Most kids get one wish at the toy store, and a parent standing nearby saying “just one.” Tito Jackson’s boys had a very different kind of shopping trip.
Tito is Michael Jackson’s older brother. He and his wife Dee Dee raised three sons: Taj, Taryll and TJ. In the 1990s the brothers went on to form their own singing group, 3T. But long before that, they were just Uncle Michael’s nephews, and he spoiled them in a way most kids only dream about.
TJ, the youngest of the three, told the story in 2015. He was 37 by then and sat down with Elaine Sir for Yahoo Parenting, which published the interview on Nov 6, 2015.
When he talks about Michael, he talks about an uncle who showed up for him.
When Michael stayed with the family one week while TJ was in high school, right in the middle of finals, the boys didn’t spend it hitting the books. “We went to the movies and toy stores and had the best time,” TJ said.
Toy stores came up a lot with Uncle Michael. And he had a way of making a normal trip feel like something out of a movie.
Before we get to the big one, here’s a look at the boys themselves. This 1995 interview puts faces and voices to Tito’s sons Taj, Taryll and TJ when they were young singers.
Taj, Taryll and TJ in a 1995 interview
So where did that toy trip end up? In Japan.
TJ says a newspaper there once reported on one of their shopping trips with Uncle Michael, and the number in the story was $25,000. That’s what the boys spent.
A paper on the other side of the world, writing about three boys and their toy carts. We weren’t able to track down the article itself, so this one comes straight from TJ.
Here’s how the trips worked. Michael would take the boys to the store after it had closed for the night. Then the store would open back up just for them. And Uncle Michael had one rule: grab a cart and fill it with whatever you want.
TJ told it like this: “Michael used to take us to Toys R Us after the store closed. They’d open it for us, and he’d tell us to grab a cart and fill it up with whatever we wanted! We were even in the paper in Japan one time for spending $25,000.”
For a kid, that’s about as close to a dream as real life gets. An empty store, the lights on and an uncle telling you to go for it.
TJ is grown now, and he still talks about the family he grew up in with a lot of love. Here he is talking about his dad, Uncle Michael and the rest of the Jacksons.
TJ Jackson on his dad, Uncle Michael and family
Funny thing about the way kids remember famous relatives. For TJ, it keeps coming back to the movies and the toy stores.
“The world remembers my uncle as a legendary artist,” TJ said. And then he added the part that matters most to him: “but I remember him as a legendary uncle.”
And if TJ’s memory of that Japanese newspaper is right, at least one reporter got a glimpse of the uncle side of Michael too.