Toy Story - Patrick Miller

 

Sent to me via email in 2007

My parents used to open many of our gifts the night before Christmas and set them up ready to be played with.  Those gifts were "from Santa."  On Christmas morning 1969 I went downstairs at about 4:00 A.M. and was thrilled to see Matt on his lunar trac there waiting for me.  It was way too early for me to be up, (5 years old) so I grabbed Matt and took him back to bed with me.  A few hours later the entire family enjoyed Christmas, and I got a crawler and a Callisto that year.  It was the beginning of my relationship with the good major.  

The next March for my Bday I received a bubble and a Sgt Storm.  As with many boys from that era, I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything, and I played with the MMM toys more than any others.  Sadly, the batteries from that time, I'm sure many of you recall, lasted about 20 minutes per set, so my crawler was usually idle.  That same summer I was playing with the entire MMM lot near a creek that passed through our property.  My mother called me up to dinner just before dark, and I left all the toys there in a box.  That night came an awful downpour and thunderstorm.  The next morning I went down to find everything had been washed away by the rain and rising water from the creek.  I was inconsolable.  I looked for any trace of the toys for weeks, but never found a thing.  My mother also gave me a pretty good thrashing, and none of the toys were ever replaced.....until about 32 years later when I bought a Matt and a broken crawler off of Ebay.  It's strange how things stick with you.  Now I have a larger collection than I need, but there is some comfort in having re-obtained those things lost so long ago.  Do any of us ever really grow up?

Patrick Miller

Fredericksburg, VA

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