Atari, Colecovision and the future wave of electronic gaming systems hadn’t yet come along – those were still a few years off. The most sophisticated things we had were pocket football games with super bad graphics, and of course “Operation!” which was always out of batteries because no one had a steady hand. We read books, played Checkers, Candy Land, Chinese jump rope, and Twister. If we wanted to be spooked out, we had the Ouija (pronounced “wee-gee”) board and the Magic 8 Ball.
There was always the Big Wheel to get around in style (and there was no recovery once your plastic tire wore down and got a “flat”), and if you didn’t want to go anywhere, you sat down on the Sit and Spin right after lunch…going around and around and around until you vomited the meal onto the sidewalk. Of course there were the yellow cones that you strapped on your feet and held the rubbery strings and nearly broke your neck when the cones finally gave way to your weight and collapsed. The pogo stick was for advanced kids who could walk and chew gum at the same time. Most of us uncoordinated kids just stuck to the old-fashioned hoola hoop and the lemon twist that you put around your ankle and skipped with (if you were really uncoordinated, the lemon twist was known as the “shin buster”).
If all your toys of the day still didn’t make your world go ‘round, you always had your brothers and sisters to beat up on, introducing them to the “Horse” family. “Charlie” Horse was rough, but his brothers “Irving” and “Pony” always hurt more. Then you had the dreaded “melon baller” (you firmly grasped the person’s head down by their ears and with the palm of your hands applying most of the pressure, you forced your hands up and it “burned” the sides of the skull for a moment or two). The meaner version of that was the “match stick” (you made a fist and with a pressured stroke, you ran your knuckles fast upwards from the base of the skull, which left the victim howling). There was always a good old game of “Flinch” to be played (palms up on the bottom, palms down on the top; the person on the bottom shakes their hands and tries to slap the hands on top. If they miss, they have to take the top position). The meanest of the mean was the post-sunburn “lavin peachie” (a good slap on your lobster back).
It was still an honorable profession to make world-class mud pies and threw worms at each other and daring one another to eat them. No one did, and it gave birth to the grandest of insults: “You’re CHICKEN! Bock! Bock! Bock!” No one thought of shooting each other – we worked hard to come up with insults like, “Your mother wears army boots!” and “Your momma is so fat, when she sits around the house, she sits AROUND the house!” You always followed the insult rule: never make it so mean your friend won’t play with you again.
We sang the “Miss Lucy” songs that always bordered on swearing and got our mouths washed out with soap for it. I discovered back then Joy liquid dish detergent and a Budweiser chaser to rinse it out was never a gourmet combination. So we learned songs that helped us to democratically pick who was going to be “it” for tag or “one-two-three-redlight”.
“One potato, two potato, three potato, four…five potato, six potato, seven potato more.” The other favorite of the day was, “My mother and your mother got in a fight. My mother punched your mother right in the nose…what color was the blood?” Everyone who wanted to play had their fists in a circle, and with each word of the songs, you would tap their fist. The last word of the song tapped the fist “out”, and the last person with a fist in the circle was fairly chosen as “it”.
Today’s world is a different place. You can’t leave your kids in the back yard without supervision because someone might call Child Protective Services on you for neglect, or a weirdo might come by and steal your kids. Lawn darts and horseshoes? Never! I was in my teens when lawn darts were outlawed, and I haven’t seen horseshoes anywhere for at least twenty-six years.
Now we have anti-bacterial hand cleansers to protect our kids from germs – and we grew up chipping in our pocket change to walk to the store to buy a coke six with of us with sniffles would share. For that matter, if you see a young kid wandering around alone, it’s automatically assumed he is neglected. If someone got the measles of chicken pox, you didn’t run your kids over and get them infected, you kept the separated and hoped for the best.
