NOT KNOWING I HAD NOTHING

Watching a bunch of kids today as they were returned home from school, I couldn’t help but wonder what they would do with their afternoon.

I recall my son coming home from school a few times, and off he went with a baseball glove and ball or played Atari on the TV with a game set that was attached, and I imagine that today he would have turned on his computer to play a computer game with enhanced graphics and realism that would be hard to describe.

Growing up in Brooklyn during the 1950s, I never realized how so little was so much! Everybody seemed to own a coonskin cap but me, although I did own a Davy Crockett toy rifle, with a brown plastic stock that shot caps. So with a six-shooter and a rifle I terrorized a few places with my friends. Aside from a few toy plastic soldiers and cowboys and Indians, we really didn’t have much else except roller skates. No one owned a bicycle, as much as most people didn’t own cars, and if they did they hardly drove them.

One of the things we did to make our life interesting was to buy chalk, and get bottle caps and play a game called “Skelzie” where with your index finger you pushed the cap around this layout of numbered boxes until you completed the course, that was drawn on the sidewalk. While my sister was jumping rope with her girlfriends, I was racing up and down the block, or playing stoopball, punch ball or stickball. (Two sewers on a fly were a homerun.) Sometimes we would play handball at the schoolyard because it had these high walls that we could pound the ball into.

Money was no object; we had none. Everything we had lasted a long time except for Spaldeen rubber balls and wheels on our skates that wore out quickly on the concrete sidewalks. A pair of skates kept us busy from about 3:00 PM until supper time, and if we were having a real good time, we would totally miss supper and Mom would not hold it for us. Our job was to be home on time for supper, at the table waiting for Dad to appear.

Then there was tag, or sometimes iron tag where safe was any metal object and even hide and seek where boys and girls played together, these games along with “Red light green light” and a miniaturized version of baseball with a rubber ball and chalk bases where a fly ball over the infield was an automatic out.

Also included in the repertoire of games was; tops and yo-yos, where everyone had to master these toys or you were a loser. Finally came the hula-hoop, where all the little sisters would become proficient at something. Of course “A my name is Amy and I come from Alabama” was popular as little sis would bounce her Spaldeen and cross her leg over the ball as it bounced, showing her physical prowess as a little sister.

Life was fun and playing with your friends always gave you something to do, day or night, week nights or weekends.