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By: Andrea Hughes, Curator, American Collection
I was excited to begin working on a list of 100 Toys that define childhood over the past 100 years. At first, it was easy—just rattling off the names of some of my own favorite toys didn’t take very long. There were my baby dolls, blocks, Clue game, red wagon, Barbies, Dressy Bessy. Wait… Dressy Bessy? Yes, well, she was terribly important to me! But that was when it started to get more difficult, because it wasn’t just about what one person remembers or liked. In thinking over last 100 years, there are just so many wonderful toys to choose from! While we tried to choose things we thought most people will remember, there was just no way to satisfy everyone or to include everything. Unfortunately for Bessy, she didn’t make the cut.
We chose to make this list something that would inspire storytelling and intergenerational sharing. It isn’t meant to be a definitive list. In other words, it isn’t meant to be a list of what we think are the absolute most important toys ever. It is a list of 100 things from our collection that represent a wide variety of childhood experiences. Some of them are among the most important toys of the past century—it is hard to deny the impact that Barbie or Star Wars toys had on the toy industry. Some things were left off the list for the simple reason that we don’t have them in the collection. Not yet, anyway!
We hope you will start thinking about and sharing with family and friends what you most enjoyed playing with as a child. Is there something you wish was on the list? Is there something popular now you think we should put in our collection one day? Let us know in the weeks ahead, as we celebrate not only these 100 toys, but all the memories of our childhood and the joy of play!
