Children rapidly sensed the possibilities inherent in cardboard boxes, recycling them into innumerable playthings. The strength, light weight, and low cost that make cardboard boxes successful with industry have made them endlessly adaptable by children for creative play. Shoe boxes serve as ideal settings for scenes and dioramas. Small boxes take on alternate roles as dollhouse furniture. Draw wheels on the side and a box turns into a car. However, it's the really large boxes-from washers, stoves, big-screen TVs, or refrigerators-that offer children the greatest potential for play. With nothing more than a little imagination, those boxes can be transformed into forts or houses, spaceships or submarines, castles or caves. Inside a big cardboard box, a child is transported to a world of his or her own, one where anything is possible.
Candy Land®
In the early 1940s when the dreaded disease polio struck thousands of Americans, Eleanor Abbott, a victim of the disease, sought to invent pastimes for children who were recuperating. Her most successful idea became Candy Land®, a game many people remember fondly as the first board game they ever played.
On the advice of her friends, Abbott sent her creation to Milton Bradley, and the company introduced Candy Land in 1949. Eager players travel along the rainbow-colored trail, past the Peppermint Stick Forest and the Gumdrop Mountain, navigating impediments like the Molasses Swamp and the Ice Cream Floats. Delightful sweet treats decorate the playing board. Wooden playing pieces were used in the past, but today gingerbread men are the game's markers. Drawing simple color cards, players advance to squares of the same color, and the winner is the one who reaches the Candy Castle first. Although parents are often known to play it too, Candy Land is designed for preschoolers ages three to six. The game encourages socialization in playing with others, patience in waiting for one's turn, and practice in recognizing colors, learning rules, and following directions.
Milton Bradley, now Hasbro, has produced Candy Land for more than fifty years. Today, along with the standard edition, the game is available in CD ROM, as a hand-held electronic game, and in special character editions. It is also produced in a Step-a-tune edition featuring an oversize board and audio contributions from Grandma Nut, Mr. Mint, and Princess Lolly.
Checkers
Simple rules. Straightforward play. Sociability. These hallmarks have kept checkers popular even in an age of complex video games and colorful board games. Checkers, or draughts as people elsewhere know them, dates back to ancient times when Egyptian tomb paintings referenced the game. By the 17th century, people purchased the first checkers' strategy book. Throughout its history, checkers' simple equipment has included pieces made of colored stones, dyed slices of corncob, or painted wood. Boards could be scratched on the ground, carved in wood, or printed on cardboard. Machine-made wooden pieces replaced hand-carved ones in the 19th century, and plastic sets dominated in the following century. Pressman Toys, perhaps the leading manufacturer of checker sets, estimates it has sold more than 25 million since its founding in 1922. Today, players can compete against computer programs, clown around with jumbo sets, or take small, magnetic travel sets on road trips. Checkers endures because it captures the essence of play: a chance for people to step away from their normal lives and the demands of the workday world to a space that rewards calculation and strategy on the board and wit and humor off it.
Crayola® Crayons
In 1900, Binney & Smith, makers of familiar red barn-paint, ventured into the school supply business. Noting teachers' complaints of poor quality chalk, the firm imagined a new market. Adapting a black grease pencil used to mark containers, Barney & Smith created handy multicolored non-toxic wax sticks in black, brown, orange, violet, blue, green, red and yellow. Alice Binney combined the French word for chalk craie, with olea,"oily" to make "Crayola," and Crayola Crayons entered the market in 1903. At a nickel a box, kids snapped them up. Over the years, appealing new colors tracked fashion trends and cultural change. Burnt Sienna and Salmon appeared after World War I. Aquamarine materialized in the 1960s. Atomic Tangerine and Laser Lemon launched in the 1970s and 80s. Macaroni and Cheese, Outer Space, Purple Heart, Tickle Me Pink, and Manatee surfaced in the 90s. Names changed too: Prussian Blue became Midnight Blue as people forgot the country. The color Flesh transformed into Peach in 1962 as the Civil Rights Movement helped open American eyes to diversity. Likewise, Indian Red became Chestnut in 1999. By 1996, the company had sold 100 billion crayons. Creative kids use up billions more throughout the world each year.
