Tonka

In the late-1940s, a group of teachers in a western Minneapolis suburb set endeavored to build and sell a line of garden tools out of a schoolhouse basement. Fortunately, for legions of children that followed, those rakes and shovels never caught on, so the industrious teachers turned to crafting sturdy, scale-size earthmovers with metal that was left over from the failed venture. The teachers named their trucks for nearby Lake Minnetonka, tonka being the Lakota word for "great." The fact that the Tonka trucks that followed were designed for indoor and outdoor use would prove a testament to their legendary durability. This book takes a decade-by-decade look at some of the most marvelous shovels, graders, front-end loaders, cement mixers, pick-ups, military vehicles, semi-trucks, emergency vehicles, and, of course, dump trucks, that Tonka has produced since its inception in 1947.;The vast majority of the book focuses on the big 1:18-scale metal machines that most red-blooded American children remember from the 1960s through the, 1970s. A history of each epoch in Tonka history is accompanied by 150 marvelous color photographs depicting the trucks in their most natural surroundings, namely sand boxes, playgrounds, sidewalks, and backyards.