A look at the "Good Old Days"

Hello from your roaming reporter Zoom Zoom.

Today we are going to take a look at what people call the "Good Old Days". We all have those fond childhood memories and for the most part they are good memories.........but are they all that good?

Back in my Good Old Days businesses weren't open 24 hours a day.......which in turn forced you to spend more time at home with your family and extended family. Looking back I can now say that I came from a low income family........very low. Although at the time I was none the wiser.

Let's look at toys. Being a low income family we did not have store bought toys. Toys were either made from items around the house or we used imagination. For example one of our favorite game was to slide down the old wood stairs at my Grandparents old farm house on your butt. No great skill needed for that......right? Just start at the top of the stair, sit on your butt and slide down to the bottom. Looking back I am not so sure what made that so fun. Maybe it was the skill of trying to miss the little nail that stuck up dead center out of the fourth to the last step. If you didn't miss it you got a good scrape on one of your butt cheeks. Then you have to tell your parents what you were doing sliding down the steps when they had told you not to. AH......The Good Old Days!

Then there was the button game. For this game you needed more than one kid to play with you. We would sit on that famous stairway that we loved to slide down and one of us would have a button hidden in our hands behind our back. Someone who was chosen previously would come in and try to tell which one was hiding the button. Now you have a bunch of kids -- ages ranging from 3 to 9 ---- trying to keep a straight face and not giggle to let the guesser know who had the button. It didn't take no rocket scientist to figure it out. Ah .... The Good Old Days!

That brings us to the game of water thimble. Line up all the kids --- again the same group of kids; ages 3 to 9. Each kid is asked to think of a color and the the chosen one take a thimble of water and goes down the line trying to guess each kid's color. If the chosen one guessed the correct color he then throws the water in the thimble into the face of that kid and that kid then becomes the new chosen one. Now the thimble was fun and lasted maybe one round and then we would substitute a drinking glass. And the drinking glass would last maybe another two rounds and then we substituted a pan. So by the end of the game we were soaking wet and in trouble. Ah....The Good Old Days!

Our toys were homemade. We made tractors out of wooden spools, tacks, rubber bands and toothpicks. Put two tacks on the end of a wooden spool, lace the rubber band around the tacks and lace it through the hole. On the other side of the spool stick the toothpick through the rubber band. Wrap the rubber band with the toothpick, set it on the floor and watch it go. AH ... The Good Old Days

Time to go.... Will have to continue tomorrow on "The Good Old Days"

From your roaming reporter Zoom Zoom