This guy posted pictures of a great looking toy his dad built for him in 1966.
I'm trying to figure out the year round about when he built it… I was maybe nine or ten years old… perhaps a bit younger. I'm inclined to think it was Christmas of 1966. I'm thinking that Star Trek might have been on TV which is where he would have gotten the inspiration… or was it from "Lost in Space"? I know we still lived in our old house and I was around ten when we moved so it had to be maybe a year earlier. That would make "Lost in Space" or an episode of "Twighligt Zone" as a more probable inspiration.
Thinking of how close I was to losing this piece forever puts a big knot in my gut. It had been long buried in a bunch of "junk" in a storage area and when my mom had to clean everything out she figured that since there were no longer any kids in the family to be amused by it, she put it in the pile of stuff to be discarded. It was only by chance that I discovered and "rescued" it only moments before it would have ended up in the Salvation Army bin.
Link (thanks, Mark!)
