by Jeannie Travis
I can tell you what kids played with, back when we had to find our fun where we could. Me and my sisters were ‘tomboys’, so spent more time in the tops of trees than in playhouses, but we DID act like girls at times. We spent a lot of time climbing young saplings and riding them down as the top bent over..Even the ones on the edge of the steep bank atop Red Hill..which would give us a ride off the bank into the road. Had
to be hickories, to be THAT limber. We would use our fingers to tear out “paper dolls” from the Sears and Roebuck wish book before it went to the outhouse. Old canning lids held mud pies, and the feller made good use of sling shots they’d made from a forked branch, leather tongues cut off an old shoe and some rubber straps cut from a hard to come by bicycle inner tube.
Hollyhock blossoms, sticks, corn husks, pillowcase or hanky to make adoll… jewelry from clover blossoms. String scraps of fabric from Mama’s quilting to make a doll quilt or doll clothes or a dandy jump rope if you get enough to tie together and braid. We used paste board to make a game board for games such as Fox and Geese or Checkers made from bottle caps , beans, corn, stones or whatever we had for game pieces. Black shoe polish made the checker board .
A piece of string was used to make things on our fingers such as Jacobs ladder or for tying on a June bug. Seems like we played something with a ring on a string but I don’t remember what it was. A big button was strung on a string and see sawed back and forth to make a loud hum. A grass sack was dandy to catch ‘top waters’/minnows in the creek for fishing bait. We made whistles from maple limbs in the Spring when the sap was up..and from the leaf stalks of the squash plants in deep summer. We occasionally lucked onto a tin can and cut strips off it’s sides to wrap in rags to make curlers.
One time Daddy set us up a seesaw using a stump, big long bolt and an old bridge plank board…We mostly just went around in circles….so might be better called a whirling dervish, or something. I can remember playing with homemade spinning tops, and on boring summer days we made ink and pretty water from different plants such as poke berries and ditch water and writing instruments from straws and feathers..We used tiny
twigs to pin together mulberry leaves to make hats and clothes. I don’t know how we missed it but we never did play hopscotch.
If you could find a piece of paper and a pin, you could make a pinwheel on a stick Did you make paper flowers for decoration day? We learned to make crepe paper flowers from our Mama .An old quilt thrown over the clothesline made a tent or was laid on the ground to watch the clouds by day and stars by night. We ran everywhere we went, usually pushing our wheel and paddle …The wheel was a rim off an old wagon wheel’s hub…Brother Robert made us some long paddles with a slat nailed across the bottom to push it with. Happy carefree days of summer, not a cloud to mar the sky.