WE HAD OUTDOORS
by Robert J. Tinsky
Copyrighted 2008

Recently my son, Rick, sent me a story about a grandfather who was watching his grandson play with one of his new electronic toys.  The grandson said, "Isn't that neat, Grandpa?"  The grandfather replied by saying that he didn't have anything like that when he was growing up.  He said "We had something even better."   The grandson asked, "What was that, Grandpa?"   "We had what was called 'outdoors,'" the grandfather answered.
 
That made me think of my childhood days.  We did not have TV and the multiplicity of electronic games children have today.  This morning in church our preacher mentioned that children today spend an average of 45 hours a week just sitting.  Instead of being outdoors playing, they are indoors watching TV or playing on one of their electronic gadgets.
 
Those of you who have gray hair (or no hair) remember what we did as kids. We spent a great deal of time roller skating on the streets and sidewalks. We also played tag, hide and seek, kick-the-can, a game we called "refrigerator," checkers (regular and Chinese), and mumblety-peg.  Anyone remember that last one? The way we played it was by using a stick to draw a circle on the ground. Each boy had to throw his pocket knife so it would stick in the circle.  The one who got closest to the middle was the winner.  Another version, which I never played, involved flipping the knife into the ground from various positions to make it stick in the ground.  The boy who was the loser in this version had to pull a small pole out of the ground with his teeth.  The pole was often driven so far into the ground that the loser had to literally "root" with his teeth to dig it out of the dirt.  I might add here that all boys who were "real boys" in those days had to have boots with a pocket to carry their jackknife.  This, of course, would never be allowed in our public schools today.
 
We did not have any organized sports for young children in those days.  Instead we organized ourselves into teams and played baseball or footfall in one of the empty lots in our neighborhood.  A lot of our free time was also spent playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians. During recess at school we played a lot of marbles.  Everyone had to have a large marble that was known as his "shooter."  The game was played by drawing a circle on the ground.  Each player placed several marbles in the circle. The object was to use the "shooter" to shoot out of the circle as many marbles as you could.  These were then yours to keep at least until the next game.
 
We also spent a lot of time playing by the river that was just a few blocks from our house. I remember that a group of us boys worked for hours trying to build a raft so we could, like Huck Finn, float down the river.  Thankfully we were never successful at that endeavor.  Another pastime was playing on the rafters in the new houses that were being built in our neighborhood. That fun time came to an abrupt halt when one of our playmates fell through the rafters of the second story and landed on the concrete pad in the basement and suffered a broken leg.
 
Still another game that occupied a lot of our time was the brand new game called Monopoly.  This game was originally invented in the early part of the 20th century by a lady named Elizabeth Magic.  She called it "The Landlord's Game" and the game was originally played a lot by college professors and their students.  A later version was called "The Fascinating Game of Finance."  A man by the name of Charles Brace Darrow, who was an unemployed domestic heater salesman, further developed the game and sold it to Parker Brothers.  In 1935, the year I was nine years old, Monopoly was the best selling board game with 20,000 copies being sold every week.  Someone in our neighborhood must have been one of the first kids to get a copy of this exciting new game.  I have fond memories of spending hour after hour playing Monopoly.
 
Even though we did not have TV during my childhood days we did have a fairly new invention called the radio.  I remember listening to such important programs as Buck Rogers, Tom Mix, Jack Armstrong (the all-American boy), the Lone Ranger and Orphan Annie.  I drank a lot of Ovaltine so that I could get a secret decoder badge.  In the evenings my brothers and I would sit in the living room with our parents and listen to Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, Lum and Abner, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, the Saturday Night Barn Dance and Major Bowes and his Amateur Hour.
 
Every Saturday my brother Bill and I were allowed to go to the movies.  There was usually a double feature plus the cartoons and the serial that was continued from week to week.  It cost us ten cents for admission plus another five cents for a bag of popcorn.
 
I guess I must close this article by confessing that we did not spend all our time as kids playing outdoors.

CHAPTER TWO of Outdoor [games] by Bill Venrick

Bob has certainly reminded me of "outdoors" and I must add something to his memory trip.

MARBLES - I was never very good at that game but I look back with marvel for the lack of organization as Bob has aptly mentioned. No adult supervisor called a meeting for the kids to "start playing marbles" or for the "girls to get together and 'jump rope'..." the kids just did it! One thing Bob said was "drawing a circle on the ground" -- this was more specifically taking a sharp rock or a stick and scratching a circle "in the dirt" but not before smoothing out the area and making sure it was smooth and without any imperfections like a little rock being in the way.

MUMBLE-DE-PEG -- Just another way of pronouncing the knife game. Some of the jargon maybe have been: Back hands, Fisters, Ear Logers, In Hand, Shove Head and Fingers Up & Down, just to name a few. As Bob said, if the boys tried to get away with this today they would find themselves being interrogated by the FBI or no less than local policemen and a school psychiatrist. One story I heard years ago when a boy tried to conn his mother into getting him a pair of high-tops boots (with a pocket for his knife) after he told her "all the boys were getting them". Finally she caved in bought him a pair and she asked him, "Now that you have a pair, how many neighbor boys really have high-top boots?" And he boy answered:. "If Johnny talks his mother into it, that will make two of us." Sound familiar?

GIRLS JUMPING ROPE -- When the girls jumped rope I always enjoyed hearing them call out a rhyming cadence as they jumped and when they really got going with "double-dutch" using two ropes (turning simultaneously) instead of one. Now that was real timing to see the girls "jump into" that maze of flying ropes and get into step with the swing of the long ropes. Sometimes more than one girl would end up being in between those flying ropes and when one girl jumped out another would jump in! Talk about timing and getting into step. I also remember the girls alternating their feet instead of just jumping up and down on their two feet." Hot pepper" and "Double Dutch" with fancy stepping were the crowd getters with the girls jumping rope at the school grounds or on the sidewalks in the neighborhood.

Only rarely would a boy dare to interrupt such "girl games"--and I always thought one of the girls jumping rope was a sister to that boy as most boys would be afraid of being called a sissy.

Today, the school psychologist would have to become involved, maybe the school nurse and set up some kind of endorsement by the American Heart Association. Back then (in the 1930's and 1940's) the special exercises for the heart were not the reason--the girls just did it because it was fun.

AND LET'S NOT FORGET YO-YO'S -- In recalling some of these events with my wife, who by the way, went to another elementary school across town (West School) and we compared activities mentioned above at East School or Fifth Ward School as it was once called, I remember when the Duncan Yo Yo Company used to visit our playgrounds and hawk their toy, YO-YO. The way I recall it they had field representatives in the form of young Filipino men who were experts with the YO-YO. Boy, could they make those round disks walk the walk and almost talk! Sometimes they would have a YO-YO in each hand. When those young men got through showing their skills with the YO-YO, you just had to go to a nearby grocery store and buy your YO-YO.

YES, Bob, we did have OUTDOORS and even though I have taken the liberty of making some lateral switches to school games in addition to the neighborhood games, they were still "outdoors".

I have a confession to make though. Obviously there was some kind of "organization", at least in Cleveland, Ohio. In my research, rummaging, or "dumpster diving" as it might be called, I came across an 84 page mimeographed book published by the Cleveland Public School, Bureau of Physical Welfare, Division of Playgrounds, dated 1929. Within that interesting historical publication might have been the genesis of ORGANIZED ACTIVITIES or else the school systems Bob and I attended were very covert about how school activities got started, but I seriously doubt that. This 8-1/2 x 11" mimeographed book even told about schools getting harmonicas and teaching children how to play one; as well as "How to make a Cigar Box Ukulele" with special instructions: "how to master the common strokes, stressing how to 'Press fingers of left hand firmly in places shown'..." (poor left-handed kids obviously had to switch rather than fight--yeah). OOPS, ALMOST FORGOT - today, the police would probably confiscate the cigar box and get the school lawyer to write up a law suit against the parents who gave their kids a CIGAR BOX!!

Well, Bob, I couldn't resist adding my "Chapter Two" to "WE HAD OUTDOORS"..

THE WORDWRIGHT