Toy safety? Wasn’t an issue for us

By Staff
Leada Gore, Editor
A news story this week about a toy recall caught my attention. Hasbro has recalled almost a million Easy-Bake Ovens. It seems the oven’s opening is small and little hands are getting caught in the door. This is particularly dangerous because, as the name implies, the toy is a working oven and therefore gets hot.
Then I read further. Hasbro has received 29 reports of fingers getting caught and five burns. Five burns out of one million toys sold. This works out to about a .0000005 chance of getting your fingers burned by an Easy Bake oven, something that’s probably about the same as getting run over by an elephant on Main Street, USA.
Still, I can understand why the manufacturers want to be so careful. Somewhere there is a parent scheming on how they can sue a toy company because their child burned a finger when they stuck it inside an Easy-Bake Oven.
I don’t think there were such worries when I was a child. I owned an Easy-Bake Oven and was fascinated that a cake could be cooked by what is essentially a lightbulb in a box. If I was dumb enough to have touched the lightbulb and therefore burned my finger, I don’t think my parents would have said they were going to call the toy maker to complain. Instead, they would have told me it’s pretty silly to touch a hot lightbulb and they hope I learned my lesson.
We had plenty of toys back then that would never be allowed today. We had paddles with red rubber balls attached by a flimsy band; a real dart board (none of that velcro stuff); and swing sets with nice concrete pads beneath.
We had rock tumbling kits, lead-based paint sets and a leather burning tool that you could use to etch your name on your belt or your sister, whichever was closer. My brother even had a chemistry set and once caused a bad reaction in his pet mouse due to a scientific “experiment” (before PETA calls – the mouse lived. He was just bald).
Even Barbies were probably less safe then. I’m sure me and the dog swallowed a couple of those little plastic shoes and I pulled enough of the doll’s heads off to cause some sort of hazard.
I didn’t ever burn myself on my Easy-Bake Oven, mainly because I knew from experience that you shouldn’t touch hot things.
There was a nasty incident involving the real oven when I was younger and that was pretty much all the lesson I needed.
Today, of course, there has to be a recall and warnings all over television. What they really should be warning you about is eating a cake from an Easy-Bake Oven. A lightbulb and a box of cake mix can only do so much.