New playground bring back memories

Thu, Jun 25, 2009    to del.icio.us

Recently the city of Ferrysburg built a play station across the street from our house at Sunnyside Park. It has proven to be immensely popular with children.

It's kind of nice to hear the screeches and shouts of children at play again. Previous to the construction of the play area, one very rarely heard the shouts of children. It was like living in a tomb.

It's like that everywhere nowadays, unless you happen to live across the street from such a park or a school yard.

I notice, however, that children don't play the same way we did when I was a kid. For one thing, children almost always are accompanied by a parent.

There are reasons for that. Many of the children are preschoolers, and I wouldn't allow such children to be very far out of my sight nowadays, either.

Also, automobile traffic is much greater now than it was in my own childhood. But we were free from our parents much earlier than kids are now.

I was born in 1933, the height of the Great Depression. By the time I went to school in 1938, we were barely beginning to recover. Nobody had two cars per family, and the car just wasn't used to transport kids to school. Also, very few people could afford them.

I remember my first day of school. My mother took me. After that, I was accompanied by my older brother, and I was very soon on my own. Everyone walked to school. While it wasn't uphill both ways and hip-deep snow didn't instantly materialize as soon as I stepped out the door, we all walked. It was very flat and only about six blocks.

Of course, we dawdled all the way home. I never saw a school bus until I was a sophomore in high school, and they brought in kids who lived in rural areas. We had all sorts of games to play such as Eenie Ieny Over, Red Rover and Kick the Can; as well as the usual baseball and soccer. The girls had hop scotch, jumprope and jacks. We had loads of fun.

The kids of today probably never heard of most of the games we played as kids. As a matter of fact, my wife decided to teach our granddaughters how to play jacks. She had a hard time finding some. She finally found some at a novelty store.

The girls, who were about 6 or 7 at the time, were not impressed, and they thought the game was stupid and boring. Not only did we play games in which modern children never even heard of, we did things and made our own toys. There were lots of vacant lots around whose owners were unknown and unseen, and we built what we called "forts," which were just holes in the ground and covered with boards.

Our forts were crudely furnished with furniture which we scrounged or made. We used them to hold club meetings or just to sit around and read comic books. We made scooters out of orange crates. At the time, grocers received oranges in crates that were made of wood and quite sturdy. They were about 3 feet long, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. We would stand them on end, nail them to a piece of 2-by-10, attach some rollerskate wheels to the bottom and we had a scooter.

I wish I had a picture of one of them, for they were quite ingenious; albeit crude.

We made what we called "rubber guns." At that time, trucks had innertubes — which were made of real rubber. We would go to a garage which serviced trucks and get some old inner tubes. The mechanics were glad to be rid of them. We would cut them into round strips about three-quarters of an inch wide. We would take a 2-by-4 about 2 feet long and, with one of the innertube strips, stretch it along the length of the 2-by-4 and attach one of those wire spring clothespins to one end. We would tie knots in the rubber strips to form a figure eight, stretch them along the 2-by-4 and insert one end into the clothespin. When released, the knotted innertube strip would provide an effective missile which had a range of about 30 yards.

My point is that I think we had more fun because our toys weren't always prepared for us.

As a consequence, we found things to do and treasured our treasures. All in all, I think I had a rather wonderful boyhood — one that would be envied by kids of today, if they only knew what there is to envy.

There is only one boy whose boyhood I would envy. That is the boyhood of Samuel Clemens, whose experiences as a boy, I'm sure, found their way into the writings of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn."