Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crocodile who wrote (41513)	11/11/1999 1:13:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

I never played marbles, either. Girls played jacks. Boys played marbles. The world was well-defined. Boys didn't jump rope, and boys didn't play hopscotch. Boys had something similar to skateboards, must have been the precursor, made out of wooden fruit crates and old roller skates. I was a kid in New Orleans, that is, I lived there until I was seven, in 1959. My dad was in dental school, and he only worked part-time (as a phlebotomist at Charity Hospital), so even though my mother was a legal secretary, we qualified to live in a housing project (really just like a big apartment complex), there were dozens of kids my age, or a little older or younger, and we ran wild until late in the evening. There were big courtyards between the apartment complexes, and big driveways, and lots of sidewalks, so we had a lot of space to play all our games, and there was always someone playing Red Rover, or hopscotch, or Red Light, all day long, until 7 or 8 at night under the streetlights. That was long before housing projects had gangs and shootings and all that stuff, at least not at the St. Thomas project, nothing ever happened to kids there, although one time when we were moving a big chunk of brick and concrete for some reason I can't remember, it got dropped on my toe, other than that I can't remember anything harmful at all. My dad graduated, and got job in Baton Rouge, so we moved, and the first house we lived in there were almost no kids in the neighborhood. But a couple of years later we moved again, and the neighborhood again had a lot of kids, and there was a vacant lot right across the street, where we played one-eyed-cat all summer. There was a city park a few blocks from my house that had a program all summer long where teenagers would organize games and crafts, and we could just show up and play, kind of like summer camp but free-form. I think kids really prefer the free-form stuff. I tried the organized sports routine, soccer and basketball, and mine hated it, so we didn't do it anymore. As for "To Kill a Mockingbird," it did seem very familiar to me, even though I didn't grow up in a small town. I did spend all my summers in a small town in Mississippi, so that made it very familiar, and I grew up during Jim Crow segregation, so it was familiar in a lot of ways that I bet you never experienced. But I bet what seemed the most familiar to you was the kids running around free all day and into the night. That only happens in places where kids are safe, like small towns in the 50's and 60's.