> > We also made pistols out of wood. A clothes pin on the back of the grip served as a trigger. Our ammunition was loops cut from those old inner tubes. We had battles with those things. They would sting a little, but nobody ever really got hurt.
>
> When I was in junior high (I'm 25, to give you a frame of reference), we used to sneak behind the school during the lunch hour. Behind the school it was sparsely wooded -- enough to provide a small amount of cover, but not so thick you can't run through it with ease. There was a mini-valley-like ditch behind, where the ground sloped sharply down and back up again. We used to go back there and form a couple of teams, one on each side of the dip. And play Dodge Rock. We hadn't named the game, but that's what it was. We'd throw rocks at each other. I never got hit -- at least if I did, it wasn't bad -- but I, like most, had a number of close calls. I remember that more than once rocks whizzed by my ear closely enough for me to hear the whoosh of the air.
>
> Then one of the teachers found out and put a stop to it. Spoiled everything.

Oh. My. Gosh. *Dodge Rock*??? Thank goodness for that meddlesome teacher. :-)

Anyway, on the subject of homemade toys, just about all I did during sixth and seventh grade was make my own "Transformer" robots and such out of posterboard and masking tape. Many of them were quite good considering my age and the media with which I had to work, if I may say so. I also made working replicas of the Voltron lions, complete with little rockets and the capability to merge into the giant Voltron robot. Not that the thing would actually stand up on its own, but it was pretty cool all the same.

It was also popular in school to fold notebook paper into guns, throwing stars and starfighter planes, and I pretty much had a black belt in designing those stars and planes. For awhile, when I was a kid and watched shows like He-man a lot, I'd design costumes for the neighborhood kids and myself, including wooden swords made from thin wood strips, sharpened with a pocket knife along the edges and the point. The neat thing was that the wood strip was so thin that when you threw one of those swords into the air, frisbee-style, it would spin wildly along its axis and whirl around sort of like a boomerang. It's a marvel that it never came flying back in my face and gouged my eye out. Not that the threat of bodily destruction was likely to deter us, since we were, after all, ridiculously foolhardy little kids. Good thing we never thought of "Dodge Rock".

By comparison, what I always liked the most about store-bought toys, especially toy robots and the like, was putting on the decals. The more decals that came with the toy, the better. Stuff that adults buy ought to come with decals, too, I think.

He-Iss