A long, long personal history of my collecting!

Part One:  The First Wave!

I don't really remember buying my first Joes.  I only remember having them.  I can only assume that my Mom or Grandma must have bought me Zap and the Mobile Missile System at the Kay-Bee Toys at Westridge Mall in 1982.  I do remember playing around with the MMS at Piccadilly Cafeteria on what must have been the day I got it.  For years, broken leg Zap was floating around in my yellow wooden toybox.  Parts of the MMS were floating around the back bedroom of my grandparents farmhouse for many many years.  I vaguely remember having that straight-armed Hawk as well, but I didn't know their code names.  Many of the original Joes from that first year were a mystery to me.  They seemed generic and primitive compared to the releases in the next few years.  Anyway, that is my earliest Joe memory.

At my school, GI Joe was huge.  That was about all we would play during recess.  Our Jansport backpacks would be crammed with the latest figures and weapons and on days when we wouldn't them to school, we would become the Joes themselves.  My friend Tommy always insisted on being Duke and I usually had to be Flint.  He justified this by saying that he had blonde hair and so did Duke.  It was a golden age of GI Joe!  I'll never forget hunting around everywhere to find Snake Eyes and finally finding him at Smitty's.  I found Storm Shadow at Diamond's department store (before they got bought out by Dillard's).  Every store it seemed sold GI Joe.  I bought Check Point Alpha at Alpha Beta (before they became ABCO).  Christmases and birthdays were always a Joefest!  We had to return Zartan to Lionel Playworld because his O-ring broke (this was before we figured out the back screw trick).  

Sending away for hooded Cobra Commander was a huge deal.  It seemed like six months before he finally came in the mail!  He looked very regal in his dark blue uniform with official looking gold stripe running down his leg.  I was the only kid in the 2nd grade with a Cobra Commander figure.  Since they stopped selling the helmeted version a year earlier, this was the holy grail of the time. You can't forget Sergeant Slaughter too... or The Fridge.  All the mail-aways were awesome.

The ultimate was the USS Flagg.  It sat in the living room for a week... that is until my mom got sick of it sitting there.  The mighty ship was too big to fit in my room, so it went to live on the back patio.  One day, it mysteriously disappeared into my grandparents' basement.  At the time, I was kind of creeped out to go down there and play with it, so they thought I had lost interest in it and gave it to a family friend.

My first wave of interest in GI Joe sadly came to a close late in 1987.  I had switched schools and it seemed that no one there was interested in GI Joe.  So, I stopped buying them.  Some of the last Joes I bought during that time were Law and Order and Chuckles.  

NEXT:  The Second Wave:  Too Old For Joe, but that doesn't phase me!