Toy Treasures I think we have all heard the expression time is money. It may not have been meant to be used this way, but it certainly applies to some things going up in value as they get older. Most of us old timers would have kept our comic books if we knew some of them would climb to a value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. When I was young, I used to buy mine at a used comic store and they were only two for 5 cents. I am talking about 75 years ago. Those comics may not have been pristine, but even in the shape some of them were in, they are worth big bucks today. Of course this is not true for most comics, but there are enough of them today to foster regrets in not appreciating them more back then and saving them. It turned out some of the old toys also fall into this category. Who ever thought wind up toys from Japan would have any value today. To us back then, Japan was a country which made junk. There was a lot of really cheap things for sale and my favorite store in Brooklyn named Cheap Charlies. It had much of this stuff. You could buy a very tiny pen knife which was only less than an inch long for 2 cents. I did and the first time I tried to cut something with it the blade bent. The cheap tin windup toys have become very popular today. When I was young, I never thought much of them and neither did my friends. It didn’t help that we were all very poor and even at 20 or 25 cents those toys were out of our range. Some of them in really good condition have gone to hundreds of dollars in value. Of course, our money today is also worth much less. According to an inflation calculator, a dollar in 1949 equals $13.12 today. That meant the 25 cents for the tin Japanese windup toy was equal to $3.28 according to the inflation calculator I had found. One of the toy like objects from even a little earlier time was toy airships and banks made to look like airships. These objects have become very popular to collectors. Some banks which look like them are now worth a couple of hundred dollars or more and speaking of banks, in the old days some banks would make coin banks which looked like their main building. These have become popular with some collectors. I think most of them must have been given out for free at the time to depositors. Things went from free to having some value. I can understand that. I love the idea of having a representation of a bank which is no longer with us. Girls who took really good care of their dolls, especially Barbie dolls, could have a valuable one in their house. At the time these dolls came out, no one ever thought they would have something of value. I guess this helps the value because as more get destroyed, the more valuable the remaining ones get. One of the things which blows my mind is the value of some baseball cards. As a teenager I had perfected the competitive art of flipping cards and beat many other kids and amassed a huge baseball card collection. I never thought of them having any value, because at the time we never heard about that. As I got older, I no longer played games with them and I can’t even remember what happened to them. After that time companies began to flood the market with cards of all sorts. My sons and my dear departed wife filled closets with baseball cards which are mainly worthless and I threw many of them away to make room. There were bigger toys we poor kids could only dream about getting. One of them was a pedal car. When I was little that was the dream toy to get for Christmas, but of course it was out of the reach of my mother at the time. My mother was the sole support of our small family and women not only made less money than men, if they were good looking, they were subject to unwanted advances and my mother was very good looking. As I got older my entre family chipped in and somehow got me a two wheeled bike. I loved that bike and rode it for a long time. Some of these old bikes are worth quite a few dollars today. If some of us would have kept our bikes we could have gotten some money for them. Some of the really old ones had wooden wheels and generally they are worth quite a bit of money along with brands which are no longer in business. Some old toys were really classics. I was lucky enough to have one which I got as a Christmas present which today would have been worth a lot of money, I am sure. It was horses pulling a Budweiser wagon with two men and many tiny beer barrels stacked on the wagon. It was a classic. I have seen some on line but they are newer than the one I had. I seem to remember my horses being wood and painted red, but I was very young and could be wrong about that. One type of toy which is from a newer decade than when I was a child is Hot Wheels. It is amazing to me that certain ones can be so valuable. Some are worth hundreds of dollars, and others a heck of a lot more. The most valuable is said to be the Volkswagen Beach Bomb. Several are worth $3,000. With others being worth higher amounts until that Volkswagen Beach Bomb which is worth about $175,000 or more. It is hard to believe a simple toy representing a 1969 vehicle could be worth such an astronomical amount of money. The bottom line with all this seems to be we should have kept our toys in good condition and then saved them and not given them away or thrown them out. I have to wonder, in my case, what I could have made off my old toys and comics today. I also have to wonder if the same will be true for the kids today. Will some of the things they are playing with be worth a lot more by the time they reach their 40s or more? Since many of the things are digital today, this may just change things.
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