Not long ago, while searching for something in the attic of my garage, I came across two big boxes of Tonka toys. They were not mine – I never had Tonkas while growing up – but they brought back fond memories of my children’s childhoods.
My son Nick was two when he got his first Tonka, a dump truck in the late 1970s series modeled, with artistic license, on that era’s Dodge truck. The dump truck was soon joined by others, which he was proud to demonstrate to his mother. By the time the youngest of our three kids put away “childish things,” the Tonka fleet numbered some eleven vehicles (the backhoe loader in the middle is an Ertl, not a Tonka).
Tonka toys have been around since 1947, when Mound Metalcraft, Inc. of Mound, Minnesota, shortened the name of nearby Lake Minnetonka for its first toy, a steam shovel. Since then, millions of children have enjoyed them and today Tonka toys are enthusiastically collected.
All our Tonkas were well played with, some more decrepit than others, but I set out trying to identify them with the help of the book Tonka, that Dennis David wrote with veteran Tonka employee Lloyd Laumann. The Dodge dump truck that started it all is of a design originating in the early 1970s, updated around 1979 with a new grille and fatter tires. (Interestingly, by 1985 the Dump Truck had been converted to Chevrolet by virtue of a “bowtie” grille.) The next two were the Mighty Loader and the Road Grader, the latter nearly the same as the 1965 version but with different wheels. Other construction toys, in no particular order, are the T-6 Bulldozer, a less-than-mighty loader, a neat little Bobcat loader and a tractor-trailer from the Tiny Tonka series that comes with a matching bulldozer. One of the neatest and most useful pieces is what I believe is a Mighty Scooper, on which a child can actually sit while digging cellar holes and building roads. We seem not to have ever had the most popular Tonka, the Mighty Dump Truck, of which some 25 million have been sold.
The Sand Loader, probably the oldest piece in the collection, dates from the early 1960s and probably came with a dump truck when it was new. I suspect we got it from a yard sale.
Cars and trucks, in addition to the Dump Truck, include the Sanitary Service garbage truck (with 1973-style cab – Tonka often updated older bodies with new cabs), Cement Mixer with 1969 “Turbine” cab (the Cement Mixer debuted in 1960 with a conventional Ford truck cab), a Jeep (perhaps the late 1970s Dune Buggy, which used the Jeep body introduced in 1962 but with fatter wheels) and a Jeep Cherokee. Note that the Cherokee is a two-door model. Most Tonka Jeep wagons are a four-door style.
The Tonka line was sold to toy giant Hasbro in 1991. A few of the familiar styles are still in the catalog, but most are now made of plastic and manufactured in some far-off land. Web sites devoted to Tonkas include G.T. Kitchen’s Tonka Toy Trucks and Tiny Tonka Toys, which is devoted to the small series introduced in 1968.
The title of this piece is taken from the Bible, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Note that Paul does not say “throw away childish things.” He says “put away,” which implies that your childhood things are not gone. You can get them out from time to time and enjoy them again. And if your Tonkas were somehow thrown away, you can always find more on eBay.
