several weeks as I've been mulling over the sixties…but it’s been fun sorting it out. Thanks for your patience.

It was only a few years ago that I brought that fire truck home from my mom's attic and put in on a shelf with some other “antique” toys—Ouch! That hurts… calling something I got brand new as a kid an antique. Across the room from that truck, I have the Johnny Reb Canon I got a few years later. Let me change the subject by telling you about a gift I didn't get, one my Dad refused to give my brother Dave and me.

It was called a "Hump-A-Jump." I can't find a thing about it on the internet, so you’ll have to trust me. This thing existed some time in the late Sixties. They were advertising it on local TV in the Detroit area. It was basically one of those circus teeterboards—you know the kind that acrobats use to get each other higher and higher in the air.

The commercial showed kids catapulting each other like ten feet straight up right there in their own backyard. Dave and I had seen the TV spot for weeks, and finally it came on when Dad was home to see it.

“Hurry, Dad. See. There it is... that's the ‘Hump-A-Jump’ we’ve been telling you about.”

He watched for a while, because there was a side of Dad that loved us being athletic "risk takers," but there was another side of him that liked our daring stunts to be free—like climbing 50 feet up in a tree or diving off of fishing shanties into the raging St. Clair River. There were plenty of inexpensive ways for us to kill ourselves...

"Well, Dad. What do you think? Can we get one?" I begged.

"You gotta be kidding. You’d break your neck on that contraption. How do you stop once you get going? They don't show you that. Those kids are probably on crutches right now. I think they should call it a ‘Hunk-a-Junk.’” He couldn't help but laugh at his own joke.

"You'd break your neck" ranked right up there with "You'll shoot your eye out," but Dad did have a point. What were they thinking? I've said it here before... safety wasn't discovered until the Seventies. Years later my brother Dave pursued his secret circus desires by learning how to juggle and ride a unicycle. I have a feeling if my dad had gotten us our “Hump-A-Jump,” I wouldn't have lived to tell you about it—I weighed a lot less than Dave at the time.

Speaking of living to tell you about it. I hope to find some time this week (Christmas Break) to wrap up those missing epilogue posts from after 1964. I've got to get to the part where my little brother is born and we go back to Hudson's.

Until then...have a very merry Christmas!

Update: August 30, 2009. I had missed most of these comments since writing this back in 2006, but I found them today. [Added January, 2020: Then someone directed me to this clip. Mind you this is essentially the "toy" that all the people in the comment section are talking about. It was for sale to kiddos in the Detroit area but without the safety mats. Amazing.]

If Dave and I had gotten a hump-a-jump, we would have envisioned becoming as good as these guys. This is crazy.