Homemade Fun

Warner: Arlington and I created a lot of our own toys. There was no such thing as television or video games and you couldn't go to Walmart so we made our toys. The merry-go-round was probably the most ingenious. We dug a hole and put a post in it and then attached a ten foot plank to the top of it with an old telephone step that we found. We made seats on each end of the plank using old barn wood. All of the neighborhood kids would line up and take turns being whirled around on our homemade merry-go-round.

Another idea we had was a slide show projector. We took a box and put an old telescope lens on one end and a light bulb in the other. Mother always saved the Sunday comics for us and if you put scotch tape on them it would lift the cartoons off and onto the tape. We then ran the tape through two slits in the box between the light bulb and the lens and it would project cartoons on the side of our house for all of the neighborhood kids to see.

Arlington: We also had a swing in the big tree on the east side of our home. You could swing really high and we loved to play Tarzan in the big tree in the front of the house. It had good crawling limbs and hung way out over the sidewalk. There was also a basketball stand at the back of the lot by the chicken coop. We also made rubber guns and used the rubber from car tires to make the rubbers.

Warner: We'd take a board and cut it into the shape of a pistol or sometimes a rifle and then add clothes pins for the triggers. Then you would cut the rubbers out of old inner tubes and shoot them at each other.

Arlington: I got so I would just take the rubbers and put them in my belt and just use my hands to shoot them. It was faster.

Warner: Ya, but half the fun of it was being able to aim the gun and fire. We had a tree house in an old mulberry tree in the back. It had a floor and sides but no roof, but if we were up there no one could get us. We were invincible. That old mulberry tree was a fruit bearing tree so the ground and our fort were covered with purple berries all summer. It makes me wonder how mother kept the purple juice out of her house. We always had purple feet.

Arlington: But then we ran out of inner tubes. You couldn't make rubbers out of the synthetic stuff.

Warner: If we played army, I was always To Jo or Hitler. I was always the bad guy. We also made pea shooters out of the bark from willow trees and flipper forks from branches. We used the little berries that came on the cottonwood trees to shoot each other. Cap guns were about the only expensive toy we had.

Sometimes we would get the rings that would hold wagon wheels together and then take a stick and nail a lid onto it and cup the lid. We would roll the ring around using the stick to control it. After awhile you would get pretty good at it. We made obstacle courses and would take the ring up and over things and down hills, etc.

At night we would play "Kick the Can" and "Hide and Seek". Sometimes if they had killed a pig we would get the pigs bladder and blow it up and it would make a pretty good ball. It was about the size of softball and really pretty tough.