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“Hey, Mom. Where do toys come from?”
Perhaps kids don’t ruminate about the origin of toys as they might about a newborn sibling, but toys do come from somewhere. Toy inventors dream new ones up all the time, to the delight of kids everywhere. The National Museum of Play’s collections include toy prototypes and design papers from a number of toy inventors like Greg Hyman, creator of popular toys such as Alphie, Talking Barney, and Tickle Me Elmo. How Hyman became […]

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April 17, 2012

Did you know that it’s rumored that a simple game helped counterintelligence agents discover Russian Spies? For decades, this classic psychology experiment based in a simple, funny, yet devilish game continues to demonstrate how play reveals the inner working of our minds.
Try this. Read the following set of words out loud:
Red   Blue   Yellow   Green   Purple
Piece of cake, right? Now, (and here’s the brain-teaser) say out loud the color of the text in each word:
Red  Blue   Yellow  Green   Purple
Um, er, […]

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April 12, 2012

Simon and Schuster published the first Little Golden Books in 1942. Filled with colorful illustrations and appealing tales, these inexpensive picture books hooked kids across America. Thanks to my cousin’s hand-me-downs, my childhood library contained a copy of the series’ Little Red Riding Hood. I confess, I forgot about this book until I began to work on a new display of Little Golden Books for Reading Adventureland at the National Museum of Play at The Strong.
From a ravenous wolf that […]

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April 10, 2012

During one of my recent late night channel-surfing interludes, I came to rest on the classic film Northwest Passage (1940). Spencer Tracy stars in the role of Major Rogers, dashing leader of the ragtag Rogers Rangers, a militia that patrolled the Lake Champlain region in the French and Indian War as it is still known here in our post-colonial outpost. I joined the film part way through and stayed with it. My ear caught several instances of frontiersmen using the […]

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April 5, 2012

Recently, Minecraft fever struck my house. All four of my children now play the game and one Saturday morning my kids showed me the houses, sheep farms, mines, and other creations they built in the game using blocks they mined or harvested from stone, ore, wood, or other materials. The buildings were creative, beautiful, and strong enough to survive late night monster attacks.
While Minecraft is relatively new, what strikes me most about it is how ancient the game play is. […]

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April 4, 2012

Stroll into nearly any home, school, grocery store, or gas station and, if you look around,  you’ll begin to notice books everywhere. I say “if you look” because books have become so commonplace that they barely register in the mind’s eye. Through fiction or fact, verse or prose, art or photography, books exist to spark your interest, ignite your imagination, and propel you on a journey of the mind. Doomsayers may predict the gradual disappearance of books as modern technology […]

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April 3, 2012

Fun for me is talking with people at the top of their field, finding out how they got there, and hearing them trace the roots of their fascination. I like a good chat about the whys and wherefores of being a person who has fundamentally changed how we think about something.
With just such a conversation in mind, I recently headed to the bucolic, village of Scottsville, New York, to meet with Wendell Castle, the restless innovator and trailblazer of the […]

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March 30, 2012

Long before I began working in museums, I studied photography as an undergraduate student. My interest began as a teenager, sparked by a love of black and white documentary photographs. I was captivated by the universal language the medium spoke and the idea that with the push of a button, a single moment could be captured, documented, and kept forever. You can imagine my delight when I recently found myself tasked with sorting through photographs from our collections here at […]

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March 27, 2012

I’m always interested when one of the classic toys in the National Toy Hall of Fame earns its share of media attention, and this time Etch A Sketch had its moment in the spotlight. When one of Mitt Romney’s aides recently compared the fall presidential campaign to the timeless drawing toy, my ears perked up. Eric Fehrnstrom was quoted as saying, “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over […]

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March 23, 2012