Vintage 1970s Cowgirl Tin Cricket Clicker 🎵 Aigami Japan NOS Lithograph, Original Packaging – Dime Store Find

Why Did One Click on a Tin Cricket Mean Who Goes There? 🎵 A Vintage 1970s Cowgirl Tin Cricket Clicker on Its Aigami Card, Made in Japan

Size: 1 5/8" x 3"

A little tin cricket clicker with a blonde cowgirl in red on the front - braids, fringed skirt, boots and a pistol in the air - still in its bag, stapled to the original header card: TIN "CRICKET", AGE 3 AND UP, Playmate For All, AIGAMI under a little winged eagle, and MADE IN JAPAN. Press the steel tongue and it goes click-clack, which is the whole point.

🦗 What a cricket is

A cricket is just a little piece of spring steel on a metal body that snaps when you press it, and every dime store - Woolworth's, Kresge's, Ben Franklin, Newberry's - had a pegboard of them. U.S. Metal Toy and Kirchhof made them here, and the Japanese made them by the thousands. Ask anybody who went to Catholic school in the 1950s and they'll tell you the nuns ran the whole chapel with a clicker - one click, stand up, another, kneel down - and kids used them for secret signals on the playground.

They even went to war. Before D-Day, General Maxwell Taylor of the 101st Airborne, who had seen paratroopers lose each other in the dark over Sicily, had about 7,000 brass crickets made by ACME of Birmingham, England, and handed out a few days before the jump. In the hedgerows of Normandy one click meant "who's there?" and two clicks back meant "friend."

🇯🇵 Made in Japan

Right after the war, Japan's toy makers got back on their feet making cheap, bright tin toys for American stores, and the story collectors still tell is that some of the first ones were stamped out of flattened tin cans left over from the occupation. By the 1950s the business was booming, and the Victoria and Albert Museum says Japan's tin toy industry hit its peak in the late 1960s before labor costs and die-cast toys wore it down. This card reads MADE IN JAPAN, not the Made in Occupied Japan of the years right after the war. Aigami put out a whole line of these Playmate For All crickets - a cowboy, an Indian, a clown, an alligator and more - and ours is the cowgirl.

A blonde cowgirl in braids with a six-shooter is pure TV Western - Annie Oakley, with Gail Davis in blonde braids, ran from 1954 to 1957.

📅 How old is it?

Nothing on it carries a date, but the card tells you anyway - look up in the corner: AGE 3 AND UP. American toy packages didn't carry a minimum age as a matter of course until the toy industry's own safety standard took effect on September 22, 1976 and called for every toy package to say what age the toy was meant for. Then in 1979 the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned small parts in toys for children under three, and "3 and up" became the line you see on toy packages from then on. So this card is a 1970s card, from the tail end of the years when Japan was still stamping out tin toys for American dime stores.

🎵 About these

She's the cowgirl cricket, still bagged on her Aigami card, about 1 5/8 by 3 inches. Like everything I keep, she lives in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so any age she shows, she had before she came to me. It's a great little stocking stuffer, a fun piece for a cowgirl or Western collection, or something to hang on a shadow box wall with other dime store toys. The supply is finite - nobody's carding Aigami crickets anymore, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.