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Simple Games of Independence Days Past

I suppose parents today look at their children and are amazed at the skills required to navigate our society's current crop of games, both individual and collective.

From Lego Mindstorms, to EverQuest, to buses full of uniformed Little Leaguers, or troops of shirted soccer players, the flavor of what we do in society with respect to games in general, and toys in particular, is a world removed from those offered to children just sixty years ago.

Perhaps 60 years seems like a long time to the reader. For me, a person born in the early 1940's, however, sixty years is simply the day before yesterday.

Please allow me to reminisce for a moment, and describe for you some of the games that I looked forward to playing in 1953 when I arose on a summer morning.

Sixty Years Ago - The Games We Played

There was, of course, Stoopball.

All you needed to play Stoopball was either a few stairs (a stoop) or a curb, and a rubber ball. Ideally, there were two players, although one could play alone in a pinch. The idea was for the "batter" to throw a rubber ball against a stoop and the other guy or girl to field it. We had our own rules for what counted as what, that is, a single, double, triple or home run. It all depended where the stoop or curb was and where nearby trees, lawns, and fire hydrants (you get the idea) were located.

On a blazing July 4th, we could look forward to playing Bomb Ball. (The reader must remember as I describe this game that cherry bombs (small exploding round marbles full of explosive) were legal in the 50's where I lived in Massachusetts.

The idea of Bomb Ball was to find a support for a rubber ball like a three-legged iron stand about the size of a football tee.

The mechanics were simple enough.

Out on the lawn, we set up the ball between the flanges of the iron stand, with the cherry bomb nestled in the grass directly underneath it, placed in such a way that the fuse stuck out to be ignited by a long wooden match or punk.

To crouch down and light this bomb was exciting. Then there was the hissing sound which sent the "punker" scurrying.

When the cherry bomb went off, the thrust of the explosion was such that the ball nearly disappeared into the stratosphere. Sometimes the height was extraordinary, much higher than any ball hit with a racket or fungo bat.

The idea of this July 4th game (we never played it on any other day) was to try to catch the ball. We had points for catching it on the first, second or third bounce, but the real fun was watching that ball soar to heights that rivaled those reached by the local starlings.

Then there was Chinaberry.

To play Chinaberry, one needed, well, a chinaberry tree.

For the uninitiated, chinaberries are the little round sour fruit borne by the chinaberry tree. They make ideal pellets for use in cowboy games. We always insisted that the chinaberries be thrown at parts of the bad guy's body below the neck, but, then, this was war on evil, and we could not always control our bullets to such a fine degree.

There were many more games I remember, all created by our imaginations.

For example, we had Roof Railers, Soccer Bar, Rotten Apple Toss.

Just to choose one, Soccer Bar was fairly simple. The pitcher would throw a soccer-sized ball toward the batter who would try to hit it where people would not be able to catch it before he or she arrived at first base (wherever or whatever that was). If the ball was caught, the batter was out as in baseball. If it was a grounder, though, the fielder had to retrieve the ball and then tag or hit the batter with it before the batter reached first base, say a tree or the corner of a building. We played that game for hours.

We all stayed in very good physical shape with these games, although we had no idea we were doing that at the same time as we were having great fun.

Finally, my favorite, since I was an army child, was called the Lollipop Game. My sister and I used it to make friends no matter where we were in the world.

The game was simple. We would let it be known that we would be creating a Lollipop Garden for the neighborhood the first Saturday after our arrival. (We would casually mention it to whomever was in the children's park across the street.)

We would then ask for, and invariably were granted, a handful of eggplant or zucchini or yellow squash seeds from our mother's collection.

We allowed each child (prospective friends) who showed up on Saturday five seeds each, our solemn faces reflecting the seriousness of the task.

We then had them plant each of their seeds in the patch of ground in back of the property reserved for this purpose, and announced that one week from that day a garden of lollipops would have grown there. And, then, they could come back and harvest their crop.

On Friday of the following week, we would use some of our saved money to buy a bag of lollipops. They were very cheap. We could by hundreds for a dollar.

On Saturday morning just before the appointed hour, my sister and I would go out to our magic plot and put lollipops in each of the patches planted by the kids one week earlier.

Of course, when the kids arrived and saw the lollipops, they thought that our house was something out of Cinderella or Wonderland.

We would invite them to do the same that week, giving seeds to everyone who showed up, usually a lot more kids than had actually planted the seeds the first week.

We would then go through the ritual again with the second group, and then once more for a third week.

By the time we harvested the third crop of lollipops, we knew every kid within a half mile of our house.

We then announced that that was the end of the lollipop growing season for that year.

But, we sure had a lot of friends.

Well, today we have Facebook and Twitter and Google and virtual dungeons, and Lego dungeons too, complete with knights slaughtering various evil beings.

However, I can't help but wonder occasionally if anyone is still in the old neighborhoods tending our Lollipop Gardens.

Ron - Toy Tech

Friday, 7:41 pm | July 3rd, 2009

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