When Laurie bought some strawberries in the above container, it brought back a childhood memory. My mother had given me similar baskets to play with as a child. I took them and used them as cages to hold my plastic animals and set up a little zoo for my stories. This was how animals were displayed in my childhood. I am glad that has change and the animals have better environment in most zoos.
I am have used them as cells for prisoners. It is amazing how we adapted things for our childhood.
Yes, I think all of us may have used them at one time or another for cages, they never lasted long as they are rather fragile.
I, too, used these both as cages and prison cells. I would also turn them upside down, place a piece of paper on the bottom, and they became gondolas. As I could usually not get ahold of helium balloons my confederate gondola usually went nowhere on its own. I did “borrow” my sister’s helium birthday balloons one year. After loading up four of my favorite figures I released the gondola in the front yard. Thinking the figures would keep the balloons weighted down I didn’t think to put a tether line on the gondola. The balloons lifted quickly, dodged any nearby trees, and I think flew off east to Pennsylvania, never to be seen again.
I also used these to construct the alpine set from “Where Eagles Dare.” Again, my limited supplies and engineering skills could not get the carriages to move along the string in our playroom.
That’s tragic! you lost 4 of your best guys! I know I would have moped about that for weeks when I was a kid. Especially since ACW figures were a bit tough to get.
Funny history, who knows were those figure fell, may be in some other kid back yard that made him/her believe in Santa parachute gift out of season or else. May be Stads got them too!!.I was kidding..
Erwin
No I did not get them LOL, I cannot remember find any figures on the streets in my life time.
Egg Flats make good Seigfried Line Dragon’s Teeth.Metal Hair Rollers for concertina wire.Don’t know if still made but my Mom used to use a wooden stick with a sharp point at one end that she bought in a box to use to hold a Roasting Chicken together that when you glued a bunch together made a good Western Fort Wall.For some reason every time she went to get some and found the box empty I had to lay low for awhile!
Oh yes, they still make them. I used a load of them to improve the parapets on my massive log stockade / Ft. Frankenpache. I used and still use the white Styrofoam pieces for all sorts of stuff – like the recent Greco-Roman buildings. Never thought of the egg cartons like that. I used them to hold figures in place nailed to a piece of wood, they became transport barges. Slits on the bottom swallowed up the bases and held them in place. I floated them across the pool to land an attack on the far side deck. Once they got wet though, that was it. By the way – there is ‘foam safe’ paint at hobby stores so you can paint the Styrofoam any color you want, without it melting.
Oh and don’t forget the white Styrofoam moulds from when you buy an appliance,etc. Can be used for Forts,bunkers,pillboxes just spray with Grey paint.
Yes I use all those foam too. Agree; specially water paint as most oil paint corrode the surface some time. They are also easy to carve damage impact on them
Brian
We did not get many items with foam that I can remember so I did not have foam to make forts etc. great stuff.
Soon as I saw the first picture, I remembered, we always used those containers for zoo cages. For one brief moment, it was a warm summer afternoon on the side porch, sitting on one of those terribly uncomfortable “straw” porch rugs, playing with a variety of soldiers and animals and etc., etc., etc.
One of my school projects in the 70s featured an Ancient Greece theme. I did a report on an Athenian temple. I was allowed to make a diorama so I built the temple. It was also my first purchase of ancient Atlantic 1/32 figures at the local hobby shop. My dad encouraged me to make the temple columns more realistic and use the liners from the new Pringles potato chip cans to place around the wood pegs. The effect was amazing, and I didn’t have to paint them. A great project it was later sold in garage sale while I was away at camp.
Hoping to recreate this great building I bought six Pringles cans several years ago. Sadly, technology, packing, and probably corporate efficiency have removed these liners. I ended up stuck with a just a lot of bad potato chips.
There was a flash back! I totally forgot they used to have those liners in them. I hope the at least gave you the money for the sale.
When I was in ninth grade, for some idiotic reason, I took Latin (actually, had no desire to learn French or Spanish). Unfortunately, the Latin teacher did not think well of my friend and I. We were failing, so for extra credit, we took my Airfix HO Romans and built a diorama of the Coleseum (sp?) made from an old hatbox and Constantine’s Arch (made from balsa wood). Spent quite a few hours converting said objects to the diorama, painting the figures, etc. The old bat gave in and gave us each a “D” and kept the diorama. Luckily, the next year the school district hired a German teacher and I got straight A’s, for the next three years and never had to build a German diorama (although that would have been fun).
If they were Auburns I found them in Chicago. Of course you would have needed about 2,000 helium balloons to get 4 Auburns off the ground. Then again Auburn never made Confederates. I did find 10 Auburns once laying on a street corner in Chicago, they were unattended and not near anyone’s house so they became mine. I found quite a few figures in my lifetime on the streets, one guy here, one guy there, seems there was always some laying around somewhere.
I don’t think Styrofoam was invented until WWII, so when I was a kid it was a relatively new thing. Not sure when it became popular to use with packing or drinking cups.
I don’t remember much Styrofoam growing up either, Ed; but I sure made use of cardboard boxes. Shoe boxes became stone or adobe houses, I don’t know how many times I turned a box upside down to become a fort. I used to love to use a blanket and it’s folds for terrain – either on the bed or occasionally on the floor (much to Mom’s disapproval).
I did make a shore fortification out of a foam rubber pillow and used some flat foam rubber pieces as the beach, you could make some great bomb or shell craters out of that stuff with a match, just don’t breathe the fumes. It was difficult to gouge out bunkers and trenches though.
A local tradition is at the Christmas season the Grocery Stores bring in loads of Japanese Oranges(between 1941-45 for some reason they were cancelled),Anyway back in the day they were packed in small wooden boxes that resembled a cheap kindling style of wood(now they are in cardboard boxes) that one of my friends Dads would convert into Castles for the neighbour kids right down to chained draw bridges.Spent many a happy afternoon with Lido and Crescent Knights attacking the walls.Mine survived quite some time before being lost in “Mom’s Big Cleanout”Most of the rest I remember being doused in Lighter Fluid by the local Eddy Haskell who in later life became “Well known to Police”
I think we all had an Eddie Haskell type, ours built a 3 foot long motorized version of the Bismarck, loaded it up with modeling glue, and M-80’s lit it on fire and set it out on the park lagoon. Quite an explosions that was and no more Bismarck. It made it about half way across, sure lit up the night.
I could never understand the kids who would take the money to buy a great ship model, the time to build it, and then blow the stinkin’ thing up with cherry bombs. Knew a couple of fellows who did that, one even took the time to paint it up fairly accurately before launching it on the creek (or “crick” as we say in Delaware County, PA) and lighting the cherry bombs he built into the hull. At the opposite end of the scale, we made all kinds of structures out of boxes, especially shoe boxes. Oh to be ten years old again.
Well, the same kid who is now deceased, rest in peace once threw the cover of a buffalo box (cover for a water main usually found in front yard made of cast iron), at me and split my head open, to the degree that they had to use clamps to close the wound. He also blew up the construction company storage yard at the corner of our block and was sent of to Military School. Oh, by the way he was the son of a cop. He was in and out of trouble most of his life. I always did have a good right hand, that’s how he ended up on the pavement in the first place.
I did get revenge for the split head a few later, I beat him unconscious by slamming his head repeatedly into the concrete and left him laying there in front of my house. I was a little worried that I may have killed him when he didn’t move for about 1/2 hour, but eventually either someone scrapped him up or he got up and staggered back home. He lived one door away from me and he used to mess with me all the time as he was much larger than I was, after that beating though he never messed with me again and we became better friends.
A lot of our inferior stuff in the neighborhood kids’ collections got burned, bb gunned or blown up. Payton GI’s and vehicles? Burned! Too many MPC GI’s laying around? BB gunned! A deformed MPC tank? Breakout the fire crackers! Another favorite target were those clown-colored Timmee GIs with M-16s!
I love neighborhood bully stories, and hearing that they got their “comeuppance.”. Ours was the typical kid who got his growth early. Once the rest of us caught up or exceeded him in size, we saw very little of him. Sadly, as life went on, we discovered that he grew up in an abusive alcohol infused household. His older sister disappeared (not necessarily in a bad way, just disappeared), younger brother had one or more failed marriages (may have been a drug problem there) and worst of all, the bully, as an adult, ate the end of his deer rifle. He probably should have spent more time playing with soldiers than terrorizing little kids.
I had a real strange kid in m neighborhood. He might be talking to you, laughing, having fun, then suddenly punch you in the face. Sometimes, he’d refuse to fight somebody he was attacking the day before. He had a fascination with fire and it came to light (ha-ha) that he had burned down several unoccupied houses in the area. As an adult he got a job as a janitor in the junior high, were it became known he had several 15 year old girlfriends. After he burned down a house with people in it, he was followed by police, where he managed to hide in a parking lot. Long story short, before they got him, he’d lit one of the police cars on fire. He was sent ‘away’ and found insane. I had joined the Army and all of this happened while I was gone. I came home from my first enlistment ( to start the road to becoming an officer as soon as leave was up) to find out he was gone. The fact is, so many in my neighborhood were crazy, violent, drugged out, toy soldiers are most of my best memories of my young years.
Greg,
That sound a lot like this guy, you had to keep your eye on him. I made the mistake of turning my back on him once and I got that cracked skull. He was basically a coward with a fiery unpredictable temper, who wouldn’t hesitate to pull a know on you or hit you with a baseball bat, when you weren’t looking of course. He was a thief and a fire bug, I never let him in my house. His family called him Bugsy, you can guess his last name. Sadly though he started to come around as he got older and be a better dude, but he died too young.
The link below is one of my favorite sites, just for the stories he has because it reminded me so much of my early childhood, especially his story about Joe the Downs Syndrome kid. It seemed like there was always one around hanging with us in those days, I guess before the world changed.
http://www.thortrains.net/armymen/armymen1.htm
Funny, isn’t it that looking back, the bullies, or other wackos, were all psycho kitties from dysfunctional homes or who were psychologically unbalanced? From this perspective, it’s kinda sad. Fifty years ago, it was just scary dealing with those dudes.