If there’s any doubt that writing has value as self-analysis, there’s no better test that blogging about your childhood.

This particular reunion with my formative years was aided by old photos, of course, but also by visits to a few websites maintained by people who never threw away their toys.

In fact Timewarp Toys and Moe’s Boomerabilia are cruelly mercenary, flogging memories to those who’ve lost theirs, but at least they’ll let you look around at all their stuff without committing to pay some outrageous price for an artefact of youth that really doesn’t look very “mint” at all, even if it’s still got the original box it came in.

For me, actually, visiting these sites was more like visiting some younger kid’s room, because most of the items touted are from the late ’60s and ’70s, by which time, of course, I’d forsaken comic books for cannabis (the playground of the mind, as it were).

But long before GI Joe and Hot Wheels, and before Johnny Reb, Johnny Eagle, Johnny Quest, Johnny West, Johnny Lightning, Johnny Astro and Johnny Seven, even before the Rock’em Sock’em boxing era (and before I got any decent toys), I had a cobbler’s bench like this one, as I suppose most kids did.

I haven’t the vaguest idea what I called it, but even today “cobbler’s bench” seems a mite precious. This is the “Pounding Cobblers Bench by Playskool”, and I think my childhood pre-dated even Playskool. I remember when the all-plastic models came out, with plastic hammers, and going “tsk”. When I was a boy we jackhammered wooden pegs with metal clubs until they splintered and cried for their mommy trees.

These “Fighting Men from Marx” are something like the plastic soldiers I had, complete with the annoyingly distracting bases glooped around their feet. I once cut the bases off, in the interest of enhanced realism, but of course the soldiers were thus mortally wounded and spent the rest of their tours of duty flat on their backs. They fared no better another time when I applied flame to the surgery, attempting to melt the bases creatively.

War, huh? What is it good for? Well, for any kid five to 15-ish (and unfortunately for many well beyond that), it’s for fun! I always had toy guns, yet never the slightest interest in a real one for some reason – I imagine that my battle-frazzled Dad disenchanted me about actual weaponry. Toy ones? Could not get enough.

This is me in my first room, upstairs at our house on Normandy Boulevard in Georgetown. I have a cot with safety panels on the sides, cute splotchy art on the wall and an extremely vicious-looking machine gun, the better to ensure that, even at age five, I had a room on my own.

For closer range and smaller game, I had a cowboy revolver something like this one. This, I quote from one of the above-mentioned websites, is the “Mattel Fanner 50 Bullet Loading Cap Pistol, Fanning gun of Old West w/ bullet loading action, rapid for 50 perforated roll caps, barrel smokes, action hammer 1958 — ONLY TWO LEFT $800.00″.

Mine fired caps and had the same faux-tree bark grip, and if I’d known it might someday be worth bags of money they would have had to pry it out my cold, dead hands.

I was no casual cowboy, as numerous pictures of me between ages three and six attest. I had the full get-up, spurs’n'all, and once I rode I gigantic horse. It’s true.

At some point during the sweltering summer between my kindergarten year and Grade 1, I used my machine gun to negotiate an upgrade in accommodations to a less balmy suite on the ground floor, superbly convenient to the toilet. My Old Doll papered the room with rodeo scenes while the Big Fella hammered up a long shelf that, to be fair, was a mere whiff of the carpentry wizardry he’d escalate to in later years.

Click the pic to see it much larger.

There’s a rocking horse in the picture, and although I remember it well from my years on the range, I suspect it was even by this time ready to be put out to pasture. With a castle made of tin (not plastic!) to withstand the heaviest of sieges, I’d clearly moved on to adventures that would require a mightier steed.

This mediaeval fortress was so big that the cliff Dad had built wasn’t enough to do it justice, so the facade and the back ramparts are separated, yet obviously connected via imagination beyond the wall. It was good thing I had not one, but two buses to shuttle the castle’s citizenry and/or attackers to and fro.

I notice there are folding chairs tucked into the shelf’s supporting uprights. I don’t think these were for my use; no doubt back in the hardscrabble ’50s my room was doubling as storage space, in this case for extra chairs for family guests.

The family snaps of Christmas ‘61 are so poor that it’s tough to see what my sister Karen and I were unwrapping, so apart from the ultra-cool air rifle I’m brandishing with squirrel-worrying intent, I can only identify a cylindrical tin of plastic building blocks and my rather astonishing doctor’s bag, which had not only your basic plastic stethoscope and head mirror but also a plastic syringe, tubing and vials suitable for taking plastic blood samples from neighbourhood chums.

Alas, this early incentive to push me toward the career that was long my father’s second choice for me (after dentistry) failed spectacularly and, although I loved my MD’s kit, the potential for wounding people with the air rifle far outweighed my interest in healing them once winged.

More medical prodding from my parents was welcome at about the same time in the form of a microscope and a skeleton.

The latter, as I recall, was soon disjointed beyond help, but the microscope was a milestone, and I believe to this day every kid should be given one whether they want it or not. I don’t remember how long I actually restrained myself before finally getting around to cutting myself open so I could try and see blood cells with it, but until then and long afterward I had all kinds of ick slathered on slides and categorised according to horrifying impact.

I made so many model planes, boats and cars in my time that it’s amazing I never considered glue an option when I started experiment- ing with drugs years later. Here’s Dad and me assembling my all-time favourite, an RAF Spitfire.

Dad was happily hands-on with the model-building, though it must have been at least a little ironic to him to be peacefully re-creating the machines that were making so much hellish noise all around him just a scant 20 years earlier.

Add to this fairly impressive (for the time) collection of amusements the rubber-band-propelled glider seen here on launch – a prototype for the Space Shuttle, no less – and my room was becoming a formidable museum of quirky childhood science.

Click the pic to see it much larger.

This is 1963, and I’m a proud 10-year-old in Sunday-goin’-to-Mass gear, surrounded by scenes from Robin Hood’s life, and Dad’s been a shelf-building maniac since our last visit. It was perhaps my first inkling that the older you get, the more room you need for your stuff.

On the lower tier you can see the doctor’s bag and the glider and a mast waving the American flag (something to do with a Civil War set, I think), and over to the right by a stack of board games the semi-circular portico of a house that, again, may have been a southern rebel mansion but most likely spent more time being haunted by various monsters, as we’ll see shortly.

Up the wall is a stack of shelves laden with model warships and bombers, and the Spitfire, and on the top main shelf, cleared neat as a pin for the photo op, save for a stapler ready to nail down anything amiss, is a collection of bottles. No, the bar would come many years later. This was my chemistry set.

Among my many, naggingly adhesive memories of childhood that somehow remain causes for mortification to this day is the story of how I got this chemistry set.

Don’t ask me why, because it’s no clearer to me now than it was at the time, but on two separate and brutally distinct occasions, I had such an inexplicably sudden hankering for specific items that I demanded with hysterical insistence that I be given them right at that moment, and it made not the slightest difference to me that it was late at night and my parents had a houseful of guests.

One of these was the Classics Illustrated comic version of “Moby Dick”. I already had a tidy little collection of these kidlit gems, and have always been grateful for it, because they not only grounded me in great literature, they saved me from ever having to read Charles Dickens all the way through.

One Sunday evening when I was seven or eight or maybe even nine, the family and guests watched “Moby Dick” on TV, the really magnificent one with Gregory Peck and Richard Basehart (”Hey, that’s the guy from ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’!”). I was enthralled, and afterward retired to my boudoir for a little research. I’d seen this title before, and sure enough, there was a Classics Illustrated “Moby Dick”.

About an hour later my parents had managed to calm me down sufficiently for me to consider going to bed, primarily through the intervention of my cousin Moira, who was travelling someplace where she was pretty sure she could get a copy of the comic for me ASAP.

They were able to persuade me that getting it right at that moment – it was now about 11 o’clock on a Sunday night – would be difficult, although I of course first insisted on tearfully exhausting several possibilities, some of which involved my father driving across time zones. Moira was good for her word and I soon had the whale and a bunch of other classics fuelling my already overheated imagination, and by God do I wish I still had them.

The other spoilt-kid-from-hell fit actually produced on-the-spot results. It was another weekend night, with another family party in progress, and I wanted a chemistry set immediately. I must have just spotted one advertised in, yes, a Classic Illustrated comic. I left little room for discussion.

Again, a relative or at least a family friend came to the rescue, though I don’t remember whom. Once I’d apprised the assembled guests of what a respectable chemistry set ought to contain, he took me to the basement and somehow managed to come up with enough glass and plastic containers of varying sizes and chemical-type substances to appease my science lust for the moment.

And though I can’t be certain, I think there might have been a trick involved: I think he might have burned some metal filings from my dad’s workbench. Imagine that. A tiny but completely unexpected fireworks show right there in the single-bulb gloom of the cellar. What kid wouldn’t have been satisfied?

The makeshift chemistry set was nevertheless soon augmented by a genuine, here’s-the-box-and-here’s-the-test-tubes kit, imported all the way from exotic Massachusetts by my Uncle Bill just for my delectation. That’s not it in the photo – that’s what they sell kids today. With goggles – sheesh.

Mine had beakers and a Bunsen burner with rubber tubing and a slew of colourful powders that flew into a (contained) fury when introduced to each other. No goggles.That’s bits of my set on the shelf in the picture of the room, and beside it is a model steam engine, a terrific contraption of heavy metal that chugged away for ages on the heat of little white fuel tablets. You could rig all kinds of gadets to it with pulleys and rubber bands.

What a great room.

For me and every other kid at the time, television’s influence continued to accelerate beyond our grasp. My sister and I had our wads of Silly Putty, of course, but more tellingly my choice in weapons became more sophisticated with the arrival of 007.

Pictured is a Bond-style attache case on sale at the time, into which his supergun and all its components fit like a glove. I didn’t get out to the cinema much, but was quite content with similar gear from the makers of TV’s “Man from UNCLE”, including an almost identical break-down gun and modular case.

If television didn’t have the Bond films yet, though, it had plenty of Karloff and Lugosi, and my penchant for building models jumped from Messerschmidts to monsters. I even won a Master Monster Maker plaque from the local hobby shop for my enthusiastically rendered Frankenstein. And I had one of these working guillotines too. Yum.

By the time I was 11, I was into makeup. Every boy’s dream. Really, though, apart from Mad, I was a devoted reader of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, which made sure I knew as much about the work that went into making the Mummy and the Wolfman as I did about the scripts and the actors. So I knew who Bud Westmore was and what Ray Harryhausen did, and I knew that both Lon Chaney Sr and Jr were geniuses in the makeup room as well as onscreen. So I got a little paint and I melted a little wax and I filed some bits of wood into points and …

Pretty creative, huh? It wasn’t even Hallowe’en. What my parents must have been secretly wondering I have no idea.

Creativity, though, is a tree of many branches, and I liked art from the start, as is evident from the fetching, post-expressionist blotches on the wall of my first bedroom. I got one of the first Etch-a-Sketches. (Or was that my sister? It seems to me we had some mighty skirmishes over its useage.)

And television gave us the gift of Jon Gnagy, who looked like a beatnik but that was okay because our parents loved watching Mitch Miller, and they could have been brothers. Well, almost. Gnagy’s show was more than an inspiration; it was a revelation. I learned how the letter “O” becomes a bird, and because of that I’ve never since, not once, stopped being amazed by life’s transformations.

Today my creativity extends to this weblog and its kid brother, Dali House, where you can read my other little tribute to Jon Gnagy.

There’s a related post in Dorseyland here about other nostalgic stuff from the ’50s and ’60s.