COLLECTION 149: Vintage Children's USA Puzzles & Games

Welcome to Toy Tuesday! There's just something about maps that I love! I especially love old maps, with their fascinating shapes, names, highways, cities...and I love maps of the USA. Maybe it's because I'm unashamedly in love with my country, just seeing these old map puzzles makes me feel proud and nostalgic.  (Click on any of the photos for a closer view)

Oregon, where art thou?

These are my collection of vintage USA puzzles, plus one map game: The Game of the States. One of these map puzzles was my own as a child, the one shown below. I'm so glad that I never lost a piece, and that I somehow managed to hang onto it all these years.

Mostly, I just put them up on a high shelf as part of my greater toy collection, and rarely explore further. When I was cleaning these off to photograph, I opened the box of the one on the bottom right side- in the orange box. I thought it would be fun to see if all the states were there, and I was surprised to find two Texas pieces! What? They were completely different, and I quickly realized I had two map puzzles! (well, mostly two, several of the states were missing, but enough to see what fun puzzles I had.) The second puzzle was quite different from the first. The older puzzle, was rather boring and ordinary, but the second one had cool late '50s or early '60s graphics with cute, stylized illustrations of sheep and cows and trains and the like.

Also included in my collection is the old Hasbro Teach-A-Toy map, which includes little flags you can put on the map with the names of capitals and other important cities.

Most of these maps were created before 1960, when the last of the two 50 states were added. But they were sometimes included because they were territories at the time, and considered part of the USA. On one map, the Philippines is included.

I hope you enjoy my little map puzzle collection!

COLLECTION #23: Pick-Up Sticks

It's Toy Tuesday, and I failed to acknowledge yesterday was the one-month anniversary of my blog!

It seems I have lots of 'Toys in Tubes', as shown by previous entries here and here, and this collection is just as fun!

Each generation has their toys that promote eye-hand coordination, dexterity, and strategy: today it's video games.  When I was a child it was marbles for boys, jacks and pick-up sticks for girls. (Although I remember a lot of boys playing pick-up sticks with their sisters...) My brother Gene was a pretty good marble shooter, and my sister Leslie was a whiz at jacks. But I was the master of pick-up sticks. In fact, my original pick-up sticks game is part of my collection: the Pix Pix one was mine as a child. It still contains all the sticks, including the black one!  Note that the Steven Mfg. Co., which made the kaleidoscopes and one of my building toys, also was in the pick-up stick biz!


Whitman, the manufacturer of the Pix Pix line, also came out with a pick-up sticks game. When I read the rules I was disappointed to see that actually 'playing' pick-up sticks wasn't part of the rules of the game, instead, the pick-up sticks were used as markers for the board game. It looks like it was designed for both boys and girls, and I'm not sure if their strategy really worked. But it's a cute game, and a fun addition to my pick-up stick collection.