Divesting my childhood Part II

Summer vacations as a kid revolved around my grandparents’ house in Westport, Conn. On many mornings I accompanied my grandfather on his daily drives –stops for farm-fresh eggs, grocery shopping at Stew Leonard’s, tag sales and dropping garbage at the dump.

On one dump trip, after he unloaded the pickup truck’s cans into the small mountain of refuse, we scavenged through the odd items left out front, a bunch of randomness that people didn’t feel worthy of the landfill. I picked an Army jeep from the original G.I. Joe line, designed for 12-inch-tall soldiers.

In decades of owning action figures, I never owned anything that fit the jeep. It was pushed into service as a cruiser/transport/warship for random Star Wars figures and the occasional transport for teams of the smaller G.I. Joes my generation ate up. On a rainy Friday in Nashville, that jeep and hundreds of other toys went into a local pop-culture store. This was the second wave of the Great Toy Divestiture, the end of all the toys stored in my parents’ basement for decades.

How I kept it all so long, I’ll never know. Actually, I know exactly how – benign neglect. For years I ignored those toys until my parents’ time for a move came. I cleaned out what I could. Their move didn’t happen, but in May I finished what began last summer.

While last summer’s load consisted mostly of Star Wars and G.I. Joe vehicles (plus a few thousand comic books dating back to the mid-1960s), this new collection of boxes grew more eclectic as I reassembled toys and reorganized. Of all those toys, the vintage Kenner Star Wars figures remained. As prices on those toys have soared, they have become a meal ticket, unlikely to ever dip in value.

The rest was a mess ranging from Batman to He-Man to toy robots to a single Thundercats figure I could not identify. A small shoebox contained t he entirety of my Transformers collection. I never delved too deeply into Transformers. As much as I enjoyed the cartoon, realities were unavoidable - they were expensive and broke easily. All mine bore some sort of damage from limited play. For Christmas 1985, I craved Perceptor, an Autobot who turned into a working microscope. The scope was mounted on a flimsy hinge that broke within six months.

Among my Transformers, only Galvatron went unscathed. I attributed that to his playability. Galvatron turns into a gun with three sound effects – the trick that those of us who knew him was that switching halfway between the settings produced two more sound effects.

The He-Man figures fare poorly through the decades. Rubber joints that held together their legs rotted in time, and only a handful were still capable of standing. Worse than the weak legs, decades in boxed isolation discolored many of the villains. At least Grizzlor’s fur was as robust as ever. I packed them up quickly and with little thought.

One He-Man vehicle from that line was a high point for imaginary battles - the Talon Fighter served as the command ship for multiple toy lines ---- an aircraft for the Joe team, a shuttle for Rebels and Imperials alike depending on the day’s imaginary missions and battles. The tower upon which it rested, Point Dread, served as the base for multiple assaults and suffered through many sieges.

G.I.Joe figures comprised the bulk of the toys. Anything before 1986 was almost always broken. The rubber O-rings holding figures together snapped or dry-rotted. Ask me when I received or bought any of them and I could tell you the occasion – the holiday, the figure I got for coming in third in the Pinewood Derby (Raptor) or winning the fifth-grade spelling bee in Dublin, Georgia (Roadblock). I could tell you the last figures I receive before I gave them up in early 1989 (Annihilator, Dreadnok Gnawgahyde and Tundra Ranger Stalker) due to my classmates laughing at me for still enjoying toys.

I had augmented those figures with another batch I assembled in the early 1990s. After receiving my driver’s license, I began visiting toy stores and buying up G.I. Joe figures. Before writing this, I never acknowledged that habit to a single person, because I was in high school and such activities would have made me even less popular (geek culture as we know it had not arisen yet). I reunited dozens of figures with their accessories.

Had I wanted to keep any of them, I might have consulted this list ranking all 163 different G.I. Joe team members. But no matter the adventures I oversaw for Duke, Wild Bill, Mutt, Lady Jaye, Tripwire, Bazooka and Scarlett, there was no going back. They defeated the armies of Cobra time after time.  Maybe they could do that for someone else now.

From Wild-Weasel to Sgt. Slaughter, I was King Midas in reverse – no sooner did I touch the 30-year-old plastic than the figure collapsed into parts, the rubber connective tissue breaking into pieces and the rest of the figure following suit.

The last major portion was a relatively recent collection of a Simpsons toyline from the early double-aughts. They covered the entirety of Springfield from Simpson family members to obscure residents of Springfield. I almost owned them all. I bought playsets, department store exclusives and even a few Treehouse of Horror sets I never opened. Other figures came as the World of Springfield line ended and stores closed out the remaining figures. Time to part with them arrived, or at least most of them.

Hours after I dropped off the boxes, a sudden realization hit me – I included a box of Simpsons figures and playsets I intended to keep. I had about a dozen figures and two playsets I wasn’t ready to give up. Yet in seconds, I shrugged them off. For a moment I might miss Moe’s Tavern or Burns Manor. When would they ever be displayed again if I kept them?

Like the older figures, I gave them up. Nostalgia’s pull isn’t the same anymore. I had my time displaying those figures, and the time ran out. Time for most of these toys ran out decades ago. But their staying power in popular culture and the fact that I came of age at the right time helped me to release them as easily as I did the batch of vehicles I reassembled almost a year earlier. Most of those toys could last forever, but the time came for me to enact a term limit.