Playtime ephemera from the 1950's

In the Big Box o' Stuff mentioned in my previous blog entry I found instructions for two toys.
The first was an ELGO building set that I still remember playing with after almost 60 years. It took hours to assemble buildings from the small red plastic rectangles. ELGO and LEGO made similar products during the 1950's but are not the same company.
Click on each picture to see an enlarged image.


Front and back covers of the instruction booklet.

The Toni doll was introduced in the early 1950's, licensed to the Ideal toy company by Gillette, manufacturer of Toni home permanents. She came with a complete perm kit including harmless sugar-water setting solution and tiny plastic rollers. I still have my Toni doll and the "Play Wave" directions but the accessories disappeared long ago.

I found several boxes of 1950's paper dolls stored on a high closet shelf and forgotten for decades. Rediscovering these old reminders of my childhood was a nostalgic delight.

To me it was a boring task to cut out clothes using a dull pair of metal scissors with rounded safety tips. The results were ragged, to say the least. Small fold-over tabs that were supposed to hold the clothing in place on the doll didn't work well at all. Someone came up with a clever solution...

This is an early version of Milton Bradley's Magic Mary series of paper dolls. Her pre-cut clothes magically! stayed in place without the usual fold-over tabs. A small, flat piece of metal taped to each piece of clothing clung to a magnet embedded in the doll. Over time the tape has stained some of the clothes.

My Sweetie Doll, Honey, was produced by the Whitman Publishing Company. Similar Sweeties named Sugar and Ginger have been sold on Ebay but I haven't been able to find any further information about the dolls. Unfortunately most of Honey's clothes are gone.

I LOVE the vintage clothing styles in this 1950's bridal party set. There were so many different pieces I never finished cutting them out.
  *** I've had a series of silly mishaps while trying to photograph this and will add pictures later. Here's an example of what happened. The problem may not be immediately apparent... I used a terrible background.