Items from My Youth: Tiny Helmets

“Slow news day.”

Along with my Starting Lineup figurines, I also salvaged these mini helmets from my mother’s latest rummage pile.

Taking advantage of my GF’s clean desk.

I used to get these for a quarter a piece from vending machines at grocery stores.

Once I had enough of them, I would play out entire seasons, the schedules scratched out in notebooks, each game decided by a coin flip. (I was never able to get all of the teams, so I just used duplicates to stand in for the missing teams, putting a tiny scrap of masking tape over the logo on the duplicate and initialing the tape to represent the missing team.) For the playoffs, I would do a coin flip per inning and keep track of the “score.” I sorta wish I still had those notebooks now. It was a life’s work, really.

In an effort to meld the past and the present, I decided to assign each of the helmets to an object/being in my current house. I made some effort to align some aspect of the team with the object/being it got placed with — but don’t read too much into that. Or do. There are some duplicates.

California Angels, LOLz

Braves helmet cereal bowl that I got from Apple Jacks box offer,
had since I was 10 or so.

Lady stuff.

Wanted to have chicken and beer but beer was too high quality
and chicken was frozen.

Look at me: I’m beautiful.

I’m not kidding: I named our cat Mark “Bird” Fidrych.

I can has mini helmet?

Some good finds for Kenny Williams.

A family of sasquatches, a family of extraterrestrials; $5, Seven Mile Fair

It’s a fossil. Get it?

Possibly my fav’.

Courage bird.

This cat once lived with a dog named Brewer.