Games We Played

When I was about 6 or 7, I had typhoid malaria fever and was sick a month and the doctor would come to the house to see me. The children in the neighborhood would come and fan me with a fan with newspaper tied around a stick. She would sew the paper around the stick and cut the paper around the stick and would make a big fan. They would come in and fan me. Aunt Sally, when I got up ready to walk, she said, your legs look like sparrow legs with stockings on them. It was summer time and they put stockings on me in the summer the first day I was up. And I walked down the hall to the kitchen with mama holding me and Aunt Sally just teased me about those sparrow legs.

We played hopscotch, and we played marbles, hide-and-go-seek. And a when a lot of us got together we played drop the handkerchief and spin the bottle. Drop the handkerchief, everyone gets in a ring and you go around and around and drop it behind somebody. And they pick it up and try to catch you. And if they catch you, you go in the ring and then they're it. If they don't catch you, then you're still it. We played skip the rope. We had a rope swing in the yard we swung in.

We did a lot of running games where we got our exercise. We played hail over. You get a ball, chose sides, and have some on each side of the house. They would throw the ball over the house and run around the house. They had to catch the ball and tag as many of us as they could get before you got back to your side of the house. We played hide-and-go-seek. Let one count and then everybody hid and he tried to find everybody. And if he tagged them, the first one that was tagged had to be it the next time.

We played town ball, that's what everybody in the school would play. They would chose up sides, and they would hit the ball sorta like baseball. You would get three outs. Town ball and baseball are about the same except you had a lot more players in the field. That's one of the games we played at school.

Then we played checkers, marbles, and we played a game with corn. I can't remember just how we played that. We played thimble. You would have a thimble and pass it around. And you would not know who had it, and the rest would be trying to guess who had it. You would pass it or act like your passing it when you're holding it. I think you got out if you had it when they guessed you. We played tagged like that too. Chose it and then we would run around and tag somebody and they would try to catch you before you got back to your place. If you couldn't catch them you would try to catch somebody else, If you caught him then he was it.

In the school we would run three-legged races. You get a partner and tie two of the legs together and call it a three legged race. Your partner might stumble and pull you down and somebody might catch you.

When my mama's brother came back from the service, he gave me four or five pennies and one of my brothers said, Alma I'll give you this dime for those pennies. And I said, no you won't I've got more money then that. I wasn't going to give them five pieces of money for one. They teased me about that for a long time, my brothers did. They were big teasers.

We had a big china berry tree in our yard and we had a rope swing and we'd play that swing so many times and you'd have to give it up or somebody would push you out.

I don't believe children play nowadays like we did. The gotta have bought toys. We had a ball, but mama made that. She got an old inner tube and wrap around big piece of thread from the men's socks when they wore out and wrap it around. She would take a needle and thread and sew it up real tight. She would take the rubber and wrap the sock and wrap it around. She made a good many of them out of Papa and the boys old socks. She just had to have a piece of rubber in the middle to make it bounce good and that's what we played town ball with, the balls that our mothers made. If happened to get a little ball for Christmas, we were thrilled to death.