re: #85 Blind Frog Belly White

Yep.

The Older Boy was really into trains, from the age of 2 to the age of 6. And I mean REALLY INTO trains, in the way ASD folks get. Nearly every toy, and most of the videos he watched were train-related. Mrs. FBW found all the nearby train rides, including the Live Steamers in Tilden Park in Berkeley, and the Roaring Camp steam train near Santa Cruz. We went to ‘Train Shows’ at the Cow Palace - basically a bunch of dealers selling train and model train stuff. I even took him up to Portland to ride for a day on a Union Pacific excursion train, pulled by what was at that time the largest operating steam engine.

Then, at the age of 6, over the course of a couple months, he completely lost interest in trains. Next it was pirates.

So, his 6th birthday we celebrated on the Roaring Camp steam train. His 7th birthday we celebrated on a “pirate ship”, the Hawaiian Chieftain.

And we ended up with a lot of train stuff.

One thing I just found out about the original, defunct Lionel Corporation that falls under “huh…”: Roy Cohn (yes, that Roy Cohn, he of McCarthy and Trump infamy) was the owner of the company from 1959-1963 and just about ran it into the ground then:

In 1959, Cowen and son sold their interest in the Lionel company and retired. The buyer was Cowen’s grandnephew, Roy Cohn (businessman and attorney to Senator Joseph McCarthy) who replaced most of Cowen’s management. The business direction of the Lionel company changed: it added subsidiary companies unrelated to toy train sets — among them were Dale Electronics, Sterling Electric Motors, and Telerad Manufacturing.[14] Cohn’s unsuccessful tenure of Lionel lost the company more than US$13 million in his four years of running the company.[6]

en.wikipedia.org