These games would still be fun, right?

Afavorite reader, Wilfred Smith (New Castle, Indiana), who grew up in Webb City many years ago, sent some memories of his childhood. Wilfred has shared some of his memories with us before, and we love walking down memory lane with him.

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These are some of the games I played with my brothers and sister during the 1930s. We lived on North Main Street of Webb City, the first house on the left side of the road just past the railroad tracks at Independent Gravel Co. Please note that most of our games were homemade or cost practically nothing.

Have you ever tied a thread to the leg of a June bug and let it fly around in circles over your head? After awhile the bug gets tired, lands and you let it rest to recuperate.

We shot marbles placed in a circle using marbles of various colors and sizes, from small clay ones to large striped glass marbles as big as a pullet egg. We carried our marbles around in an empty tobacco bag with a drawstring. Sometimes, we would bet with each other, and if you were good at it you could end up with a lot of marbles. That is where the saying, “You’ve lost your marbles” comes from.

How about running and pushing an old tire down the road or pushing and guiding a round steel rim with a rod or a stick? Or stomping an empty Milnot evaporated milk can onto your shoe heel and walking around on the sidewalks or asphalt road making as much noise as possible!

We slid down Pike’s Peak, the highest chat pile north of Webb City, between our house and Black Cat Crossing. If we didn’t have a shovel to slide on, we used a big piece of cardboard or a piece of galvanized tin roofing… lots of fun!

There was always hopscotch played on the diagram, easily marked off in the dirt in the front yard or playing jacks on the front porch.

Sometimes, we would whittle out a wooden gun with two rubber flippers cut from an old inner tube and a spring clothes pin attached to the rear end as a trigger. Or we would find a forked tree branch and make a flipper with two rubber drawstrings and a leather pouch made from the soft leather tongues of an old shoe. These worked real well.

On the Fourth of July, our oldest brother, Everett, got some sticks of dynamite from someplace and would set them off in the chat pile across the road. If we had some money, we would buy the little Lady Finger firecrackers and light them, one at a time to make them last longer. If we could splurge we would get a few cherry bombs and blast them off in a piece of pipe… sounded like a cannon going off.

We had wild persimmon trees on the property, and in the fall we would find a long, straight, dried weed stick or a slim tree branch, sharpen one end and stick a green persimmon on it and hurl it off for quite a long distance. It hurt if you got hit by one.

In the summer, we always went bare footed and my younger brother, Bobby, and I would walk to Center Creek to swim at the bridge if we had anything that looked like a swimsuit. If not, we would go up river to Greenwood where it was secluded and girls never ventured and we would swim in the bare. That is where I learned to swim. We would ask mom if we could go swimming and she would say, “Hike out.” Sometimes, when it was really hot, the tar in the asphalt bubbled and we would dance a little jig getting off the road as it would burn our bare feet.

At home at night, with nothing to do, we would entertain ourselves by singing songs like “Red River Valley,” “The Maple on the Hill,” “Home on the Range,” and “Little Mary Fagin.” As Dad would read his detective magazine by the light of the Rayo lamp, we kids played, “I see something,” naming something in the room by color and the others tried to guess what it was. We would take a string or thread and weave it trough a button, pull the string back and forth and the button would spin furiously. Our evening snack in those good ole days was our home grown popcorn popped in bacon grease in a skillet on Mom’s old iron kitchen cook stove.

We could always play tag, kick the can, leap frog, hide and go seek, drop the hankie, spin the bottle, yo-yo, spin the top (small ones made of wood or bigger metal ones with a plunger). If all else failed, two of us would sit on the front porch and count cars that passed by from either direction and whoever had the most won. Sometimes when playing Pitch with a deck of cards, we would get into an argument. Mom would get aggravated with us, gather up all the cards and throw them into the fire in the heating stove… end of game!

In school, we played on the playground before school took up and at recess. I remember we staged a sport event with four-man relay races, three-legged races and gunny sack races. One time we had a Maypole dance.

We brothers played a game called Hannie Over, where one boy was on one side of the house and another boy on the other side. You couldn’t see one another. One would holler Hannie Over and give a ball a pitch over the house. The boy on the other side would try to catch the ball before it hit the ground. One day, my older brothers, Joe and Charles, were playing this game with a rubber ball that had split open. Charles filled it with cow manure, yelled Hannie Over and gave it a heave. Yes, Joe caught the ball before it hit the ground… he got splattered!

When was the last time you heard of anyone playing these games of yesterday? Maybe it is time you tried a few of the games… best leave out the cow manure though.

Thank you Wilfred for relating the fun of a large family on a limited budget!