How We Entertained Ourselves in The Good Old Days

Me Swinging the front Gate
(Notice Geneva in the Background and no Freeway)

Some of the things I did in the good old days (the 50's) was swing on tree branches. We had a tree that had limbs going around in a perfect circle. So I would swing around all those branches just like the monkey bars. I had skinny arms but big muscles and callouses from all that swinging. Once I put my hand on a wasp on the branch and boy that was not fun! Got stung really bad. Kind of put my swinging off for a while.

We lived on a one acre lot and had all kinds of animals. We had a huge garden. When my dad irrigated, we would play in the ditches. I also pretended that the little furrows were rivers. I built miniature dirt houses and used sticks for people. The ditches would accumulate some foam which we called Indian soap.

We had a lot of red ants everywhere. I used to watch them for hours bringing food to their ant holes and fighting off enemies. Sometimes I put a few black ants in the red ant beds and there would be a fight. I know I was very bad for doing that.

Back then, summers seemed to last forever and had so much fun. We played hide and seek at night with the neighbors and even my parents played. We also played soft ball. My dad had put up an electric fence to keep the cows in and he put his hand on the fence and they we would hold hands with him and feel the electrical jolt. It wasn't painful just kind of a strange feeling.

I used to play marbles with my brother. I had a whole collection of them. I was always trying to win the prettiest ones. They were called cat eyes. Of course, my brother was much better at marbles than I was.


I always had a cat. It was usually an orange stripy one. I would dress them up in baby clothes and take them for a ride in the buggy. My favorite cat was Scrappy. He was a gray stripy. He was so gentle and he would let you do anything and be really mellow about it.  

There was a swamp west of our house where the freeway is now. We used to go down there and get pollywog's and frogs. I can't believe I got in the water. There were even leeches there and we let them get on us and then pulled them off. We loved the dragonfly's there. There were of toads back then. We could go out in the summer and hear them hopping all over. I was not afraid of them and I would even pick them up and hold them and they would pee on me. There were so many of them that a lot of times we saw them flat as pancakes in the driveway or road where somebody had run over them.

I loved to read and read every book I could get my hands on. My mother had read to me a great deal when I was a baby and she read me all the Mother Goose rhymes and I had all of them memorized. I also liked to look at pictures and make stories up from the pictures. When we did get a TV, there was only 3 stations. My favorite shows were: I Married Joan, Show of Shows, Milton Berle, It's a Great Life among a few. In the later 50's, there always a lot of westerns. Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Death Valley Days, The Rifleman and many other westerns. We liked Perry Mason and Lassie and Rin Tin Tin as well. Also the kids shows of Howdy Doodie and Kula, Fran and Ollie. I also enjoyed playing paper dolls and played with a dollhouse and miniature people.

In the winter when we could not go out, my dad put a basketball hoop on the door and we play basketball in the living room. He also liked to throw waded ups socks at us and we had to move fast to keep from being hit.  We played board games like Sorry and Touring and Old Maid.

These are just some of the fun things we did back then. We didn't have anything like the kids have today. But we didn't know and so of course we didn't care.