When we moved into the house on White Cherry Way, the previous family left behind a lot of things in the crawl space. One of them were the broken remains of the Barbie Olympic Ski Village. I never knew its name until I found it in the 1975 Sears Catalog:

You can see it in its full glory here:

The toy we inherited from the previous homeowners wasn’t complete. We only had one of the panels to the ski jump, but it wasn’t long enough to even reach the floor in a vertical drop. Stacey and I used to prop it up on the huge dictionaries from Mom’s bookcase. There was no Olympic Gold Medal to award Barbie, either. The “swirling snow saucer” was missing as well.

Thirty years later, all that remains of the Barbie Olympic Ski Village are a pair of skis.

You would think that living in Salt Lake City, Utah, I would have been a mad for skiing kid and loved this toy, but I didn’t. Skiing was something rich people did. They invaded our town and wasted their time strapping boards to their feet and falling down hills. This toy kind of sat in disrepair, virtually unplayed with until it was finally thrown away. It makes me kind of sad for it.

Maybe it ended up on the Island of Misfit Toys and found a place where it could be happy.