Toys I had - Voice Control Kennedy Airport

I actually had this as a child - it was a garage sale toy that my mother found at local sale on Shaker Boulevard.  I probably got when I was in second grade - my brother was still living at home - and he was into playing with it while muttering things like "we didn't have stuff like this when I was your age."

But like all REMCO toys, it was pretty plain Jane if you peeled away the decals.  And being obsessed with Architecture from a young age, I had seen the wondrous terminals at the airport designed by the international host of architects, leading me to comment in disbelief "what Kennedy Airport is this?"  Where was the TWA terminal? What about the Skyport?

If the terminal was bland, the planes were mundane, with the wheels molded in a half nubbin position, they appeared to be pimples in the on pale planes under bellies. 

Being a child of some exactness, I found the headphones connected to the terminal housed record player to be limiting.  It takes miles for a real plane to descend into a real airport, but the cord on the head phones was maybe two feet long.  Try and take a plane down at that angle and your sure to die a miserable death.

To do it properly I would have had to started my descent in the living room, banked through the dining room and then come in low to the family room. Worse yet was where to have your holding pattern.  Too close to my mother's Erwin Lambreath coffee table and I was sure to get yelled at.  Circling around the dining room table was an invitation to dizziness.   But since I was unable to land the planes in a proper fashion because of the short headphone cord, there were a lot of mishaps at VOICE CONTROL KENNEDY AIRPORT.  And without the head phones, there wasn't much to work with as a toy with just crappy parts.

One of the local toy stores (I think it was the FAO Swartz at Shaker Square) carried small airplane toy models that were really detailed and we used them with the "VOICE CONTROL, KENNEDY AIRPORT"  for the 15 minutes that it held my attention.  After that it found it way into one of my mother's garage sales.  The cycle had come full circle.

I found one of these on ebay, but its missing the fold out runway system, and a couple other pieces.  Without the set up, it doesn't amount to much.