A town called lehi 2

The things we did in my little town to pass the time.
On
January 20, 2010
if you didn't partake of my first article its right here so check it out
http://www.retrojunk.com/details_articles/5329/


Hi im back for my sophomore article. Now this account is about the things we did growing up in my little town of Lehi Utah. It will obviously be heavy on toys, whips, adventures, and all sorts of tomfoolery all remembered by me so sit back and enjoy the show.

Reading through this site, the articles i seem to gravitate towards are the ones that demonstrate personal reflections and memories. Some of the lists and things are fun to read but i feel more nostalgic when people include personal background. This is what i want to try to do with all of my articles so let me know if i have accomplished this feat.
so with out further ado lets begin.

I was Into toys growing up. We all were. Rather we were out at the park hosing each other down with our super soakers or in the back yard having world war 3 with our GI Joe troops, toys were objects that promoted fun and using our imagination. Toys were a big part of growing up and i want to cover some of the toys that i grew up with some cool some stupid all memorable.

As i stated in my last article my parents used to bribe me growing up . Be good and we will give you an action figure be bad and no video games for a week. Now a lot of the time i got really cool action figures like He man and Gi joe other times,,, Not so much.

For some reason I think my parents wanted me to be a police officer or something because there were a few years there that they bought me a lot of cop related merchandise.
ROBOCOP


Man did i think this toy was cool back in the day. not so much nowadays but i digress. I remember watching cartoons one Saturday morning and seeing the commercials for these sets of action figures. Wow those look cool . i thought. all of these toys had back packs that you could put rolls of caps in and shoot off. Epic. I remember asking my parents over and over to get me Robocop and finally they obliged,,,,,, well sort of.

WHEELS WILSON



Now see my parents were oblivious. I was raised in a house that did not allow rated R movies to be viewed so i had never seen Robocop and neither had my parents. I imagine they headed over to the toy section and just grabbed the first action figure they saw with the words ROBOCOP on it. I remember how disappointing I was when they brought home this action figure. I had to eat 10 meals of like the worst vegetables to earn a Robocop figure and when they came home with this I was hating life lol.
the funny thing is it took my parents four tries before they finally got the right Robocop.

NOT ROBOCOP!

NOT ROBOCOP!!!!

BIRDMAN BARNES???? WHAT THE FU- NOT ROBOCOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's right check out the name on the last one, Birdman friggin Barnes. Now i have seen the movie since then and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't remember a character named Birdman Barnes being in the movie lol.

Bird man put them knicckas in the trash can!


Finally my parents succeeded and got me Robocop but i was almost over the phase and in between them getting me Robocop toys they had also been giving me action figures that I hadn't even heard of before

POLICE ACADEMY
Maybe this is the reason im not a big fan of law enforcement because i had all these wretched toys shoved on me as a kid lol . these toys were slightly cooler but again i had no ideal where they were from . I had never seen the movies and if there was a cartoon it wasn't on the air where i lived so i just had some lame cop toys that I didnt really want. lol they sure were interesting though.

This first one was really lame. I think you would squeeze his legs together and it would make him swing his baton. If i remember correctly you could also fill his dog with water and spray people but i could be wrong on that one. Now i know this is the Spanish version of the action figure but it is the only pic i could find so thats all your getting.


Now the only thing i remember about this dude was that you could speak into his mega phone and it slightly increased the volume of your voice. also i think if you squeezed his legs his mouth would move.

This is one of the last Police academy action figures my parents got me. I think by this time they noticed I wasnt playing with the lame cop figures except maybe every here and there when i would have my He man toys murder them lol.


Now that i got the wretched toys of my child hood lets shift gears here a little bit. Growing up we would always use our imagination to pretend we were something else then we were. Rather it be super heros, racecar drivers, etc we could always have a lot of fun with a few props and cool places to play in.

We will start with the beginning and end of a lot of our adventures in Lehi with none other then My own house

Home is where you hang your hat, or proton pack or Powersword or whip or spacesuit what have you . yep the house above is the one i grew up in. nothing to special. a few bedrooms an upstairs and down stairs but boy did we have a blast.

Growing up i was diagnosed with adhd. I was always bouncing off the walls at home and in school. I loved life and i loved people but i was put on those godawful ritlin/aderall meth pills. ill get more into that later because I think it is directly related to what im about to talk about.
THE GHOST PROJECTOR
Growing up in Lehi we would play a lot of different games with the fellow kids in the neighbor hood. But the one my house was imfamous for was Ghostbusters! See every halloween my dad would decorate our house in such a way that some kids wouldnt even come to it. one year we even had a walk through haunted house for all the kids in the neighborhood which was off the chain! I remember one october i was at the local thrift store, Desteret Industries, shoping with my mom when i came across the following toy of awesomeness.

This toy was friggin sweet. it would project ghost onto the wall that me and my friends would subsequently pretend to catch and trap. DONT CROSS THE STREAMS. we had the whole little ghostbusters world set up in my basement. A containment unit made out cardboard, the little cheap proton packs

and even the traps where you could step on the little rubber pump and the air would make the trap open up.

Epic!
We would use the projector and we even had a cassete tape that i had recorded the ghostbuster theme song on that we would play while we were busting ghosts. lol.

The only bad thing that came from all this was those adhd pills gave me THE WORST NIGHTMARES EVER. And still to this day i remember everynight my dream would be something to the effect of real ghost being in my house and i would go to get my ghostbuster gear to fight them off but my gear would be nowhere to be found lol retarted i know but it used to scare the piss outta me.

Now just so you know eventually i did get all of the nintendo and sega systems later on in junior high but growing up i would ask santa clause everyyear for a NES and everyyear i would be heinously dissapointed, except of course the year i got the HEMAN POWER SWORD


yeah that rocked. but anyways my first video game machine that i got was the original game boy. And this kick ass carrying case with it.


but that is all besides the point. My first game console like not portable was rather odd but i am thankful that i got it first because all these years later i still appreciate it for what it is, hell i even have an emulator of the thing on my google android phone. which is incredible seeing as how big the thing was all condensed into software ahahha.
There was a really smart computer guy that lived across the street from me and my family and i was best friends with his two sons bill and mike. There father dave one day asked my dad if he wanted to buy me a computer, and after me endlessly begging he finally gave in. Now this computer was way more of a game machine then anything else, this made me love it even more.
what am i talking about you may ask. well none other than.
THE COMMODORE

Now granted the neighbor sold my dad the Commodore 64 AND the commodore Vic 20, but i was always more so fascinated with the 64 then the vic 20. hours and hours of trying to figure out how everything worked. it was so awesome. i Rember to load a game you had to type someghing like

load batman ,8,1
or it wouldnt even work hahahah so stupid but so awesome.
There was a game on there called impossible mission that i would play for hours and hours but was never able to master, maybe thats why it was called impossible mission i guess Ill never know haha!

LEGOS
when it came to christmas my parents- er i mean santa was really good to me. he would usually get me what i wanted, save the Nes, but he would always bring something that i wanted but i never asked for and that was Legos! Legos Legos Legos. man i had a lot of cool sets growing up. Being an only child was pretty cool because my parents cleared out one room in the house as my lego slash commodore 64 room. the commodore set in the corner on the desk and my dad laid down a giant board for me to build a lego city. Man did we have some fun in that room. Here are some of the sets that i had.

the ice planet ones were some of my favorite. Remember the kids across the street whos dad sold my dad the commodore? Well they also had the ice planet legos and i think thats where my parents figured out that i wanted that one because i would always talk about how awesome they were. check these out




I actually remember my mom buying this one for me at Kaybee one day randomly browsing the mall.

I also got the mars base one year i think just because again the kids across the street, Mike and Bill got one

this one came with my favorite lego mini action figure guy ever and i still have him to this day THE ROBOT

I also dabbled in some of the underwater ones but i liked the space ones better


The summers were always fun. I remeber one entire summer we had an Indiana jones summer, where me and the kids in the surronding houses would explore the old ditches and farms around our neighborhood. Catching snakes, bulding huts, wrecking other peoples huts, and doing all sorts of dangerous stuff in the canals and tunnels that our parents would never have aloud if they would have had any idea.

I remember i would get up every morning and put on an old cowboy vest that looked something like this.



and then put one of my belts on my chest from one shoulder to my hip for effect and then throw on one of my grandpas indiana jones looking hats and i was off. We did a lot of crazy things we were lucky we didnt drown or fall and die, it was good times everyday going out and exploring the world, just young kids with out a care in the world. We lived in our imaginations and i reveled there. Almost to a point of alienating some of my peers because i remember when summer came to a close and school started some of the kids found it odd that i came to school with a belt around my chest and a little halloween whip on my side ahhahaha. I still have friends to this day that i am still in touch with who give me a hard time about coming to elementary school dressed as DR jones. hahahah.


Lehi has changed so much since the days of me growing up and footloose being filmed there.

It used to be just miles and miles of fields, with no street lights, 2 gas stations, and one super market. they are now building a free way to tear through the back end of lehi to get to a city out west called Eagle Mountain. Main street Lehi is still only a two lane street but if you want to get to work anywhere close to on time you need to leave about an hour early because something like three cities have to go through lehi to get to the freeway to go to there respective jobs.

Most of the fields and ditches and hollows that we used to explore and ride are bikes are now all houses and subdivisions. There are now tons and tons of street lights,gas stations,and fast food establishments All of these things are in the name of progress i guess, but you cant help but miss the days when you could sit in the middle of mainstreet and not be bothered at all for a good 45 minutes. The times before a mcdonalds and Wendys when the only fast food in town was a little shin dig called Vittles hahahah. I miss what Lehi used to be but there are still remnants of the past in that magical town that i grew up in, and those i will treasure for ever.





There is so much more for me to tell you all if this article gets a fair response i will put together a third one. Thank you for sharing in my memories and thank you for sharing yours with me. Much love and respect for everyone here at RJ




Look for part 3 named after the famous rodeo that takes place in lehi every year and the end of this trilogy. And yes sadly the ROUNDUP pun is intended. lol
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