Tater Tots

Every time I hear about the worrisome toys threatening children these days, I feel old, grumpy and a little smug. Apparently, parents of little kids are worried sick that their children are going to pick up some of those Chinese toys with the lead paint all over them, then chew the toys until they get sick or die from lead poisoning.

You worried parents—listen to me. Lead is like dog crap; if you don’t eat it, it won’t hurt you. So what you need to do is find a way to keep the lead out of the kids’ mouths. Some years back, I explained the lead-eating problem to a nervous daddy who was buying an old house. “There’s lead on every painted surface,” I said. “Don’t let the kids chew on the woodwork.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” the nervous daddy asked me.

“Well,” I said, “the same way you’re going to keep the kids from jumping off the roof, running out onto the interstate or joining a snake-handling church. You watch ’em. If a kid toddles over to the window and starts gnawing on the sill, snatch him up and convince him not to do that.”

I knew what the nervous daddy was thinking: “And how do I convince him?”

That’s the kind of situation where I just shut up for a minute and let the question rattle around in the asker’s head until it answers itself.

I’m not giving out much lead-paint advice these days, but I can tell you this. Up until 1978, just about every painted thing in America was coated with lead-based paint—every house, barn, windmill, water tank and wheelbarrow, every metal thing in a park or playground, and a whole lot of painted toys. Every American who’s older than 30 has eaten a little lead. Lucky for us, though, the old lead paint didn’t cause any mass extinction. That’s a strong indication that the current generation of babies and toddlers will survive the current lead-painted toy threat, if parents can work up the courage to take the painted toys out of the kids’ mouths or just buy toys that aren’t painted.

Believe me when I tell you: I’m surely not wishing trouble on innocent children, but I think it’s good that some toys are a little dangerous. If parents can’t keep their kids from sucking the lead paint off a Chinese Peyton Manning bobblehead doll, the kids and parents are just going to have to learn about hazards the hard way.

I say we start by bringing back the original Mr. Potato Head. Because if you ask me, America started going to hell the very day that Mr. Potato Head went fully plastic. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr. Potato Head, he’s a toy spud who hit the toy store shelves in 1952, during the Truman administration, and was the first toy to be advertised on television.

The original Mr. Potato Head kit came in a box that held plastic hats, eyeglasses, noses, eyes, ears, hands, feet and such. But there was no body. To make Mr. Potato Head into a recognizable potato-based being, you had to stick the plastic parts into your own dang potato.

The plastic parts were sharp. Very sharp. Think big, sturdy needles. If a parent turned his back on a kid playing with Mr. Potato Head, that parent’s next sensory input might have been the keening wail of a child who just got some plastic eyes—or maybe a plastic bowler hat and bowtie—embedded in the palm of his hand or the sole of his little bare foot. There would have been blood, and somebody would’ve had to pull those sharp parts out of the kid.

You hope this would’ve clued the parent to the possibility of the kid swallowing one of the long sharp pieces—say, Mr. Potato Head’s green smoking pipe. At that point, a watchful and loving parent would’ve gathered up all the sharp parts and put them where no child could find them.

And there still would have been something left for the kid to put in his mouth: Mr. Potato Head’s body, which is OK to eat raw and is good for you—low-cal, no cholesterol, with plenty of vitamins C and B6.

Sadly, though, Mr. Potato Head had to get right with toddler-coddling consumers. By 1960, Mr. Potato Head was a prefabricated plastic shell of himself, and all of his penetrating parts were dull.