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PAGE 3 of 6
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Another proud collection from California, Walt
Costa. Glad to have you aboard! Jamie Linford took these photos, but since I
don't know very much about Cap Guns myself, I haven't labeled much of what
you're seeing. You can contact Walt at: |
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If you want your Cap Gun collection featured,
then please send your photos to:
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This must be a rather rare
Lone Ranger outfit.
Squirt-O-Matic? I wonder how
many of those are out there. When I was a kid, we would play for hours with
water pistols. This was before they invented the kind that one good blast and
you could drown a kid. Ours were plastic. But we did have one sensible rule.
Since EVERYBODY had to fill up their water pistols from time to time, it was
"illegal" to shoot them while they were filling it up. Otherwise, everybody
would simply get wet with no shooting skills involved. And part of the fun was
dodging the other person's aim and yet managing to shoot him at the same
time.
There's one of those Hubley
Atomic Disintegrators. Even though there were a lot of them made (and still
there are a lot available), the price is still high for a good example. I can't
place that gold ray gun to its right.
You can easily spend a lot of time going to flea markets to find
good showcases like this. Here we have an armload of fancy wrist cuffs. I have
never seen this many in one spot.
I'm probably a
sentimental old fool, but I really regret that we just don't have any heroes
like Gene, Roy, The Lone Ranger, Tonto, Dale and Hoppy anymore. I asked a girl
who was our waitress at a restaurant the other day if she had heard of these
people and she said, "No." Come on people. That would be like me saying that I
had never heard of Andrew Carnegie, just because he died before I was born. Is
the education of America that bad these days? Have we no recent history? Do
teachers only teach about things that happened before World War II?
I have always taken a lot of pride that
Nichols Industries is the only Major Cap Gun Company that came about completely
after World War II and that I was a part of it. Yeah, I know, Mattel was over a
year ahead of Nichols and was from 1945, but that was right at the tail end of
the war. But 100% of the major Cap Gun companies went out of business and that
is a shame. Well, all except for Mattel, but it wasn't their Cap Guns that kept
them alive: It was Barbie. And now 100% of Mattel's stuff is produced in China.
80% of Mattel's profits are in Barbie Dolls.
There are
hardly ANY companies in the United States or anywhere that are making quality
toys out of metal anymore. You know, the kind of stuff that you would like to
save and keep.
When I was a kid, a rich kid down the street (in Dallas, while
my dad was in seminary) had a HUGE collection of miniature soldiers. You know,
the kind that might have been cast out of lead or zinc or iron, and they were
all hand painted. We would put them out on the floor and arrange intricate
battle scenes. I'm sure that some of you older collectors remember this kind of
thing.
Do you see those Mordt Cap
Gun in the center at the bottom? Mordts are quite rare.
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