MOULTRIE,  Ga.  — So I was watching “American Pickers” the other night and they were paying big bucks for junk. Excuse me, I mean antiques. And I got to thinking that I could be rich if I had saved a bunch of stuff from my childhood … all my old Levis, Red Camels,  Red Ryder BB gun and those little tin cars that had pictures of Dick Tracy painted on the drivers side window.

But as they say, hindsight is always 20-20. Back then these things were new, and the phrase “mint in the box” meant that you had something good to eat at the Saturday movies. And besides, why would you buy a great toy and never take it out of the box and play with it. That would be illogical.

So one of the pickers, the short stocky one, found a toy tanker truck in some fellow’s barn. He got all excited and was just short of foaming at the mouth. It had Texaco painted on it. I had one very similar to it, except mine was Standard Oil. He paid a lot of  money  for the one he found. And mine probably has returned to its basic elements somewhere out in the old barnyard.

Funny how time can mess with you like that.

He also bought an old tricycle. I had one of those my parents bought for me at Firestone. I would pretend mine was a Farmall tractor, and I would tie my Western Flyer red wagon to the back of it and haul ears of corn around the backyard, emulating what my dad did in his big guy world.

By the way, a tricycle doesn’t work too well when you try to ride one in dirt. When I rode my cousin’s in town on a sidewalk I thought how unfair life is by not giving me a stretch of concrete. But in hindsight, I’m glad there is no concrete there. Just rich loamy soil.

These pickers have a couple of shops where they sell these items for very hefty prices to “collectors.”

I’m not sure what collectors actually do with this stuff. Do they just sit and stare at it or do they get down in floor and play with it? Do they leave it “mint in the box” and just imagine what it would be like to play with it?

Also  I wish I had saved all of those Star Wars toys we bought for our son. Of course I’m sure their value would have depreciated substantially with the mixtures of bubble gum and peanut butter in the hinges. And certainly stretch Armstrong would  have seemed greatly out of its original proportions. I mean it was an open invitation to see if he could wrap his arms around the dog.

It wasn’t that long ago that I found a partial carcass of that old Red Ryder BB gun. A piece of it was sticking up out of the sod behind the corn crib. I guess that’s where I fought my last battle against the Comanches. Or maybe it was a replay of Pork Chop Hill. Only the good earth knows.

I recall having a toy box under my bed with cap pistols, a rubber Jim Bowie knife, a coonskin cap and other such memorabilia. Well, I guess its only memorabilia if you still have it. It’s memory if you don’t.

I have no idea what happened to that toy box. I guess as I got older it got discarded. Time absorbs stuff it seems. It’s an amorphous process.

I lived in a time and place where very little thought was given to antiques. We just had old stuff. There must be a fine line between “just old stuff” and antiques.

But I recall a lot of happy days with some of that old stuff. And even though I don’t have anything that the pickers would foam at the mouth over, I have some memories that are priceless. All in all, their value in that regard far outweighs “mint in the box.”

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)