Tales of playthings past

ST. LOUIS -- Parents frantically searching stores for holiday gifts may yearn for a time before the Xbox and the Game Cube electronic game systems, not to mention the pre-Harry Potter era.

But spend a little time talking to toy experts and they'll tell you that toy mania is nothing new, though the seasonal zaniness associated with purchasing playthings seems to be a more recent phenomenon.

"I never heard any stories about crowds, like we would get today," said Frances Waldrond, director of the Eugene Field House and St. Louis Toy Museum. In years past, children made toys popular rather than the television making something popular to want, she said.

The museum, restored as an early Victorian home, was the birthplace of Field, a newspaper columnist in the late 1800s who wrote famous children's poetry, including the tale of Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailing off in a wooden shoe.

Open since 1936, the three-story home is full of historic toys, including some that could be considered the Rubik's Cube or Cabbage Patch Kids of their day.

Toys en masse

Waldrond walks through the rooms, decorated with Christmas trees reflecting styles of different decades, and points out toys on display that used to be wildly popular.

"It isn't until the 1850s that we had any one toy in abundance," she said, explaining that factories with assembly lines resulted in the first mass-produced toys.

For boys, electric trains caught on in the 1920s and still are popular. But before then, children had another way to propel their trains around the tracks. They'd fill part of the toy engine with water and light an alcohol burner under the cab, she said. The process created a small steam-powered engine.

"It would have been a toy an older child would have had," she said.

Small soldiers in uniforms from almost every American conflict are displayed.

"Toy soldiers always become popular again when the country is at war," said Waldrond. These days, kids no longer melt the lead to pour into molds to make their own soldiers -- once a child's pastime.

One of the first girls' toys in big demand was the Bye-lo Baby in the 1920s.

"This was the toy to get," Waldrond said.

Sculptor Grace Story Putnam conceived of a doll that looked like a real baby. Before Putnam, Waldrond said, many dolls looked like proper little ladies and gentlemen. The baby dolls that resembled actual infants became the rage with children.

"She'd go into hospitals and sketch newborns," Waldrond said. "They were popular through the 1940s."

Curly Shirley

There were other popular dolls: Ideal's curly-haired Shirley Temple doll was highly sought in the 1930s and 1940s, with some versions still selling.

Toy collector and museum volunteer Carol Sumpter of St. Louis said some toys, far from passing fads, have remained popular over time. She explained that Teddy Bears were created after President Theodore Roosevelt decided against shooting a bear on a hunting expedition in 1902 and a cartoonist made a drawing about it.

Barbie has been around since 1959. Her popularity stumped the toy experts.

"The only thing I can come up with is the wardrobe," Sumpter said. The never-ending choice of clothes must still appeal to girls, she said.

Popular toys from the past don't give museum workers special insight into what will be hot in the future. But quality endures.

"The toys that remain were good toys at the beginning," Waldrond said.