Featured set of the day
Posted by Huw,
Schmopiesdad takes us way back to the '60s for today's featured set:
The first LEGO set I ever received was 320 Airplane which came to me from my step-grandmother for my seventh birthday in 1968. Being the youngest of seven children in a family with one wage earner, there was very little in the way of discretionary income. That does not mean that we lacked for anything we needed, but it does mean that a gift of a LEGO set was indeed special.
I marvelled at the concept. Interlocking bricks and plates of nondescript origin that could be combined into something easily recognizable as an important technological innovation--the airliner.
Please note that this set had 123 pieces, of only 28 different types and colours. Even so, there were at least five alternate builds, including a windmill. The most exotic pieces were 7039 (red 2x2 wheel with metal axle), 132a (light grey rubber tyre), and 7049a (2X4 brick with holes for wheel axles) I have no idea of the price, but I did know it was special. Of those 123 pieces, the vast majority were red, white, and black bricks and plates. Perhaps the most amazing thing about 320 is that only 14 Brickset members own it and only 28 want it. Could that be the Samsonite stigma?
I built it. I swooshed it. I loved it. Even so, it was not the most memorable early set. That would come seven years later. In the meantime, I had accumulated a handful of other LEGO sets purchased with birthday money or as gifts from relatives.
Seven years later, at the age of fourteen, I purchased my first LEGO set with money I had earned at my first job in an ice cream store. It may sound cliché, but this was a watershed moment in my journey towards independence and it felt liberating to earn money and spend it as I chose. Little did I know, then, that I was about to descend into 25 or so years of dreadfully Dark Ages.
My most memorable set was 580 Brick Yard Brick Yard. Holy cow! What a difference from 320 Airplane only seven years earlier!
At 216 pieces, it was not big by any stretch of the imagination, and not even twice the size of my red airplane, but the diversity of pieces had exploded, as had the playability. In addition to bricks and plates, there were hinge-plates, windows, shutters, printed pieces, buckets, scoops, conveyor belt, winch, arches, slopes, tracks, tiles, rounds, and a baseplate. The possibilities were endless! Or were they?
As much as I wanted this set, as much as I loved building and playing with this set to move my construction materials around my imaginary construction site, which allowed me to incorporate other sets I already owned such as 490 Mobile Crane and 730 Steam Shovel with Carrier, I would never try to rebuild the Brick Yard into something different.
Perhaps that was due to the specialisation of the pieces or my Dark Ages, I will never know. But I do wonder if it wasn't a harbinger of the struggles LEGO would face much later in the late 90s and early 00s. Regardless, I am ever so grateful to have had those early experiences that would impact my life today.
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10 comments on this article
So much emotion in your story with those sets. We all have a strong bound to our childhood. Some have forgotten it, and others still have it strong present inside. Seeing, touching, or thinking about one of our beloved or preferred toy can immediately take us back years ago. With our emotions, intact. To me, we are just like trees. We grow, but with several layers accumulating and coming one on the previous year after year. Which means that the child we were is still there, alive, inside us. It's just a matter of not forgetting her or him. I did not, and my emotions while playing with Lego (though in a different way) are the same, intact, today. Thank you Schmopiesdad !
"I built it. I swooshed it. I loved it."
Title of a Lego plane documentary.
The widespread rioting that followed the release of this set led directly to the invention of the jumper plate.
Great article, very well written........and I mean no offence by this, but perhaps the reason your first set is not well sort after is simply that the further you back in time with lego sets the more basic they become, and so in general people your age or younger have been brought up with more complicated sets, or more variety of sets or colours. its like me trying to explain to my 7 year old that when I was 7 we had 3 channels of TV, and believe it or not we had no way or pausing, recording, or downloading a program we had missed. Bizarrely though I was born in 1974, and the first set I remember was from 1978, but I recently bought the UK equivalent of your next set 360-1 from 1974 (and one from 1972) to see what life would have been like if i had been born a little earlier. Thankyou.
Great "Featured set of the day"! Well written and a joy to read. Thank you!
Wow. That 320 Airplane is fantastic! I might have to built it!
I remember admiring this aircraft in a LEGO catalogue but had no chance of getting it. So I built it with my own parts, most in red. I was very proud of the result!
By the was, I was born the same year as the author.
Great memories!
PS: For the rudder I used some illegal connection because I didn‘t like the asymetric rudder. (I wouldn‘t have dreamt of jumper plates at that time!)
I believe that it is indeed a Piper Aztec, but we can narrow it down even further. It is OY-FAV which was owned by Lego System A/S from 1962 to 1963. LEGO made an upgraded version for the 2012 inside tour: https://brickset.com/sets/4000012-1/Piper-Airplane
http://www.oy-reg.dk/register/2584.html
@scheller2 said:
" It is OY-FAV which was owned by Lego System A/S from 1962 to 1963. "
Blimey, that is a seriously impressive piece of detective work!
So nice memories!