Things Kids Used To Do When I think of my childhood, I am saddened to think what the children of today are missing. We didn’t have much money and as a matter of fact I was poor, but this didn’t stop my friends and myself from having fun every day. First of all, there was none of this stuff about quarantining whole states when a sickness came around. What used to happen if a dangerous communicable disease came about was, they would quarantine the family and put a sign on their door warning others to stay away. It worked. People were trusted and they felt a sense of duty to abide by this type of quarantine in those days. This meant most of us could go out and play every day. We had plenty of friends. There is something to be said for socializing with real people not sitting home and texting people on a cell phone or contacting them through social sites. Kids today are missing entire parts of their social life. We were out every day playing baseball, football, stoop ball, stick ball, tag and many other games. Many of you probably don’t even know what stoop ball is. Let me tell you how it is played. The only two things you need is a rubber ball and a stoop. Those old apartment house stoops were perfect for the game. A kid would walk up to the stoop while several kids lined up behind him. He would throw the ball as hard as he could against the stoop to try and get the ball to go over the heads of the kids for a home run. If they dropped the ball while trying to catch it, it accounted for some bases depending on the rules of the game. Stick ball was a little different. You needed a sawed off broom handle and a rubber ball to play. The best balls were Spalding ones. There were cheaper pinkish rubber balls you could use, but they didn’t go as far when hit them because they were softer. You needed to get out into the road to play, which meant every time a car came along, we would all have to go on to the sidewalk until it passed. I think in those days most drivers were more careful because everyone in Brooklyn played stick ball. If you could hit a ball for two sewer distances it was a home run. Marbles was a big sport in Brooklyn when I was a kid. I got pretty good at it. You would draw a circle in the dirt and everyone would put several marbles into it. The next thing which would happen was you would take turns shooting at the marbles with your shooter, which was your marble used to knock their marbles out of the circle. All the marbles you knocked out of the circle you could keep. I gained a pretty big marble collection doing this. There were different looking marbles and even different size marbles. There were solid color ones, ones with waves of color moving through them and ones which looked more like glass, just to name a few. Sometimes we would make something out of nothing. We would go around to the candy stores and ask if we could have their bottle caps. In those days all the candy stores had a large chest with ice and water in it for keeping the bottled soda cold. On the side of the cooler was a bottle opener which dropped the caps into a drawer. The store owners would let us empty the draw. The next thing we would do would use the caps the same way we used the marbles. Even then, Coke caps were preferred. I don’t know why. Sometimes the things we did were not so smart. An example of this was a game we played where we shot at each other. We didn’t use real guns so don’t worry, but we still could have hurt each other. We used to build linoleum guns. I don’t expect anyone today to know about this. We would take a broom stick and nail several heavy rubber bands which were tied together to one end. At the other end was a clothespin, the kind you pressed on to open. You know, the ones with a spring to keep them closed. Once the gun was built we needed ammunition. This meant we had to find someone throwing out old linoleum. We always seemed to find that because in those days linoleum was very popular in homes and apartments. We would take the linoleum and cut it up into small squares. The squares were inserted in the loop of the rubber band and the linoleum squares were held in the stretched rubber band by inserting them into the clothespin which kept the tension. When you wanted to shoot the gun at your friends you just pressed down on the clothespin after aiming. It was amazing how many times we hit our targets. Thank goodness no one was hit in the eye, because we never thought about that. While not exactly a game, our poverty got us to be very innovative. What do you do if you wanted a scooter and you had no money? You look for old roller skates and some wood. The roller skates in those days fit over the shoes and were composed of two sections with a nut which when loosened allowed you to adjust the skate to the size of your shoe. Someone was always throwing out old and rusty skates and we would get them from the trash whenever we found them. A scooter was usually made using a fruit crate, some boards and the skates. What you would do is take the skates apart and put each end on the front and back of a wide board. You would nail the crate on the front of the board and take to smaller boards and make handles which were nailed to the top of the crate. Now you had your scooter. I remember when I was about 10 years old it had rained pretty hard and water was running in the gutters and we kids decided to try and build a boat. We had found some plaster someone had thrown away and thought if we took a fruit crate, which there was many of since there was a fruit store on the next block who was always throwing them out, and covered it with plaster it would make a nice boat. We plastered it up, let it dry, put it into the water and it sunk. First of all, there was not enough water, second plaster is not waterproof and third when we got into the crate it was too much weight. One thing we had and that was a lot of fun.
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