Games We Played When I Was A Kid
When I was very young, we didn’t have a TV; we had a stand-up radio that sat in the corner of the living room in our one-bedroom house.
I don’t remember exactly when we got our first TV, but I am guessing it was in 1951 or 1952 when I was 8 or 9, because I remember the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president.
Kids back then had to be creative to entertain themselves. Some of the things we did include:
- Playing cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians
- Playing checkers and Chinese checkers
- Riding our bicycles near and far to explore, and I mean far
- Playing hide and seek with neighborhood kids
- Making tunnels in very tall weeds on empty lots and playing army
- Playing Monopoly for hours on end during summer break
- Playing card games like Go Fish and Old Maid
- Playing Hop Scotch on the street or where there were sidewalks
- Playing marbles, with the winner getting to pick one of your marbles if they won
- Playing dodgeball
- Playing pink pong
- Playing badminton
- Playing croquet and sometimes lawn darts, which were later outlawed as dangerous.
- Going to the park and playing on the monkey bars and other things that are considered dangerous these days
I had a couple of older friends on the next block who introduced me to the magic of gunpowder for fun.
I learned how to make it with sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. We would use it to blow little things up, and fortunately, we never hurt ourselves or anything of value.
This led to the discovery of empty CO2 cartridges.
By putting match heads in the cartridges and gently compacting them, you could make a rocket. You could put them in a pipe and shoot them at things. This was very dangerous as you could burn your fingers, which I did when packing the match heads, or severely hurt someone if they were hit with one.
After penetrating a telephone pole about 1 inch, I never tried it again, because it scared the hell out of me when I realized how powerful they were.
I’m sure there were other things we did for entertainment back then, but that’s all I can think of right now.
