I know there are many old-timers on Free Republic.
Did any of you have any fun playing as kids without aquatic centers and hockey fields?
There were trees to climb, beaches to splash around in. An empty yard to build a marble game in, in fact we had about 3 places where we scraped away the vegetation and built our
marble “yards”. We built small hills, one even had a tunnel the marble had to go through. Lawn mowers became race machines, the mowers we pushed without engines. An old house we played kick the can. We didn’t have anyone teach
us how to have fun. Baseball was in “the” empty lot. We built our own stilts, and boy did we have some races.!
You betcha. We would used long pointed tree branches and have make believe sword fights and I am a girl!
Nope. We went out in the mesa and dug forts. Played cowboys and indians. Smoked any cigarette butts we could find. Hunted lizards. Ah, the good old days.
We used to play football on the street. The light pole was the goal line.
We played football and baseball in backyards, all day, every day during the summer. Only 2, sometimes 3 white kids playing. That would be my brother and I. Everyone else was black. You know what? We didn’t care. They were my friends, race was never considered.
Until ‘65/’66. All of a sudden we were the enemy. More fights in those years than in all my life.
Nowadays, the loser will come back with a gun. Then, it was hard feelings for a day, then shake hands and best friends again.
I miss those days.
Hockey field? That must be a Minnesota thing? We played on ponds. Or rinks.
In my current digs (Pocatello), there is an indoor pool (year round) and outdoor pool (May to September). Lots of soccer fields. Rodeo for the high school kids. Football. A full range. It's hardly a "wealthy" area with median income of $29k. Very few blacks. Gangs are present on the nearby reservation, but not in town. Drug activity tends to visit from Utah looking for customers.
I was raised up on a long dirt road...No nothing for miles...I survived it....at least i was close to a bay...spent time swimming and fishing...Didn’t know anything about parks and activities... No government around. and didn’t know any difference...Us kids met up on bicycles and entertained ourselves....I can’t even relate to city folks that were raised with even a store close by....It’s odd that i turned out ok and the government played no hand in it at all.....I find city people whiny to tell the truth.
I guess Moochie never saw a bunch of white kids playing stick ball on a busy street.
Yes, we did. A trip to our neighborhood playground, where there was no graffiti, I might add, was a big deal. We had a see-saw, monkey bars, a swing set with 3 swings, and a sliding board. And, for us, it was heaven.
Just recently, I was reminiscing about how my mother would give us sheets of wax paper to be used to shine the sliding board. We were convinced that it let us go faster down the slide.
There were no such things when I was a kid. We didn't have a car, and the only time we got to go swimming was when we visited my aunt for a weekend. I can probably count on one hand, the number of times I went swimming prior to going to highschool. We played ball in the street, and hockey too, without skates during the winter. We played cowboys and indians, jax, marbles, board games, jump rope, roller skated on the sidewalk, played hopscotch, and drew with chalk on the sidewalk. We also played other games, like hide and go seek, Simon Says, etc. We kept ourselves busy because we made our own fun.
Ring-A-Leeveo 1 2 3
Johnny-on-A-Pony
Don't know how old old timers are but I'm close to sixty. We had a pool about six miles away. Cost a dime I think. Ocean was less than a mile ( free) and a store was the same as the pool. We walked or rode bikes or horses everywhere and all kids played in the street. If we wanted to get penny candy or a pack of baseball cards we collected bottles, and did odd jobs and ran our wagon around cutting lawns with a push mower. Played anything with a ball and a stick and or imagination and chalk and a rock. We were not rich by any standard. .
I don't remember a park. We had the land, the stables, the street, the hills, the orchards, the ocean. We lacked nothing.
Of course we were in
Certainly... the only actual playground I can recall was the one at school. At home we all played in the yard/street and just made do with whatever was around. I recall spending weeks working on a space capsule we made from a big cardboard box.
Yup. Played mostly in the street or my own back yard. I lived in a small town in north east NJ.