My Smokey Bear and my constant childhood bed companion. One night, I got sick and threw up on him, leading my parents to dump him into the garbage. Witnessing my abject devastation, my mother dug him out of the trash and tossed him into the washer. His mouth, rinsed away in the ordeal, Mom found a small piece of brown felt and fashioned a new mouth for him. But she accidentally epoxied it upside-down, giving him a sinister Simon Legree kind of look, and I could never quite trust him again. Nor her.
I still have him in the basement in a clear plastic container. And I look askance at him, and vice-versa, every time I go downstairs and walk past him.
My parents took my bedtime stuffed animals away from me too early. So I wouldn't wind up damaged.
In the playroom downstairs at my grandparents' house, they had this exact 1960 model of a deluxe sportscar's dashboard, complete with "vrooooom vrooooom!", horn and functional windshield wipers. It was there for years. When they took it to the mountain with them when I was 13, my female cousins played with it -- but it disappeared one day.
We haven't seen it since.
