ABSTRACT
“One of my favorite toys when I was four years old was a piece of stiff wire roughly twelve inches long, bent into the shape of a double letter C. It must have been the piece that holds a thermos bottle firmly in the lid of a metal lunch box. I found it on the beach in southern California and named it ‘gropper,’ because, I think, the lower part of the C looked to me like the legs of a grasshopper. The upper part looked something like the bill of a duck. In the ensuing months I worked with my mother and grandmother to make a large wardrobe of bright colored socks to pull over the ends of the wire legs and a variety of wool, silk, and cotton tubes to slip over the bill and cover its body. For several years, Gropper held an honored place among my other toys—cars, Teddy Bear, blocks, and soldiers—but at some point I became self-conscious and a bit embarrassed about my fantasy and discarded Gropper, bag and baggage. If I had kept Gropper and donated him, together with the rest of my playthings, to the Smithsonian, what would a curator do with such a bizarre object?” (Mergen 1982, 121-22).
