On childhood treasures, questionable purchases, and the never-ending hunt for things I don’t need.
This is a Gen X inventory of the 80s and 90s stuff I lost, the stuff I bought back, and the oddballs that somehow survived. It covers WWF/WWE rubber wrestlers, He-Man, Battle Beasts, Galoob’s The Animal, the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 I’m still hunting for, a bag of vanished concert shirts, and a pair of green elephant socks. Somewhere along the way, it turned into a question I didn’t expect: who am I actually collecting all this for?
Somewhere beneath the basement floor of my childhood home in Queens, there was buried treasure. At least that’s what I hoped.
There was a small utility closet with a drain cover on the floor. Beneath the cover were rocks and dirt, which, for reasons I still can’t explain, I decided to start chiseling away at. Maybe I thought I could tunnel my way to China. Maybe I imagined discovering gold. Or maybe I was just a bored kid with too much time on his hands and an unhealthy curiosity about what might be hiding beneath his feet.
But then something happened. I found a baseball card.
Not a whole card, mind you. A filthy, deteriorating fragment of cardboard that looked like it had survived a war. But a baseball card nonetheless.
A 1951 Bowman Pete Suder card, number 154, featuring an infielder for the Philadelphia Athletics.
It’s not worth anything in its current condition. I keep it in a little plastic baggie alongside the other baseball cards I’ve collected through the years, and every time I see it, I smile. Because for one brief moment, digging through the rocks beneath my house actually paid off.
More than forty years later, I’m still digging. Just in different places.
Rubber Wrestling Figures vs. Plastic He-Man
I’ve been thinking lately about all the things I owned as a kid that somehow disappeared. Toys, clothes, electronics, weird little trinkets that probably cost a few dollars but occupied an enormous amount of space in my imagination. Some were thrown away. (thanks, Mom! love ya, Mom!) Others were traded, sold, broken, or simply lost to time. And then there are the things I never owned at all.
The funny part is these days, I’m fortunate enough to be able to buy most of these things again. But it’s not quite the same.
Take my original WWF wrestling figures. These weren’t the little plastic action figures that came later. They were big, chunky rubber wrestlers that could take an absolute beating. I’d stage match after match, bouncing them on their toes so they’d flip through the air and land on one another. Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, the whole gang. And yes, I occasionally chewed on a hand or foot. I don’t know why. Apparently, professional wrestling was a full-contact sport for everyone involved, including my teeth.
You can still find these figures online. Some are surprisingly expensive. But I don’t really want somebody else’s Iron Sheik. I want mine, the one that survived hundreds of imaginary matches and whatever the hell I was doing with my mouth.
He-Man was another obsession. I remember receiving Clawful from the tooth fairy. I don’t know what kind of arrangement my parents had with this magical professional, but finding a Masters of the Universe action figure beneath my pillow was one of the greatest surprises of my childhood. I was in shock.
And then there was Castle Grayskull. My parents had hidden the enormous box behind the washing machine in the forbidden section of our basement, where I wasn’t supposed to go. Naturally, I found it. A day or two before Hanukkah, I spotted the box, and rather than ruin the surprise, the discovery made me even more excited.
Until I actually got the thing.
What a piece of junk. Flimsy plastic, decals that shifted, nothing like the magnificent fortress I’d seen in the television commercials. It was a disappointing piece of molded plastic. Thankfully, there was also a green He-Man vehicle. When you yanked the cord of the Road Ripper, the thing would fly across our basement floor like a rocket. Now THAT was a toy.
The original He-Man figures also spent considerable time outdoors, hanging from trees and hiding in the bushes of our tiny front yard, preparing to battle one another. And while most of them are gone, one survivor is always with me: Man-E-Faces. He sits in my home office today, and occasionally I’ll rotate his head to change his expression depending on which work persona I feel like adopting. At my age, that’s either charming or a sign that I need a vacation. Probably both.
Battle Beasts, Transformers, and Glow-in-the-Dark Stars
I had a thing for objects that seemed to defy explanation. Transformers were fascinating, particularly a little cassette tape that transformed into a flying creature. I loved that thing.
Battle Beasts were another favorite. I owned quite a few, and I was obsessed with the little heat-sensitive decals that revealed whether each character was fire, water, or wood. Unfortunately, those decals had a habit of falling off, rendering the whole elemental battle system useless.
I also remember trading away a bunch of toys around fifth grade for a collection of strange metal superhero figures. I think they might have been Fantastic Four characters, although I’m not certain. What I remember is that parts of their arms and legs looked bionic, made from some kind of glasslike or hard plastic material. They were unlike anything else I owned. I barely played with them. I just thought they were cool, which, in hindsight, describes a surprising percentage of the things I’ve purchased throughout my life.
There were also the magic wands my sister and I bought at Forbidden Planet in downtown Manhattan. These were glass tubes filled with colored liquid, glitter, tiny circles, and stars. You’d turn one upside down and watch everything float toward the top. Completely hypnotic. The red one was the best. And somehow, despite the violent abuse my sister and I subjected them to, those glass tubes lasted for years. Recently, my sister gave me a replica. It’s almost as good as the original.
I was similarly obsessed with glow-in-the-dark stars that covered my bedroom ceiling. I think we bought them at Forbidden Planet, or perhaps Star Magic. They seemed to glow much brighter than the versions that came later. I can still picture myself lying in bed, surrounded by that faint greenish light, shooting an orange foam Nerf basketball toward the miniature hoop hanging above my closet door. The stars provided just enough light to see the basket.
And then there was a silver skull ring with red eyes that I bought at the American Museum of Natural History. I loved that ring. Lost it, of course. And every time we returned to the museum, I’d search the gift shop hoping to find another. Never did. Funny how a cheap little ring can remain lodged in your memory for forty years.
Years later, when my childhood house was put on the market by the subsequent owners, I revisited that basement and was stunned by how small it actually was. In my memory, it was practically an entertainment complex. In reality, it was a tiny room where I somehow managed to have an enormous amount of fun.
Nintendo brought a different kind of magic into that little basement. I had the original Duck Hunt gun and R.O.B., the robot accessory that came with the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game that used R.O.B., Gyromite, wasn’t especially entertaining, but the idea that a robot could interact with a video game seemed revolutionary. And being able to point a plastic gun at the television and shoot ducks? That felt like the future. I even tried cheating by standing ridiculously close to the screen. I remember thinking there had to be some trick to mastering it. I think I mailed in a Polaroid of my perfect score, expecting Nintendo Power magazine to send a crew to my house to interview the Duck Hunt Whiz Kid!
I Was (Not) a Deprived Child!
One of the great injustices of my childhood was that I never owned The Animal. Remember that remote-controlled truck from Galoob? You’d press a button and these ridiculous claws would emerge from the tires, supposedly allowing the vehicle to conquer virtually any terrain. The commercial was spectacular. Rocks, mud, whatever you threw at it, The Animal was going to destroy it.
I wanted that thing badly. Never got it. But recently, I found one on eBay for about $40 and couldn’t resist. Today, it sits in my office. I don’t play with it. I don’t even particularly care whether it works. But every time I look at it, I smile. Forty years late, but I finally got my Animal.
The same pattern applies to sneakers, which I didn’t have many of as a kid, at least not the expensive ones I coveted. Once I became an adult with disposable income, I made up for lost time. And then some. I’ve written about that particular obsession in Tales From a Recovering Sneaker Addict.
But there’s one childhood item that remains my Holy Grail: the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera.
If you don’t remember it, this was a toy video camera that recorded black-and-white moving images onto ordinary audio cassette tapes. Yes, audio cassettes. How? I have no fucking idea. I didn’t understand it when I saw the commercial as a kid, and frankly, I still don’t fully understand how they pulled it off.
But the concept blew my mind. I remember seeing the enormous box at Toys “R” Us and imagining myself buying ten-cent cassette tapes and filming actual movies. I’d have my own little production studio. A camera, a tiny black-and-white monitor, a stack of cheap tapes. Spielberg could kiss my ass.
I never got one. And for nearly forty years, I’ve been looking. Flea markets, garage sales, thrift stores, eBay. There was a time when these things commanded close to a thousand dollars. Even broken units could fetch several hundred. Recently, prices seem to have fallen considerably. You can sometimes find one for around $200.
I could buy one today. But I haven’t, because there’s something about the idea of spotting that unmistakable camera sitting on a folding table at a garage sale, paying ten bucks, and walking away feeling like I just robbed a bank. It’s not even about the money. It’s the hunt. And I suspect that if I finally found one tomorrow, I’d celebrate for a few minutes, bring it home, and immediately start looking for whatever comes next.
Disappearing Act
Not every lost possession can be replaced. In my parents’ basement, beneath the stairs, there was a dingy storage closet that housed all sorts of forgotten stuff. Among the treasures was a garbage bag filled with perhaps 30 to 40 concert T-shirts from the 1990s and early 2000s.
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Smashing Pumpkins, Lucy’s Fur Coat, and countless others. One of my favorites was a maroon long-sleeve shirt from a relatively obscure band called Kerosene. It had the band’s logo and four words printed on the sleeve: “Freak,” “Fake,” “Joke,” “Alone.”
When my parents renovated the basement, the entire bag disappeared. Accidentally, I’m sure. Let’s go with accidentally.
Those shirts would probably be worth a decent amount of money today. But that’s not really what bothers me. I wish I could hold them again, look at the faded graphics, remember the shows, and remember the person who wore them. I certainly don’t need 40 ancient concert shirts taking up space in my closet. But I wish I had them.
I also regret selling some of my early CDs when I was unloading much of my collection in the early 2000s. These were copies of Cheshire Cat from when Blink-182 was still known simply as Blink. At the time, getting more than $100 for a used CD seemed like a no-brainer. When else was that going to happen? I sold them. And to this day, whenever I find myself digging through a bin of used CDs, I look for another copy. Because maybe, just maybe, somebody overlooked one. There’s currently one listed on eBay “buy it now” for $5,776.56. Let’s pretend I didn’t see that.
My old Walkmans are another category of regret. I had a remarkably small Aiwa model that was barely larger than the cassette itself, and I was amazed by the engineering. Then there was my original Sony, a clunky refurbished model I bought at the outlets in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during a family trip. I always wanted a fancier one, but that Sony was mine. The buttons, the weight, the mechanical feel of the thing. There’s something about those old electronics that modern devices don’t quite replicate.
Lancaster was a recurring destination during my childhood, and I bought quite a few electronics there over the years. During the pandemic, I even tracked down and repurchased one of my old 1990s stereo systems, which became the subject of another Drewography post. I suppose that should have been a warning sign that my nostalgic collecting was getting a little out of hand.
There was also a red, yellow, and green drawstring bag that I used for school. It was essentially one enormous fabric cavity, with no useful pockets, no zippers, and absolutely no regard for comfort. But I loved it because I thought it announced to the world that I was a cool alternative kid from the suburbs. Eventually, it became so mildewed and disgusting that I threw it away. A perfectly reasonable decision that I somehow still regret.
Survivors
Here’s where things get interesting. Somehow, I lost dozens of concert shirts and childhood toys, but I still own a pair of socks I traded for at sleepaway camp in New Hampshire in 1991.
Green elephants. That’s what’s on them.
The socks belonged to a counselor named Wilco Hagen, who I believe was from Denmark. I remember his name not because I have an extraordinary memory, but because it’s still stitched onto a little tag on the socks. I think I traded a Guns N’ Roses shirt and possibly something else for them.
For years, I considered these my lucky socks. I’d wear them to important events, like the SATs and my driving test. At some point, I paired them with another lucky charm: an actual black eight ball from a pool table that I believe I liberated from a hotel in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Yes, I walked around with a billiard ball because I thought it brought me good luck. I’m not proud of this, but I’m not particularly embarrassed either.
I still have the socks. They’re in rough shape, and I certainly don’t wear them anymore. Yet they’ve somehow outlived possessions that were far more expensive and objectively more useful.
There’s also a James Bond Zippo lighter I bought somewhere near South of the Border during a drive to Florida when I was around 20. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t particularly care about James Bond. But for some reason, spending $35 on a lighter seemed like a sensible decision. I still have it, and the little metallic click when the lid opens and closes is still incredibly satisfying.
I also have a collection of mercury necklaces I bought in Cancun during the 90s. These strange pendants contained little blobs of mercury that would break into dozens of tiny silver balls when you flicked them. I loved watching them move. At one point, I hung one from the rearview mirror of my Honda Civic. One day, after my internship at CMJ Magazine, I noticed it was leaking.
Naturally, I called Poison Control. I expected sirens, emergency instructions, perhaps a hazmat team. Instead, the person on the phone seemed spectacularly uninterested and made me feel like a fool for calling. Nothing came of it, thankfully, but those necklaces remain among my favorite little artifacts from that period of my life.
Another unlikely survivor is a set of devil sticks I bought at Woodstock ’94. You know those juggling sticks wrapped in colorful felt? Two smaller batons and one longer stick that you toss and balance between them? I bought a set from some hippies at the festival, and somehow, despite the mud, rain, dirt, and general chaos of Woodstock, they survived.
I remember carrying them home through New York City, covered in mud, riding the E train back to Forest Hills before catching a bus home. I imagined people looking at me and wondering who this mysterious, mud-covered young man was. Was he famous? A musician? Some kind of superstar? The reality was that nobody gave a shit. But I still have those devil sticks, and they still work.
And while I’m on the subject of unlikely survivors, there’s my first Swatch watch. I bought it with money I’d earned shoveling snow, and it had a little interchangeable pie-shaped section that allowed me to change the color of the face. As a kid, I’d coordinate it with whatever I was wearing. I still have it today. The face looks a little small on my adult wrist, so it doesn’t get much use, but I love that I managed to hold onto something I worked so hard to buy.
Print Is Not Dead
In my garage, I have several cardboard boxes filled with magazines. Nearly every issue of George, the magazine founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., along with an assortment of Details, Rolling Stone, Stuff, and Maxim.
I collected George partly because I thought JFK Jr. was cool and the magazine was interesting. I also suspected the issues might be worth money someday. Whether they are, I have no idea. But every few years, I’ll open those boxes and start flipping through them, and I’m amazed.
The advertisements, the technology, the clothes, the celebrities, the ridiculous advice. Some of it has aged terribly, but that’s part of what makes it fascinating. I particularly enjoy revisiting old issues of Maxim, which, at the time, seemed to have invented an entirely new way to talk about women, music, gadgets, and everything else that interested a young guy in the late 1990s.
Was it sophisticated? Hardly. Was some of it ridiculous? Absolutely. But it felt fresh. And when I open those magazines today, I’m reminded that the world really did look and feel different. There’s something reassuring about that, like physical proof that the things I remember weren’t simply inventions of my aging brain. It all happened, the good stuff, the stupid stuff, the questionable fashion choices. All of it.
Finders Keepers
That baseball card beneath my childhood home wasn’t my only archaeological discovery. I used to dig around our postage-stamp-sized backyard, turning over rocks and looking for ones that glittered underneath. I was convinced I might discover gold or silver. Never did. But I remember the excitement of examining each rock, wondering whether I’d stumbled onto something valuable.
Then, sometime in the late 1980s, I found a 1985 Fleer Roger Clemens rookie card lying on the ground about a block from my house. A Roger Clemens rookie, just sitting there. Unfortunately, it had a giant crease running through roughly a third of the card, rendering it virtually worthless. I kept it anyway. Still have it.
Years later, I found a hundred-dollar bill on the floor of a Harrah’s Las Vegas casino bathroom. My first thought? It’s a setup. Apparently, decades of searching for hidden treasure had left me deeply suspicious when I finally found something with actual monetary value.
As my wife often asks, “why?”
And even today, I’ll browse sports card flipping sites and get a ridiculous amount of satisfaction from finding a card for a dollar that I might be able to sell for two. A hundred percent return! Never mind the general absurdity of the whole exercise. There’s something satisfying about identifying an opportunity that someone else missed and then capitalizing on it, even if the reward is a dollar.
It’s the same reason I love the Green Dragon flea market in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, which I’ve visited countless times since childhood. You never know what you’re going to find. Old NFL window decals, obscure band pins, strange little collectibles that nobody else seems particularly interested in. I once found a Nelson pin there, which probably means absolutely nothing to most people but made my day. I’ve written about that band before, too.
Maybe there’s a connection between the kid digging beneath his house and the adult digging through boxes of junk at a flea market. Actually, I’m pretty sure there is.
Reality Bites
Here’s something I’ve only recently started thinking about. When I was a kid collecting baseball cards, I imagined holding onto them for decades and eventually selling them for enormous profits. Time would do the work. I’d buy a card for a few dollars, put it away, and someday it would be worth a fortune. Simple.
Except I’m older now.
And while I certainly hope to have another forty years ahead of me, I’m beginning to recognize that the magical compounding period I imagined as a child isn’t quite what I thought it would be. Am I really going to be 80 years old, hunched over boxes of baseball cards, looking for buyers willing to pay a premium for some obscure rookie? Maybe. God help my family if I am. But probably not.
And that raises an interesting question. At what point do you stop collecting things for the person you imagine you’ll become? At what point do you simply enjoy what you have?
I don’t know. Because there’s still a part of me that believes the next flea market, garage sale, or forgotten box of junk might contain something extraordinary. And I don’t particularly want to lose that feeling.
The Hunt Goes On!
When I think about all these things, I’m struck by how little their actual value matters. A pair of green elephant socks. A broken baseball card. A cheap magic wand. A $35 lighter I never needed. A rubber wrestler with a partially chewed foot.
These objects are ridiculous, but they’re also the scraps that make me, ME! And the things I no longer have aren’t necessarily gone from my life. I can still see those glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, feel the buttons on my old Sony Walkman, picture that giant Fisher-Price camera box at Toys “R” Us, and remember the thrill of lifting a dirty baseball card from the rocks beneath my childhood home.
Maybe that’s why I keep looking. Not because I need another toy, another baseball card, or another obsolete piece of technology, but because every once in a while, I stumble across something that makes me feel like that curious little kid again…the one who never stopped wondering what might be hiding around the next corner.
And if I ever find that Fisher-Price PXL-2000 sitting at a garage sale for ten bucks? You better believe I’m buying it. Then I’ll probably spend the drive home thinking about what I want to find next.
Because the collection will never be complete. And that’s the beauty of it.
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