Andrew Lloyd Funny Face tin walker, 1920s
On July 8, 2010, I hosted the Spirit Mind Body group at my home for Meditation, followed by a breakfast of quiche, fresh fruit, bagles and spreads, orange juice and coffee. Then I took the group through the house to different sites where I had presented groups of some items of my toy collections. On the dinette table were 9 different issues of the card game, Touring, and later editions called Mille Bourne. It is interesting to see the illustrations on the cards with the earliest Model T cars, advancing to more modern ones from the 1950s and 1960s. Chess sets graced the dining room table. I put my subcollection of nesting blocks on the foyer table. This collection commenced with a cardboard set of nesting blocks that belonged to my mother, probably dating from the 1920s. Since it is entirely of cardboard, it would be classed as collectibles called ephemera. I have never seen a similar set anywhere, including on ebay. We moved onto the living room where I displayed a couple of old board games, Parcheesi and Round the World with Nellie Bly. I presented the history of Nellie Bly, the journalist who was before her time, also the history of Fisher Price Toys, and other toy companies. Also I demonstrated the Whistling Questioner, a question game that uses air channels to provide a whistle for the correctly matched question and answer. From this area we climbed upstairs to the toyroom where everyone saw a toy that they remembered from their childhood. The Richmond School blackboard easels with rolled paper information windows on top, one from my mother's childhood, and one from mine were popular when the rolled information windows were demonstrated. From the toy room, we moved across the hall to my library, where we viewed steroscopes from the late 1800s and the Viewmaster with its round discs which is another way to present three dimensional pictures. Heidi brought some of her toys which included collectible dolls and Stieff teddy bears. I was able to present the history of Teddy's Bear both from the United States development based on a cartoon about Teddy Roosevelt and the simultaneous development in Germany of Stieff stuffed bears.
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