Do you remember what your favorite toy was growing up? I cherished my Baby-This-And-That and my vast collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls and accessories. Sadly, neither one was chosen to be immortalized in the National Toy Hall of Fame (at least not this year).
Instead the Easy-Bake Oven and Lionel model trains are the “chosen ones” and will join Mr. Potato Head, the Frisbee and 32 other classic but watt-free toys in the Strong-National Museum of Play’s eight-year-old hall of fame located in Rochester, New York.
How could my beloved “Baby-This-and-That” be overlooked yet again? Museum curators say longevity is a key criterion for getting into the all-star lineup. Each toy “must not only be widely recognized and foster learning, creativity or discovery through play, but endure in popularity over multiple generations.”
I’m not sure of the exact date that Strawberry Shortcake hit toy shelves (sometime in the late 70’s), but this year’s honorees have been around for awhile. The first Easy-Bake Oven showed up in stores in 1964, and Lionel trains have been chugging along for more than a century.
According to toy historians, Lionel trains came about after engineer Joshua Lionel Cowen built his first electric toy train as a store-window attraction around 1900. When a customer bought the train instead of other toys it advertised, he launched the Lionel Manufacturing Company… and the rest as they say, is history.
As for the Easy-Bake Oven (which, by the way, I asked Santa for two years in a row and still came up empty-handed), according to historians, pretzel vendors in New York City gave toy makers at Kenner the idea of the child-size oven that actually heated food. The company has since sold 23 million Easy-Bake Ovens and more than 140 million mixes.
“It’s safe, it works and the best part is that the play makes its own reward,” said toy museum curators. “Fifteen minutes in the oven and a slurpy, gooey, doughy concoction becomes a delicious — OK, edible — confection.”
The Easy-Bake Oven and the Lionel train set will be enshrined in the museum next to other classic toys including, Barbie, Jack-in-the-Box, Legos, Lincoln Logs, Slinky, Play-Doh, Crayola crayons, and marbles–to name just a few.
Did you have an Easy-Bake Oven or a Lionel train set?