Sports I Played in Grade School

I was fortunate to have a very diversified sports experience in my years of grade school in the one-room country school attended by my grandmother 80 years earlier. Many of these sports were not recognized as "sports", they were just what you did.

Tiddly Winks was one of these unrecognized sports that involved flipping a small plastic disc with another plastic disc from the carpet into a cup. You got points just for being in the ring around the cup but the big points came from those shots into the cup.

Hide & Seek involved several versions. The simplest involved the person who was it hiding their eyes while everyone else hid. When the search began, there was a competition If you could get to the home location before the searcher got there, you were in free. If you were found first, i.e. searcher called you out at "home". You were "it" for the next game.

A more elaborate version was "Red Light, Green Light" which differed in the starting. Instead of hiding while the one who was it covered his eyes, everyone lined up and started south along the west side of the school. You could run on a command of Greenlight and keep running on any color command except Red Light. If you failed to stop at Red Light you had to come back to the starting line. When you finally got around to the south side of the school, hiding and seeking worked as in the simpler version

Cowboys-and-Indians was never played on the schoolyard but was a game we played in someone's barn. Some players had BB guns but I don't remember them being fired. I always felt at a disadvantage because I had no toy guns; my father believed guns were for killing and inappropriate for toys although water pistols later were approved for play.

Wrestling was always good for activity and I remember only two instances, one bad and one fun. In one winter event, my winter coat began to choke me leading to an unceremonious surrender. The fun wrestle occurred in our front yard at home when my small hound dog decided to enter the fray on my side and nipped my opponent who felt that this was unfair to him.

Fighting with Cudgels was a game with literary backing. Robin Hood and Little John battled with cudgels when Little John was admitted to the group and my cousin Brenton and I constructed our cudgels from our family Christmas trees. We cut off all the branches as well as the tip leaving a sturdy walking stick or cudgel. We had some great hand to hand adventures and luckily never got a concussion or put out an eye.

Football was an interesting exercise. The three seventh and eighth graders were one team and all the rest of us, probably seven or eight, were the other team. We had no pads, yard markers nor goal posts but we played tackle football with vengeance. The best part of all was learning to count by sixes to keep track of our scoring!

Softball was perhaps our most innovative sport. We had no gloves and so few players that we had to play "work-up" where one rotated through all the positions becoming a batter. Batters, usually three in number, had to catch for each other. Since there weren't enough players to man the bases, we invented "Cross-Out". If you threw the ball between a runner and the base he was approaching, he was out. If the ball went behind him he could take one more base but stealing was not allowed.

Basketball existed as a bare hoop on the north side of the school but I don't remember ever playing basketball there or even shooting the basketball. About the time I was 13 or 14, our 4-H team had a game in the gym at the Army Post in Des Moines. I was already nearly six feet tall and so they put me in expecting an advantage. I picked up three fouls in about a minute and a half and was taken out of the game!

Ice Skating was a common winter event but I had no skates until I was 14. I remember two skating events both pleasurable. One was at Lake Ahquabi State Park watching Mary and her friends do skating tricks that I couldn't hope to accomplish with cute names like "Shooting the Duck".

The other fun skating was one Saturday night when my cousins, Wayne and Brenton, came by after I had gone to bed and invited me to join them in a moonlight skate on Squaw Creek. I got up and went with them and we skated until midnight. Nothing fancy, just skating along the creek!