VAC U FORM

I think since most of us can remember toy's we loved, or didn't. We all have some we were at least fond of.
This evening on the way home from work I remembered the "Slip N Slide". It was a long plastic yellow slide you hooked up to a garden hose, then you ran towards it, fell down and hopefully slid to the end of it, great fun right? Except one day when I was about six I decided if it did that well on grass, what would it do on the sidewalk?
After placing it on the sidewalk taking the first slide down it and busting my head until I saw stars I decided it wasn't such a good idea. I think I have brain damage to this day.

I also had a 1957 Ford Retractable. The remote was attached to the car with a plastic cord. Mine was two tone beige and white. It was fun making the top go up and down as long as the batteries lasted. I always had to have some kind of toy car as a kid. My brother and I would stage "crashes" and if we could sneak matches out of the house sometimes they were "fiery" car crashes. Of course if my mother caught us our behinds were usually on fire.

Another thing we would do that drove her crazy would be to get a hammer and place a whole roll of caps for our cap pistols on the cement and hit them hard with a hammer. It sounded like a gun shot and made our ears ring so much we almost couldn't hear mother yelling at us from inside the house.
I had two female first cousins who were four and six years younger than I. My mother babysat them a lot when we were kids. They always lugged their cases of Barbie, Midge, and Ken dolls with a ton of clothes along with them. They used to bug my brother and me to play dolls with them I really enjoyed it myself, but boys being boys we posed the Ken and Barbie dolls in suggestive ways, in other words they “boinked” and boy did it make them mad. They told my mother and that was the end of that. I convinced them to leave the Barbie’s at our house so they wouldn’t have to lug them back and forth and I’d play with them and style their hair when my mother wasn’t home. I was good I actually had the blond one’s hair styled exactly like Elke Sommer in the “Pink Panther” movie, “Shot In The Dark.”
I remember my grandma had a Mimosa tree. We never did anything with the pods except rip them open with my grandmother warning us not to eat them. We did make mud pies though using her pie pans simply patting them together just wasn't good enough for us and pretend we were selling them in a store to each other.
I vividly remember a toy I got for Christmas in 1964 when I was nine called a "Vac U Form" it was made by Mattel. It was this rectangular metal box either red, or orange. There was a handle/lever thing on the top, you placed a piece of colored plastic on one side that had holes around the edges to lock it in place. Then you laid it down on the side that heated while you placed a "form" on the other side. I know it must've had more than cars, but the cars are all I remember. When the plastic was heated you quickly flipped over to the other side on top of the form and used a handle on the side to quickly pump all the air out of it. The hot plastic formed over the mold and when it cooled, you trimmed off the edges you had a new toy in the color of your choice. Pretty cool, but I don't think it stayed on the market very long because the first night I had mine while no adult was in the room I just had to stick my finger on the hot side to see how hot it really was. It burned the shit out of my finger, but I didn't tell anyone because I didn't want it taken away from me for being so stupid, my brother was sworn to secrecy. I remember it did make a huge blister though and throbbed so much I had a hard time going to sleep. That was all I remember about that Christmas.