When I was growing up in my large family of 7 siblings, we played a lot of board games. Clue and Monopoly were the ones we played most often.
I wasn’t a big fan of dolls. I don’t think I ever had a Barbie doll. I know I had a baby doll one Christmas when I was about 7 because there’s a photo of me holding one. But the only doll I remember was one that was a toddler about 2-3’ tall. You could hold her hand and make her walk along with you. It was nothing electronic that made her walk. You just had to kind of sway her from side to side causing her legs to move. She had a hole where her mouth was so you could feed her a fake bottle. One day my older brother David and I crammed saltine crackers in her mouth. Of course, you couldn’t ever get them out. After that you could hear them rattling around inside her if you shook her.
We played “Cowboys and Indians” in the back yard a lot, shooting each other with play guns and galloping around the yard. We also played Tarzan, which was a very popular TV show then. We didn’t have any gear for that, we mostly just ran around doing our Tarzan yells and pretending to jump in rivers full of alligators.
We also had jump ropes and one Christmas I got a pogo stick. I never could jump on that thing. I always started falling over! Other outdoor games we played were hopscotch, Red Light Green Light, and Red Rover. None of these required equipment. We never had any concrete driveways or sidewalks so we didn’t even need chalk for hopscotch. We used a stick and drew the diagram in the dirt. We also played “catch” with a baseball and gloves.
We had a swing set and one year we got a thing called a twirl-go-round. It had four seats and a handle at each seat that you pulled back, opposite sides pulling/pushing together. This made it rotate around.
And, of course, books to read where a favorite. I spent many days up in our big mimosa tree in the back yard reading.
We all had bikes to ride too if we were old enough. It was pretty safe to ride in our neighborhood of small streets back then. When a rec center opened a few blocks away the older of us kids rode with a younger one on the back of our bikes during the summer to go swimming there.
Other than the playground equipment we had, none of our toys were expensive. And our swing sets weren’t the top of the line variety. Buying bikes for 7 kids was costly but we never had high dollar bikes, just the kind like you’d find today at Walmart. The dolls we got were generic brands. Even if there had been American Girl dolls we couldn’t have afforded them. Back then there were Madame Alexander dolls but we didn’t have those and could have cared less. I’m sure we didn’t even know there was such a thing. We had the most fun in our back yard where imagination was the only thing required for most games.
Good memories.
ReplyDeleteYes, indeed, JB!
DeleteWe didn't have many toys, either, and I wasn't fond of playing with dolls. I loved my bike. The most fun, though, was when neighborhood kids divided into teams, collected chinaberries, and positioned ourselves in ditches across from each other to hold a chinaberry war. (Of course, as an adult, I know that all parts of the Chinaberry tree are poisonous.) Across-the-street neighbors found a board long enough to reach into the lowest branch of a pecan or oak tree, and we neighborhood children scaled that board to play war from the branches of that tree, too. More cooperative activities included collecting soft drink bottles and turning them in to the grocery store for the rebate, then deciding together what we were going to buy for our picnic. We used discarded lumber one summer to build the framework for a clubhouse that was never finished. We played football. Although I was a head taller than my year-younger brother, I made it a condition of my playing with the neighborhood boys that they let him play, too.
ReplyDeleteAlso, thanks for sharing your memories. I enjoyed reading them!
DeleteGood times, Linda! Things were very different back then.
ReplyDelete