Believe it or not, I had Lincoln Logs as a first grader in 1978 or so … they might have even come in a bucket like this one; I can’t quite remember.  (I think there was a weird merchandising trend in the 1970’s in which toy sets and puzzles came packaged in tubes.)

The Lincoln Logs were made of wood!  (God, the idea that I once owned wooden toys makes me feel as old as … Lincoln, I guess.)  Here’s some weird trivia for you, if you remember these — they were invented in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, who was the son of famed architect Frank Loyd Wright.

I’d moved on to fancier things than Lincoln Logs fairly quickly — my parents had started me on Sears’ Brix Blox by 1980 or so.  (They were basically budget Legos, but they suited me just fine.)

Lincoln Logs never really went away during my early childhood, though … they would turn up in bits and pieces for years at the bottom of my toybox, my closet, my box of army men, whatever.  If you gave an absent-minded kid like me anything that included dozens of small parts, then they were destined to haunt the house in perpetuity.  There was sort of a permanent intermittent presence of Tinker Toys at my house too — you could sort of think of those as Legos’ surreal, cubist, crazy cousin.

Actually. let me qualify my admission above.  I might have scattered my small toys a lot as a little boy, but I pretty assiduously kept my G.I. Joes and their guns together.  That was a serious matter.  And I’d like to think I had a fairly good track record.

Photo credit: By Jesse Weinstein (JesseW) – Own work. (ID# 4b-2f), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=803043