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What Do Your Kids Do for Fun - Three
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I think this will be the end of the listing of activities that I and my companions did for fun in those dim dark days of the early thirties. I will not have covered all of the things we did but I will have tired I presume of talking about them and go on to something else. Remember that the motivation for doing this is the conviction which I have that the children of this day don’t DO enough. They may be busy, or entertained, or occupied but if you look closely they are most likely WATCHING someone else do something which is a different thing from doing it yourself.
Below is another list of things that we children of the early thirties did to amuse ourselves.
HULLY GULLY — For some reason it became a matter of pride around school among us boys at least to be the possessor of the hardest pecan in school. For those of you who do not live in the pecan belt I will state that the most normal way to crack a pecan is to grasp two of them in the right hand and squeeze them until one breaks. Mostly if one is interested in eating pecans they have selected a pocket full of "paper shell" pecans but if you are interested in playing hully gully you carefully select a native pecan with a shell as hard as iron and if you want to be a champ at the game you go all over town and down to the creek and out to the farm and pick up native non-grafted pecans. Then you test them carefully to find the absolutely hardest one and you subject it to a series of tests and preparations and ointments calculated to make it even harder and more unbreakable. Soaking a pecan in 30 weight engine oil was believed to be helpful as was a good soak in asafoetida water followed by drying for a week or two in a cool dark place. There were some incantations also that were supposed to be helpful. Then you swagger up to some guy you don’t like at school and say "Wanna hully gully?" and if he agrees you each take say five pecans from your pocket and comingle them with five from his pocket and you then submit your "hully gully" pecan to the test with his "hully gully’ pecan by putting the two together in his hand (because you are the challenger) and letting him squeeze the two until one cracks. If your pecan cracks he picks up all ten pecans and goes sneering on his way and will tell everyone in school that he "hully gullied" you this day. Of course if his pecan cracks you do the same thing. Like many other ventures of my childhood I participated willingly but did not often succeed. My hully-gully pecans rarely lasted the day. Do your kids make hully-gully pecans?
HIKES — Just plain walking. We boys did a lot of hiking and walking. In Austin Texas it was nothing to walk out to Mount Bonnell and back – a distance of 14 miles from the Congress Avenue bridge. Trips to what was then called Tom Miller Dam up the north bank of the Colorado and across the low-water bridge and back along the south bank of the river were common — probably twelve miles for the round trip Even as late as the Fifties and Sixties my boys used to hike all over Irving, Texas either alone or in groups. On the farm near Plainview the nearest child my age was about two and a half miles across pastures and fields, and I walked that several times in a day after my horse was "lost". Walking just for fun was very common. I have the impression that if a kid is going to play soccer over at the edge off town these days that he expects his mother to take him over in the SUV and stop at McDonalds on the way so that he can tank up on Diet Coke in anticipation of the debilitating nature of the game. If we kids wanted to play soccer , or softball, or sandlot baseball or little league football, we could jolly well get ourselves over there and our parents didn’t often come for the game — and there was no such thing as Diet Coke or diet anything else. Now I will admit that in my generation there was an impression held by most west Texas males that anytime a man walked. anywhere he could ride a horse that he either had boils on his backside or was just a little crazy. This did not apply to boys however. Do your kids walk a lot?
HOMEWORK — Am I wrong or is there a general educational philosophy rampant today which holds that homework is bad and unfair? I have frequently stated that I attended twenty-six schools — let me emphasize that all of them had homework as a regular thing and during the school year there was a period right after the evening meal at my home when the table would be cleared and it was mine to do my homework. Normally my parents did not help me with my homework — nor did I have a computer with Google at my command. But for one semester after I had skipped the seventh grade and entered the eighth grade about three weeks late my mother helped me with my algebra homework. She was a whiz at it. All the other time though I had homework and I had to do it myself. Of course there was no TV then, and we did not have the radio on during homework time. Do your kids have homework?
SLEEP — There was a general consensus when I was growing up that children needed lots of sleep. As a rule although it varied from home to home children under 10 went to bed about 8:30 PM, children 10 to16 went to bed about 9:30 to 10:00pm on school nights and by 11:30 on any night. As a general rule high school students of 15 to18 could date on Friday and Saturday nights only and were usually in violation of curfew after 11:30 PM. Even college students had curfews. The girls dorms at the University of Texas had room checks at midnight. I remember being quite startled when I called my daughter’s dorm room one night and a man answered. But things have changed in the relative value of sleep and entertainment among teenagers and when I was growing up sleep was required. Do your kids have a bed time? Do they have a curfew?"
JOBS – When I was growing up I got no allowance. I was given money for bus fare and food at the school cafeteria and anything I needed–and much that I did not – I was given the money to buy. But I was encouraged to work when I was a teenager and did so I was an apprentice butcher at a meat market located at 12th and Chicon in Austin Texas and worked there every Saturday from 9AM to 10 PM under the tutelage and direction of Jim. Jim was a black butcher who had worked in the store for years. I went suddenly from being a kid who had never seen an African American until he was six or so and had seen darn few since to a work situation where both the patronage of the store and the employees within the store were 100 per cent black with the exception of the owner. Jim made a journeyman butcher of me and after leaving Austin I worked as the only butcher in a couple of other stores in Michigan and in Texas. Jim is long dead by now because he was ancient when I first met him but he taught me much not only about a beef carcass but about people. Incidentally I was known in the 12th and Chicon area as "Jim’s boy" and I walked from the market to my home on many a Saturday night all alone and had no worries about being bothered by anyone. I also had jobs mowing lawns when I was a sub-teen and picking up coke bottles at the cattle auction and a yearly job of delivering telephone directories that lasted about three weeks to a month and was quite profitable. After graduating from high school there has never been a period longer than two or three weeks that I did not have a job. Even when I was going to the University I worked at part time jobs. I think that jobs are very useful and educational. Do your kids have jobs?
EXPLORING – It was a lot kinder world prior to the 1960's than it is now. I know that statement will get some argument but it never-the-less is very true. Nothing impeded a subteen kid from walking all over town and being away from home all day or even hitchhiking ten or twelve miles over to the next small town if it appealed to you. As a generality I could go anywhere I liked as long as I was home before sundown. If I did anything unusual I was instructed to call "Central" who always knew where my mother or Dad was and report my plans. Sex crimes against kids were almost unknown in my part of the world . There were many poor and destitute during the great depression but generally speaking there was not a large criminal element. So I and my buddies spent a lot of time either singly or in groups exploring the very small universe in which we lived. Even small West Texas towns have cattle auction barns, cotton compresses, cotton gins, feed mills. grain elevators, cheese factories, telephone pole yards--all of which were wonderful places to play and watch our adult friends work. Blacksmith shops were terrific entertainment. Farriers (we just called them horseshoers) were entertaining for a morning on a hot day--especially if they had an obstreperous horse for a client. Courthouses were terrific to explore. The sherrif's office was there and we could sit quietly underneath the open window and listen to the deputies talking all about all the criminals and whores in the county--many of whom we knew on another basis. We had better sense than to report the news we picked up there at the dinner table. Or we might even attend a couirt trial. In Carlsbad I ran around with a bunch of Mexican kids and was amazed that they had church every day and at the oddest hours and went to several masses where we sat sedately on the back row of the chapel scared to death of the black-robed nuns who glared at us if we made a sound or moved. I never understood until many years later why we "unconfirmed" couldn't participate in the Holy Communion. The nuns would always have cold goat's milk for us if we came to the kitchen door at the convent. Since my parents were Protestant I didn't burden them with my Catholic adventures. By the time I was eight my parents would let me take four hundred mile bus rides alone. I don't think that today's kids have the freedom that we had at that age. Do your kids explore? Alone? At age six?
SMOKING – I didn't smoke tobacco until I was about seventeen and out of high school but we sub-teen and low-teen kids never-the-less smoked. Cedar bark, corn silk, dry grass, corn shucks and several other things made us feel appropriately wicked and of course we had to hide down in the cellar or in the bin of Uncle Curt's grain combine or on the barn roof so that our parents or grandparents wouldn't know about it---that was part of the appeal .Once I started smoking tobacco though it was 2 1/2 packs a day for the next 48 years and will probably be the reason I die young. I haven't used tobacco in any form now for 15 years come next month.
PIPE BOMBS – I hate to report this but we regularly made pipe-bomb hand grenades when I was in high school. We would get a piece of two inch steel pipe four inches long and threaded on each end and make a bag of explosive from potassium nitrate, powdered carbon, sulphur and whatever other new mix we wanted to try and would empty a five cent tube of BBs into the pipe , screw the pressure end caps tight and go throw it off a cliff at Campbell's hole about two miles upstream on Barton Creek from Barton Springs swimming pool. Ostensibly we were up there to hunt squirrels and each of us had a .22 cal rifle along. It was wild country then but is expensive mansions now. Was it smart? NO!
Our ring leader in this endeavor was Jack Williams who only a couple of years later was a US Marine acting as a demolition expert blowing up caves full of Japanese on Pelilieu. Those pipe hand grenades made very satisfactory noises
when they hit the rocks at the cliff base.Do your kids make pipe bombs? I hope not---it is a stupid thing to do!
BOARD GAMES – Cards were forbidden at my grandparents because it might teach we children to be gamblers but my parents and I used to play poker with matches for chips. But dominos, checkers and chess were common diversions. Monopoly came along when I was about ten and there were several other board games. Do your kids play board games?
TREEHOUSES – We didn't make tree houses where I grew up mainly because there were very few trees.
RADIOS – My cousin WD and my Uncle Willie Elven made a crystal set receiver and razor blade detector receiver in the barn loft of Elven Brown's barn. It was housed in a cigar box---each of them--- and we got a lot of static and just a few instances of intelligence from the ether from them. I remember thinking that they were geniuses and stood in much awe of them for years. Do your kids tinker with things electronic or mechanical?
That about ends the "What do Your Kids Do For Fun? quest. It is not anywhere near all we did, but I have plowed the memory field long enough for today – and tomorrow. But let me urge you to let your children be busy and to independently and alone develop their diversions and entertainment.I think that we hold our children too tightly now.
My mother used to say "We should hold our loved ones tightly – with open hands"
love
dad, granpa, et al
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