In those days we had to find ways to entertain ourselves

Growing up in Riverton, I’m quite sure my mother thought I and my friends were far too slovenly for our own good, plopping down on the couch every day after school and eating potato chips, but while I will admit that I watched Star Trek and the occasional episode of Gilligan’s Island after school, I seem to recall spending a lot of time outside, at least when the weather was nice.

I think we got plenty of exercise. After all, we did have to walk several blocks to and from school, uphill both ways, I might add, and we had to create our own entertainment in large part. These were the days before Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox, so we had to come up with activities to keep ourselves occupied.

Marbles were a huge thing. On the playground at Jackson Elementary School in Riverton, game bosses created elaborate systems of carnival style games with marbles, not unlike various other games of chance, I suppose – the odds being greatly against you – where you rolled and flicked your marble in a course dug into the dirt behind the school. If you managed to get the marble to a specific place, you were good and won the round, but if you came up short or overshot, you lost your marble to the crime, er, carnival boss.

We played marbles at home, too, and we had coffee cans full of glass marbles. Steelies were especially valuable – ball bearings, I suppose – along with boulders, large size marbles made in vivid colors. You would flick a marble with your thumb, and kind of like croquet, if you hit another player’s marble, you got to keep it, at least that’s how I remember the game. We called one of my brother’s friends The Piddler, because he would just piddle around boxes or plants or chairs or whatever he could hide behind, rarely venturing into the open.

If we weren’t playing marbles on the playground, we were trying to set height records on the long-chain swings, pumping and pumping and pumping until we were briefly weightless at the apex of the pendulum – this was the space era, after all – and then if you were especially daring, you would launch yourself from the swing and fly (and ultimately tumble) forward. More than one kid broke an arm in this fashion, I’m sure.

Likewise, you would spin the merry-go-round faster and faster and faster until the centrifugal force would fling off weaker riders. Those astronauts in training had nothing on us.

I don’t recall playground monitors stopping us from engaging in any of these activities, but perhaps they did.

There were also endless games of tag, and I recall that some of the girls in fifth or sixth grade, who had matured faster than the boys, were able to easily outrun us. Embarrassing, for sure, not that anyone would confuse me with Jesse Owens in the first place.

On summer evenings we would play hide and seek, and there were plenty of places to hide at our sprawling former dairy farm home or our cousins’ place about a mile away with its spacious yard. Occasionally, we would quit or would be called inside by our mother, and some poor kid would be left outside hiding, at first proud he hadn’t been found, then realizing he had been forgotten. Ah, the injustice of child play.

And, of course, we rode our bikes all over the place for baseball and basketball games, and our father would take us fishing or exploring the hills around Riverton on weekends. In the winter we skated on Davis Pond and sent our sleds down Glass Hill. We had to roll off the sled if we reached the barbed wire fence that marked the property line.

Sometimes we’d just lie outside and look at the stars, often from the flat roof of one of the old dairy buildings – no smart phone, no TikTok reels, no scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Just a dark sky with billions of stars and a planet or two. Priceless.

These were also the days of plastic models made by Revell and other companies. I loved making mostly ships and airplanes, usually World War II models, and the occasional classic car, and rather than carefully displaying them, we would play with them. There was a small open irrigation ditch running along the street in front of our house on West Park Avenue, and we would put a couple of small stones into the bottom of the USS Missouri battleship or for ballast and actually float the ship down the ditch, sometimes with an unfortunate grasshopper aboard.

In fact, I was so anxious to build a play toy that I rarely even bothered to paint the models or apply the decals. I would sometimes slop them together, and my friend Robert would accuse me of making a “glue glop,” so that I could float, fly or drive the models around the yard. One model I did display, however, was about a six-foot tall model of a Saturn 5 rocket with an Apollo command module at the top. That one stood proudly in my room – until it fell over one day. I blamed the dog.

And so I breathed in a lot of glue while making models in those days, which probably explains a lot. Oh, and we made Creepy Crawlers with this goop you’d pour into a mold and bake into a rubbery toy bug or some other creature. Breathed in a lot of that stuff, too, not to mention the mosquito fog from the sprayer we would follow on our bikes. Real smart, right?

Again, this explains my addled brain.

The point is, these were far more simple times, and while my mother tried her best to enter us into all kinds of activities and programs to keep us busy and illuminate our lives – Tae Kwon Do, horseback riding, piano lessons and Spanish lessons, to name a few, anything to get us out of the house, we just liked playing, playing outside.

And yes, I did watch my fair share of Gilligan’s Island – Skipper!!! –but I think we also created a lot of fun.

Oh, and one more thing. I will forever stand by my decision to read “Fighters of World War II” or “Famous running backs of the NFL” instead of Shakespear or Robert Frost, much to my mother’s chagrin.

As one writer might put it, “O, gentle mother, forgive thy misguided child.”