Hey, this is cool...I think you've remembered all of them...
Hide-n'-seek..
.....for awhile I lived in a small town which had a large "old section" with narrow backyards and old-fashioned horse-sheds at the ends of the backyards. When we played Hide-n'-seek and other games, we would meet after dinner at the old post office building in that part of town. Then we would play games like tag or hide-n'-seek on top of those shed roofs... chasing each other through the entire neighborhood like young mountain goats as we tore up and over each roof. We had a great time... not too many injuries, although I remember a couple of kids falling through rotten roofs... old moss-covered wood-shingled ones under large trees...those were the WORST for being rotten... so you tried not to get cornered near those ones... (In retrospect, I'm sure that the homeowners hated us... good thing liable suits weren't heard of back in those days or that probably would have spoiled all the fun)...
***BTW, there's something about the years when I lived in a small town that has always made "To Kill A Mockingbird" seem so "familiar" to me. I've asked other people about that, but they haven't found that to be true in their case. It may be that there's something really specific about the book and my own experience... Maybe that we had a couple of "mysterious neighbors" who were sick and never came out of their houses...one of whom everyone thought was a witch. She lived next door to us though, so I knew she wasn't a witch... just bedridden and had nurses who came to look after her...
Marbles...
I wasn't much for playing marbles for some reason,...but I loved the marbles.. cat's eyes and purees and a bunch of other variations on colors, qualities, and other things like that... Funny when you think of it... how things like marbles can develop into a currency of their own...and yet they were so cheap (not to a kid, of course), but that were made more valuable by being "won" from someone else...
World... (did you ever play that one??)
You usually played with 1 or 2 other people. You needed a large sandy area to play it on. You would take a stick and make a big circle in the sand. Then you would divide the circle in half, or thirds, or quarters. Then each person would stand inside his/her part of the "world" and use a stick to carve off pieces of the other person's territory. You had a definite edge if you were tall and had a long reach. I remember that being popular when I was in Grades 4 and 5...
Skipping Ropes... (now there's my favorite...)
I was a real skipping rope person for a few years... loved to skip Double-Dutch and do all those variations of it such as skipping on one foot, or "running" (hopping from one foot to the other), or turning in circles (with or without eyes closed), and then Dolly Dutch where the direction of the ropes is reversed...and "Hot Pepper" which was Double Dutch at high speed, and that other one which had a song to go with it, about the ocean...where the ropes swing back and forth and you run through them and stay "inside" the "waves" for a few beats with someone else...wish I could remember how that one went.
Now that I think of it, I was totally skipping crazy.... My friends used to get really mad at me because we used to take turns skipping and would keep going until we tripped on a rope or something and I could go on for 20 minutes or more...all through a recess...without tripping... even if they poured on the Hot Pepper to try to trip me... sometimes I'd trip on purpose just so that I wouldn't be loathed too much...(-:
Skateboards... (the old steel-wheeled ones in 1963-4...real nasty things that sent you flying if you hit so much as a pebble on the pavement...)
Maybe the skateboards were the end of the fun as far as just getting together to play games. They came to our town around 1963... not everyone could afford one. Those that could, formed a little gang that met down by the butcher shop owned by the father of one of the boys... I had a board and it was fun, but it did split up all the kids and changed everything....
Hmmm... interesting to think back on all of this stuff... thanks for posting the list, Coby..(-: |
