Today’s guest blog is by Sherrilee.
My dad didn’t go to law school until I was born so didn’t settle into his career until a little later in my life. One of the results of this was that we moved around a lot when I was a kid. This meant I was ALWAYS the new kid on the block and I struggled to find friends and fit in.
When I was five, we lived on West Cedar in Webster Groves, Missouri for about a year. It was a great old house on a tree-lined street and as a family, we went through quite a bit in that house. My younger sister had her open-heart surgery when we lived there. My mother survived scarlet fever in this house and I learned to ride a bike on the street in front.
But my favorite memory of living on that block was being befriended by the little boy who lived across the street. His parents had welcomed us to the neighborhood early on; his name was Bobby and he was a year older than I was. There weren’t any other kids on our block that summer (except my sister who was too sick to play outside with us) and this was back in the day when you made do in your neighborhood. You just didn’t get driven around by your parents for play dates back then.
Bobby had a huge collection (or so it seemed to me at the time) of matchbox cars, all different shapes and colors, that he kept in a big shoe box. He knew all the names of the different makes of cars and could tell you when he got each one. He could play with those cars for hours and he invited me to join in his adventures. He did have a little track for the cars in the house but the hands-down best place to play was around the base of the big tree in front of his house. You know the kind of tree I mean – one of those trees with the root systems jutting out of the ground and winding all around. It was the perfect setting for all our matchbox action. We drove the cars all around, up and down the various roots and even placed popsicle sticks across some of the roots to make carports and caves. We had quite a few different scenarios to play out, but it seems that many of our games were spy games, with one spy chasing another all around the tree, in and out of our little caves. It never seemed to bother Bobby that I was a girl and I don’t remember our folks worrying about how much time we spent playing with those cars that summer. My family moved away that fall, but that summer of the matchbox tree still remains as a sweet childhood memory for me.
What childhood game brings back good memories for you?
Trail Baboon 
Rise and Finally Shine Baboons!
Great blog entry Sherrilee!
There are two childhood games that I loved: Jacks and JumpRope. I especially loved the jacks, played on cement with a golf ball rather than the rubber ball that was supplied in the package.
Onsies, twosies, threesies,
Eggs in a Basket.
Then there were all jump rope rhymes, none of which I can remember and would now love to know.
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Cinderella, dressed in yella,
Went upstairs to kiss her fella.
Made a mistake and kissed a snake.
How many doctors will it take?
This ones comes to mind quickly… but it’s the only one!
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Not last night, but the night before
24 robbers came a knockin’ at my door
As I ran out, they came in
And this is what I heard them say…
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WHich prompted another one:
John and Mary sitting in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes love
Then comes marriage
Something, something….. a baby carriage
Sherrilee, yours prompted this memory!
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Then comes baby in the baby carriage
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Then comes a baby in a baby carriage.
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Ooops, it wasn’t there when I typed it in. I swear.
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We said, “Then comes Mary with a baby carriage.”
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Monopoly. Every summer, my cousin, 2 years older than me, would come down on the Greyhound with Grandma from the Twin Cities. We spent a lot of time during the day at the swimming pool, did Girl Scout day camp, made a mess of the kitchen making recipes from my mother’s cookbooks and magazines and when we got older, tag teamed on the sewing machine (you prepped as much as you could and when it was your turn, sat and sewed for as long as you could before you had to get up again-probably good training for working in a costume shop!)
But every night, we played Monopoly-the idea was not so much to win (although of course, we really wanted to) as to keep the game going. We had a system for packing up the game every night before bedtime so we could resume the next night. My parents still have that game and my son and his cousins will probably play it next week when my son (the cousin from the Twin Cities) goes for a visit.
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my wife calls in monotany. i just got the sesame street verson for fathers day and we palyed on sunday. all i got were the railroads on utility and the two cheap ones (2 doolar adn 4 dolllar rent) it was a riot. we played ntil everyone was punchy and then went to bed. i got to be grouch.great game
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We also liked having the neverending Monopoly game going – we would write out IOU’s on slips of paper to keep the game going longer.
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i had that tree next door to my house. it was in scotty bowmans yard, his mom made popsicyles in the ice cube trays with toothpicks every summer. he had sisters. i remember being very secretive on the swigset ne day when i decided to let him in on the big news that the easter bunny was really our parents. i know e said ..just like santa claus. i can still feel my jaw drop. it hadnot occured to me to connect the dots and i was crushed.
the tree was n the back yard but it was on the busy street in the neighborhood so you could sit ther buy that tree in the shade watch the cars go by and set up the lemonade stand, climb up into the great branches i remember just where the knobs were, sit on the branches run around the bottom of it there was never any grass at all the social meetng in the kid neighborhood were at bwmans tree. we had dewberrys yard for sportng actvities and bartholdies for yard games, across the street was the farmers field and the river was down the street at theend of the block there was summer camp at the creek in the woods and the elementarty school had box hockey four square chess badmitton and baseball every day form 9-5. cars and army men and cowboy stuff with roy rogers and dale evans, wild bill and andy devine, the lone ranger and tonto, playing rummy on the porch at the dewberries listening to the twins games when the twins were new. and every day was a mornng just like today. 75 degrees and sunny. ready for a bike ride and a tree climb and a trip to the store with a nickel to decide if i would buy 5 single baseball cards or one 5 pack. more gum in the singles but you got doubles on the cards more often that way
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tim – Kool Aid popsicles made in an ice-cube tray with toothpicks for handles were staples during the summers of my childhood as well. As an adult I purchased a set of plastic popsicles makers that I used to make frozen yogurt pops and I thought I was just the cat’s meow!
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Nice story, VS, and I love the uncredited photo of the tree roots. Yours?
We weren’t much of a family for board games, and I wonder why. We had them. But my parents didn’t do many things with us, and that included board games.They had their adult playmates. My sister wasn’t very good competition for me, so our copies of Skunk, Cootie, Clue, Parcheesi and Monopoly were lightly used. I played Monopoly enough to recognize that it took a lifetime to finally win or lose.
I did most of my playing outdoors with neighbor kids. The assumption was that you would run with the crowd that lived around you.We played a lot of old classic games: hide ‘n seek, capture the flag and red rover.
Some of the best fun I ever had was early in my marriage when we discovered Super Balls, those bouncy balls that glow in the dark. We would form a sort of circle and heat up the Super Ball with a flashlight, then douse all lights. Our Labrador (Pukka) and springer (Brandy) would take positions in the middle. The idea was to bounce the ball off the floor to a person on the far side of the ring without a dog getting to it first. If you add just a little beer, this game will have you laughing uncontrollably. And if a light suddenly disappears, the Super Ball is in a dog’s mouth and that is time for the lights to come back on and everyone scrambles to locate the dog with the queer expression that means it is hiding the ball.
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Good Morning to all:
Good story, VS. All my memories are of boy games played with other boys. Girls who were tom boys could have joined some of these games. I don’t remember any tom boys in my neighborhood. I think it would have been good to have had some girl play mates.
The first games that comes to mind is neighborhood football games. I wonder why we didn’t get seriously injured playing these games because we didn’t have any helmets or pads. I was proud that I was able to bring down some of the bigger boys by diving at them and wrapping up their legs.
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When I was very young my cousins introduced me to Mille Bornes, an enjoyable card game. College introduced me to world domination, called Risk. It has been decades since I’ve played a game.
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My sister was a Risk whiz… me, not so much. The two big games when I was in college were spit (better w/ several people and several decks of cards) and bacgammon.
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Steven, we discovered Mille Bornes in the 90s and had a lot of fun with it; still have it, I think. VS, I wonder if spit is like “nuts” – a sort of multiple soliltaire…
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You lay out four cards in front of you and then you put one card up in the middle. You can play up or down on the middle card from your four cards… then for every card you play out of your four, you get to lay down more. The more people you have, the more frenzied the slapping of cards becomes.
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We played all sorts of games outside, usually pretending games that involved a lot of running. The neighborhood had lots of building sites and those were really fun to have pretend adventurers. Sometimes we would take a neighbor beagle on pretend rabbit hunts, and once he actually found one and we had to race with the dog while it chased the rabbit. We used to designate someone as “it” and then chase each other all over the place, I remember doing this at home and at school. My cousin TJ was usually “it” at school and the big elm trees on the school yard were safe bases where he couldn’t get us.
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My friend Lisa and I had Barbies – not a lot, but 2 or 3 each. I had one with hair you could curl and another that had arms and legs that moved in opposition. With plenty of clothes. Mine had some inflatable furniture and a Barbie Camper (with fold out table on the end). Lisa had more furniture and both of us had other accessories made from re-purposed bits (those were the best). I had a big box that I could pile my Barbie stuff into, and I’d lug that over to Lisa’s house for the afternoon. She had a screened in front porch with a swell ledge. The ledge was where the Barbies worked…at NASA mission control. Then the would swan home on their “flyers” (nothing as prosaic as a car for our girls – they flew on personal flyers, kind of a Segway in the air), change into fabulous ball gowns, and head out to that evening’s gala. Their dates for these events were most often Andy Gibb and Parker Stevenson (no mere Ken dolls for us). We would pause only for lunch or a snack (Tang!), and then dive back in. “I could have danced all night…” we would sing while they waltzed…
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great picture. i could have danced all night. great tune. i used to listen to my moms broadway lps all the time bouncing on the studio couch downstairs. my fair lady was one of the favorites. one of my memorable moments was seeing beretta , robert blake sing all i want is a room somewhere on johnny carson. almost made me cry.
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Matchbox cars! I not only had the cars, I had the official vinyl carrying case. You may well laugh, but my favorite was the VW Rabbit because it had tiny surfboards in a roof rack that could be removed. I didn’t play many games, because after age 8 or 10 there weren’t any kids my age in the neighborhood and like Steve my parents weren’t much on games, but I had lots of toy animals (and later, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica action figures) that would go on adventures with me as the narrator.
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I don’t think my brother still has the carrying case, but I’ve seen his classic Matchbox cars on display in the home office-the cars with detachable accessories were the deal all right. We also used to set up the track all over the basement and do races for hours (remember the bright orange track with the magenta connectors?)
We lived on a 4 acre lot on the edge of town (parsonage and church-Dad had the best garden ever there). The few houses near us all had elderly people living in them, who while we knew them and were fond of them, not so much were they good to play games with, so we only had each other. This is what made the annual cousin visit such a big deal. Also, as I think about it, most of my friends at school were farm girls, and I never saw them outside of school-never in the summer.
It wasn’t that we didn’t play with the neighborhood kids, there simply were none. Our current neighborhood is much the same, except without the 4 acres and a pool in walking distance (and a lot more traffic-sigh).
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Sherrilee – thanks for sharing your memories and everyone’s comments are fun to read. like Renee and Steve, we played lots of outdoor games – common ones and some to mimic whatever was popular in the culture. we played Esther Williams when we swam. we played “Name That Tune” (someone stand at one end of the clothesline and hum a tune and the person “up” ran from the other end of the clothesline and tugged a rope and named the tune.) only problem was that half of us (and especially Bobbie and WeeZee) couldn’t carry a tune so we never knew what they were humming. then, for one whole summer, all we did was play Canasta.
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There are a couple of things I remember that I don’t even know the names for. We had a stretchy band that you wrapped around your thumbs and forefingers in a certain pattern, then another person would find a certain spot in the web with their thumbs and forefingers and take it from you and stretch it into a different pattern. I don’t remember the band coming with instructions – I think the knowledge of how to make the patterns was just passed along from person to person. There was also a technique that everyone knew for making these folded paper fortune telling devices. Don’t remember much about how they worked, but they had numbers written inside them. Picking a series of numbers would lead you to your fortune.
For board games, Monopoly and Scrabble were the standbys at my house. One of the neighbors had Life and Operation.
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Cat’s craddle is the name of the game with the band, ours wasn’t stretchy, we’d use plain old twine.
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Here’s a link to how to do it: http://www.ifyoulovetoread.com/book/chten_cats1105.htm
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Cat’s cradle…of course! How did I forget that?
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My daughter and her best friend loved playing cats cradle when they were much younger. I think Klutz Press publishes a book and cats cradle bands that come in a set.
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We used string as well. Jacob’s Ladder was my favorite. The kid in this video does a great job of showing how to do it!
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I remember making those folded paper fortune-tellers. They were all the rage when I was in fifth and sixth grade. You’d put all the names of the boys in the your class on the inside flaps — to see who you were supposed to marry. Man oh man!
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Whoa, talk about your useless knowledge! I just tried to make one of those fortune telling things and I could still do it! I must have made a million of them for the folding technique to still be so easily accessible to this aging filing system of a brain. If only I could remember some of the really important skills I must have had back then. I do remember doing cat’s cradle but I don’t think it was with stretchy bands, we just used string.
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You mean Cootie Catchers? My daughter and best friend used to do those all the time, too. I could never figure out how to fold them the right way when I was a kid.
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I had forgotten that they were called Cootie Catchers, Renee – of course, there is a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_fortune_teller
I’m impressed, OC, that the folding technique still lives in the recesses of your brain in adulthood – I’ve pretty much lost everything I knew when I was 10.
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Isn’t the internet great?!
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Very nice embedding, too, VS!
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Ooh! Cat’s cradle – how could I have forgotten about that? Loved cat’s cradle…will have to teach this to Daughter. She already knows about fortune tellers – she’s a big fan of origami, so those came pretty easy to her. 7-year-olds don’t yet include future husband info in them…thankfully.
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my daughters love the cootchie catchers (first time i ever herd em called that. but they know nothing of cats cradle. i will have ot show them. it was a girls game on the catholic school bus when i was a kid but i would watch enviously as they kept making patterns. some went to the old reliable patterns some would wow the masses with new inspirational twists of the string. enjoyed the jump rope songs. catholic school had recess every day morning noon and afternoon 100 above and 100 below didn’t matter. get out there. no nature deficit disorder with those nuns. sister mary kickyourass made sure you got out there.
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There’s another string or rubber band shape like a cup and saucer – I think I can still pull that one off. Our grand”son” Lukas showed me the “cootie catcher” thing when we were in Georgia, though he didn’t have that name for it, so it’s still going around.
I have that Klutz book somewhere, Renee, will have to find it. The bands are long gone, though.
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When we weren’t busy riding our bikes, roller skating, building and flying kites, we’d jump rope or hop hopscotch. We’d also play Camogie. A random bunch of kids, each carrying a big stick, divided into two teams. Each team would have goal at the opposite end of a field into which we’d try beat a ball with our sticks. Talk about a miracle that no one got seriously hurt. No protective gear whatsoever and lots and lots of flailing sticks. But man, was it fun if you weren’t s sissy. Camogie was definitely not a game for sissies.
On rainy days when we’d have to play inside, paper dolls were a favorite. I’d play for hours drawing, coloring and cutting out clothes for my favorite paper dolls.
In grade school I spent three years in a Catholic boarding school, so during that period had lots of playmates. We’d do all kinds of arts and crafts projects, most of which made lovely gifts for our parents. I remember the nuns teaching us how to make jewelry boxes out of pretty post cards. We’d poke holes all around the perimeter of six post cards with a darning needle. Then we’d cut a piece of fabric, preferably shiny and colorful, into rectangles slightly larger than the post cards. The fabric would then be sewn, by hand, of course, onto the back side of the cards utilizing the previously punched holes. When the fabric was secured on three sides, the pocket between the card and the fabric would be filled with cotton balls before the fourth side would be fastened. When all six post cards were finished, we’d assemble them into a box leaving the top card hinged only on one side to serve as the lid. My mom was the recipient of several these boxes before I moved on to working with clay, when ashtrays became the gift of choice.
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I have some baskets similar to those boxes, but made with greeting cards instead of post cards.
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I also made a couple with religious motifs, pictures of the Virgin Mary, angels and saints.
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love those virgin mary ashtrays. i used to get a charge out of the lawn ornaments of frank and the bvm. (st francis and the blessed virgin mary) in the mexican neighborhoods they would stand the bvm up inside a baththub pointing skyward in the front yard to make a grotto
http://innerpath.tumblr.com/post/5714712216/mary-in-a-bathtub
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My next door neighbor has one of those. It nicely augments his sleeping Mexican flanked by a couple of angels, a large carved wooden bear and a ceramic frog.
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Are these the same neighbors that you are already so fond of?
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The very ones.
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Ooh ooh! Yet another craft for cards!
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Morning!
I had a big collection of Matchbox cars. Still got a few of them. Had the plastic (vinyl) suitcase thing too. And some of the track but never used that much. I remember the header for track; the mechanism that released them and the screw on clamp on the bottom of it.
I was pretty much an only child. My next sibling was my brother eight years older than me. And being out in the boonies limited my contact with others…. sometimes a neighbor kid would come over but he was only my friend by virtue of ‘distance’… I didn’t really like him that well.
Lots of Lego’s. My brother had an erector set but he got mad if I played with it.
I had a two level sand box that was the greatest thing ever! Often had the hose over there and built lakes and dams with raging rivers. No wonder there was never any sand left in the top half. But when it ran out we drove to town and on the side of Broadway there was a hill and we’d just park on the shoulder and load up the truck. (That hill is still there but practically downtown now. I kind of remember being nervous and embarrassed the last time we collected sand. There was too much traffic. I’d get arrested trying that now.)
We also had a big lime pile down by the barn. And a tree stump that had been dug out and pushed over in the weeds; you could sit in that and pretend it was all sorts of things.
Where my wife was growing up there was a large pile of field rocks and she spent all her outdoor time on the rock pile. She still loves rocks.
Enjoy the sunshine everyone!
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Good to know I’m not the only one with a big brother who wouldn’t let a younger sib (me!) play with his erector set. Did you sneak in a build things when your brother wasn’t home?…I did. Tough to build much, though, when you know it needs to disassemble in under 3 minutes…
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the guy i work with has collected matchbox cars for the 15 years we have worked together. he figured he’d have a kid someday and matchbox cars that you can never go wrong with. his kid jsut turned 7 this week and i am certain he got 20 or 25 new matchbox cars form dads stash for the special occasion. this kid doesn’t talk. lives in a quiet house as an only child and has an imagination that goes and goes. perfect matchbox candidate,.
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Great reminiscences Sherrilee. Thanks for sharing.
For me, two childhood games come to mind. One is Kick the Can which was a neighborhood tradition for kids of all ages growing up in Evanston, Ill. in the 50s. Here’s a link that explains it better than I could.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick_the_can
The other memory is playing with my toy soldiers on my bed. I’d throw my blanket in the air and whatever shape it ended up was the mountain that needed to be defended from the amphibious assault from the white bed sheet.
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Ah, those toy soldiers, I remember them well. Bernard Arstop, the boy every girl at the boarding school (including me) had a crush on, had lots of those tin soldiers. He also had plastic horses and cowboys and indians to put in the saddle. Bernard would orchestrate fierce battles when he wasn’t skillfully drawing cartoons. Superman and The Phantom were his favorites. I, myself, was more inclined toward the Donald Duck magazine.
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Welcome to the trail, Jake! We didn’t do Kick the Can in any of my growing up neighborhoods, but when I was in 5th-6th grade (we stayed in this house for a few years for a change), we played “Swing the Statue”. One person was the statue store owner, one was the customer. Everyone else were statues in waiting. The store owner would swing you around and around by one arm and then let go. Whatever position you landed in, you had to stay that way. Then the customer would walk around and decide which of you was the best statue.
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We played a lot of Statue in our neighborhood, too – along with freeze tag. 🙂
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Jake, we played Kick the Can all summer, and also Star Light Star Bright, though all I can remember of that is
“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight
Wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.”
I do remember “Statue” too, VS.
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I’d forgotten but you reminded me of playing starlight, moonlight. I’m not exactly sure how it went, but it was played after dark and I think “IT” was a ghost and hid, everyone else had to find the ghost and run back to base before the ghost touched them. First one the ghost got became the ghost for the next round. I think you let the ghost know when the hunt was on by chanting “Starlight, moonlight, hope to see a ghost tonight.” Then the running and screaming and laughing started.
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Fond memories of the college variant of “Star Light Star Bright”
Starkle, starkle, little twink,
Who the heck you are I think,
I’m not under what they call
The alfluence of incohol.
I’m not drunk as thinkle peep,
I’m just a little slort of sheep.
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dale enter this in the poetry rhyme wave please/ classic steve
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Great story, VS – I’m so glad you had that summer. Thanks for the memories.
One rather macabre jump rope rhyme I remember:
Mama had a baby, she didn’t know what to do.
She put him in the bathtub to see what he would do.
He drank up all the water, he ate up all the soap.
Mama called the doctor, the doctor was a dope.
How many days did the baby live?…..
PJ – Camogie sounds a bit like Calvinball! I’ve never seen anyone better than Bill Waterson at capturing (by drawing) what summer ought to be like for kids. My son collected all the Calvin and Hobbes books, but my favorite was The Days are Just Packed…
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Mama called the doctor
Mama called the nurse
Mama called the lady with the alligator with the alligator purse
In came the doctor
In came the nurse
In came the lady with the alligator purse
Measles said the doctor
Mumps said the nurse
Nonsense said the lady with the alligator purse
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I remember this one!
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OT – I just read that Peter Falk passed away today. So sad. “Columbo” was a treat!
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some one taught me how to do the peter falk eye, you go cross eyed with one eye and hold it thne move the other one. he came up the other day, someone was asking if i had my austin martin 07 car ready to go and i said no i had the colombo convertible. i did enjoy him never endng story grandfather role was memorable too
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I wonder, tim, if you are remembering Peter Falk’s great role in introducing “The Princess Bride” by reading it to a reluctant nephew or grandson. The kid is highly suspicious of the story, but soon is transfixed and begging for more.
I loved the way the murderer in Columbo segments would always start out contemptuous of the dirty, shambling, simple cop. Then maybe halfway through the hour there would be an “aha!” moment, but even then the killer couldn’t be prepared for the way Detective Columbo would keep boring in on the key issues and solve the case.
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