My "Wonder Years" Were Dangerous AF

Life was treacherous for a ten-year-old Black kid in the Deep South of 1968 - but not for the reasons you might think.

“The Wonder Years” (2021) follows the Williams family and is set in 1968. (Erika Doss/ABC) Source: The Washington Post

When I watched the first episode of ABC’s reboot of The Wonder Years, the show revived many childhood memories. Since I was a kid in 1968, the year the reboot was set, I couldn’t help but reflect on my “Wonder Years.”

Interestingly, this version of The Wonder Years is in Montgomery, Alabama. The show has gotten its share of negative criticism, either for having the temerity not to center whiteness or for not portraying enough racial turmoil. I think the show-runners for The Wonder Years have done a pretty good job — even though the AV Club’s Stephen Robinson does not share my opinion:

The show’s pilot also promotes the Cosby-esque myth that a comfortable middle class existence provides a refuge from racism. Middle class white people are presumably kinder and more tolerant than their lower income brethren, which is both classist and fundamentally untrue, as viral cell phone videos from the past few years would demonstrate.

Some of the show’s critics, most of whom have no firsthand knowledge of what life in the Deep South was like in 1968, can’t wrap their minds around the idea that Black folk’s everyday lives were relatively normal despite the pervasive anti-Black racism of that era. 

My personal “Wonder Years” were slightly different from Dean’s, the show’s 12-year-old protagonist. I was ten years old in 1968, but it would be another two years before I attended school with white kids. Except for Miss Pearl, an older white lady who paid me five dollars to mow her lawn each week, no white people lived in my neighborhood. Otherwise, my day-to-day life did not include white people. Segregation was so pervasive, I never even noticed it. 

Whenever the year 1968 is mentioned in pop culture, it’s usually in the context of anti-war protests or the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. When James Earl Ray shot King, my parents kept us home from school for a few days, even though there were no riots in our town. They even marched during the protests that came afterward. 

But as bad as the racism was, I don’t remember giving it a second thought although I was immersed in it. I was too busy being a kid — something that, in the 60s, was especially dangerous. 

It’s hard to imagine today, but I grew up in a time when TV commercials featured football stars telling us that smoking cigarettes wasn’t just cool, it probably was good for us. Not only were my parents okay with sending me to buy smokes for them, so was the corner grocery store that allowed me to buy them.

Thankfully, I usually carried around my own pack of candy cigarettes, so I had no interest in sampling the real thing. 

Cars, even the expensive ones, had no seat belts, let alone airbags. What passed for a child car seat was a joke. My parents drove all over Arkansas with nobody buckled up. My youngest brother, who was still in diapers, routinely sat in the front seat in my Mom’s lap while she and my Dad drove all over town.

I guess it should come as no surprise that a culture that was fine with ten-year-old kids purchasing cigarettes would have no reservation in selling children toys that had a high probability of killing them.

Exhibit One: Lawn Darts

You have to wonder who in the world green-lit this lethal weapon masquerading as a toy. Also marketed as Javelin darts, jarts, lawn jarts, or yard darts, Lawn Darts were used to play a yard game similar to horseshoes or cornhole. The difference was that you played with weighted, metal spikes instead of a horseshoe or bean bag. What could possibly go wrong?

I learned firsthand about the dangers of arming children with metal projectiles when one of my brothers sunk one of the miniature javelins into the side of my neck, which I was informed was an accident. While today this type of incident would result in a visit to the emergency room, my mother patched up my neck and sent me back outside to play. The Lawn Darts, however, were never seen again. 

Source: Pinterest

In 1970, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stepped in. Rather than banning Lawn Darts outright, they required that the toy's manufacturers change the packaging and stop selling this abomination in children’s toy departments.

Finally, in 1988 the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned Lawn Darts, arguably the most dangerous toy ever sold, for good. 

Exhibit Two: The Linemar Atomic Reactor Steam Plant

I’m not sure how my folks pulled it off, but somehow my four brothers and I had every toy a kid could imagine. But of all the toys I ever possessed, from infancy till I no longer believed in Santa Claus, one was the holy grail.

The reason I hold this Christmas gift in such high regard: It was the one gift I received but was never allowed to play with, not even once. The reason is simple. Next to Lawn Darts, it had to be one of the most dangerous children’s toys ever produced. 

The Linemar Atomic Reactor Steam Plant was some twisted toymaker’s Cold War vision of a children’s toy. It consisted of a “nuclear reactor dome” with a boiler connected to a locomotive-style flywheel.

The packaging included a small container of chemical tablets mysteriously called Esbit. Setting fire to these tablets under the boiler made the atomic reactor’s flywheel spin.

With time, I’ve come to believe the Atomic Reactor toy wasn’t meant for me at all. I think my Dad intended this to be his toy, and he was using me as his straw man.

For one thing, the toy appeared after the initial Christmas hoopla, when no one was paying attention. In retrospect, he seemed more excited than I was about the toy nuclear reactor. His efforts were all for naught, though, because once my Mom noticed the toy’s corrosive-looking chemicals, she vetoed the present and, like the yard darts, it disappeared. 

The Atomic Reactor Plant, by Linemar (the Japanese branch of Marx toys). Source: Oldtoyz1.com

As it turns out, the toy’s disappearance was probably for the best. Although the Atomic Reactor Steam Plant was a safer toy than the 1950s Atomic Energy Laboratory, a toy that cost about $500 in today’s dollars and came with little containers of uranium, it still had its problems—namely, the Esbit tablets used to fire up its boiler. 

It turns out the Esbit is just a nice-sounding name for hexamine, a precursor for the chemical RDX, an explosive more powerful than TNT. Had I ever played with the Atomic Reactor Steam Plant and fired up those Esbit tablets, the noxious result would’ve been a combustion that randomly creates formaldehyde, ammonia, nitrogen oxide, or hydrogen cyanide—take your pick.

Giving a kid a toy like that today will probably result in a visit from child protective services, but this was the atomic age. A lot of people back then thought atomic radiation was good for you. Thank goodness Mom had some common sense. 

Exhibit Three: Creepy Crawlers

I’m still trying to figure out what made my parents buy us a toy that came with an electric hot plate. But inexplicably, they bought us the “Creepy Crawlers” version of the Thingmaker, the masculine answer to the Easy-Bake Oven. The Thingmaker allowed kids to create fake bugs shapes using Plastigoop, which emitted toxic fumes like the Atomic Reactor Steam Plant. You poured into an open-face electric hot plate oven that heated up to a scorching 390 degrees. Seriously, this toy got hot enough to cook a steak.

My brothers and I played with the Thingmaker all the time, especially when Mom and Dad were at work. (Back then, parents left little kids home alone all day.) We never made any of the stuff in the television commercials. Instead, we filled our Thingmaker with anything that melted, from toy soldiers to crayons.

Given the combination of four kids and a hot plate (At the age of ten, I was responsible for my three younger brothers aged seven, six, and three.), it’s a miracle we didn’t burn our house down.

Fortunately, my brothers and I made it through our Wonder Years. In retrospect, I do give the government credit for taking some truly hazardous toys off the market. If only they’d offered my children the same protection from the likes of Instagram.