A Toy Bought in Silver Bay... and Made in the U.S.A.

One of my first days in Silver Bay I took my first trip to the Silver Bay shopping center!  Daddy needed something at the hardware store and I went with him.  This was late August or early September, 1956.  At that time the shopping center included S & Q Hardware - on the end farthest from the I.G.A. Foodliner. Later Rexall Drug store knocked out a wall and expanded into this S & Q space.  But on that day there was no post office yet and no famous Rocky Taconite statue.  While we were in the store Daddy said I could pick out a toy.  Either he told me or I knew that it couldn't anything too big or expensive.  In any case I chose the policeman on motorcycle below:

The policeman and his motorcycle is made of hard rubber so it's got some weight to it. It's durable or it would have broken many decades ago. The wheels actually roll on steel axles. But what's interesting to me and puts the toy in a particular time:  it's stamped Made in USA, Auburn Rubber Company.   In a previous blog I wrote that our Silver Bay Class of 1969 witnessed the change in America from farm to industry to service economy and I use this as a personal example.

I keep the motorcycle on one of our bookshelves. Just for the photo I moved a baseball from a different shelf so you get the idea of scale. (The ball is on our shelf because it was autographed for Bill by former Dodger Steve Garvey one day when Garvey visited the "Young and Restless" stage at CBS.) The toy is front of a class photo, Mrs. Jauhola's fifth grade at Campton.


Perhaps it's strange that a four-year-old girl would pick out this toy and not something cute or cuddly but I loved playing with cars and trucks. I think it's because, until I landed in Silver Bay, the only children I'd played with were boys - cousin Jeff from Minneapolis and a boy named Dean who lived on a nearby Harris farm.  The first Christmas in Silver Bay I asked Santa for a gas station.