More Fun and Games on the Homestead

In about 1928, our Dad started using some very low-priced skiis (i.e. home made by the James boys) which he used for going across country to his remote school about 30 miles from home. Those were monstrous skiis, about six feet long, made of pine, and were rather wide. They had only a single strap which went across the arch of the one's foot. When he was home, on a week-end, I used to try my luck at skiing down hill.
I went one time, I remember, up on the hill in front of the house, where I wouldn't have to dodge any fences, though there were a few sage brush clumps, and some patches of bare ground, because it had been thawing. I made two or three fairly successful runs, not falling down more than a dozen times. Then came disaster! I was doing fine on my last run until I headed for and hit a patch of bare ground. Needless to tell you, I, or rather the skiis, came to a sudden halt. I didn't stop that fast, and in falling somehow knocked the knee cap on my right knee clear over on the side of my knee! Oh, my, how that hurt!
I couldn't even get up, but had to call for Dad, who was down in the barnyard, to come help me. He came, rolled my pant leg up and saw where the knee cap was. He simply pushed on it with his two thumbs, moving it back in place. Then, to my surprise, I could walk again, though the knee was awfully painful for many days. Did we go to the doctor? Oh, no--it healed up by itself. And I've never had trouble with that knee since that injury!
I mentioned neighborhood coasting parties. I think they were the result of our Mom's suggestion. For several winters, all the neighbors would get together by appointment, at someone's house, and we would all, old and young, go out coasting. I especially remember one coasting party at the Charlie Carter's. It was a beautiful cold, clear, moonlit night. You could literally see for miles, the light was so beautiful on the snow. We all went sledding on the hills north of their house, where there were great long swooping slopes. Some of the bachelor men from the area had come, too, including the James boys, Matt and Bill, and Magnus, the Norwegian brother of John Goodmanson. These fellows all brought their skiis, mostly homemade, and they had no fancy ski boots or poles to assist them. They had only single straps on their skiis, and crude willow sticks for poles.
It was the first time I had ever seen anyone who was truly skilled doing down hill runs. I can still see Magnus flying down that hill in the moonlight, making the run without poles, and on only one ski! He looked like a bird, swooping from side to side, never falling once. He was by far the most skilled person there. It was his night to shine! He could scarcely say anything in English, but he could surely ski! Another time we went to the Emil Richter's-- "Grandpa" and "Grandma" Richter to most of us. They didn't have any hills to coast on, but we were pulled on a rope behind a car or a saddle horse, down the road which was well covered with ice and snow. They went so fast it almost took my breath away! Again I remember Magnus on his skiis, holding onto a rope behind a galloping horse, jumping over the clumps of sage brush, yelling at the top of his lungs, having a great time. Whoever it was on the horse was having a wild ride, too, weaving in and out among the big sage brush clumps; he rode even faster than we who were being towed behind the car!
That night was memorable for another reason. After we had had our fill of being pulled around on our sleds or skiis, we all went in the house, had some hot cocoa and sandwiches, and then played games--"winkum," "spin the platter," and POST OFFICE! I had never heard of the latter, and was so embarrassed when sent into a nearby bed room with one of the girls (I can't even remember her name!) that I didn't know what to do. Of course you know that I was supposed to kiss her, but believe me, I never touched her! I have never played post office since! (Well, not the formal game, you understand.)
What did we do indoors? As I've indicated in previous chapters, our house was quite small, so there wasn't room for any vigorous play indoors. But we could and did play lots of table games. Tiddledee Winks was a favorite, played on a blanket on a table, with little celluloid disks. By pressing on the edge of a disk with another "shooter" disk, and snapping the shooter off the edge of the disk you wanted to move, you could snap it up in the air, and, if lucky, into a little catch basin. Scores were kept on the basis of how many disks you could shoot into the basin. One could really develop some skill, a sort of "light touch," which made accurate shooting possible.
Another game we sometimes played on the table covered with a blanket was croquet. Our set had little wooden mallets and balls, and rather fine wire hoops which could be moved around, and were not fastened down on the blanket. It wasn't very satisfactory, because when a ball struck a wicket, instead of going straight through, it knocked the wicket galley west. But we played croquet quite a lot, anyway. It wasn't until years later that I realized that our set was actually a miniature set, and that regular croquet was played on a lawn with big balls and mallets! Of course there was checkers, one of our favorite games. Dad and Mom used to tell us of how they played checkers a lot in the years before we kids came along. When they first homesteaded they didn't get around to the neighbors much, and after a long day of hard work would often sit down to play a game of checkers. They had a cat who would sit on an apple box next to the table where they played, and who would watch the game carefully. Every once in a while, apparently thinking it was his turn, he would reach up with his paw, and move a checker. And he was careful to only move it just one square! I don't think he ever won a game, of course. I wasn't very good at checkers, but could often beat my sister Jean. Then when she would get frustrated, we would play "Giveaway" which was just the opposite of checkers. The goal was to get rid of all your men by forcing your opponent to jump them, before your opponent made you jump all of his men. Jean was good at that. However, I don't think it improved our checker game skills a bit.
Years later, when I was in college, I used to play checkers with a man across the street from where my parents lived, in Glasgow. I thought I knew something about checkers, but soon found out I didn't. He would start the game with only eight checkers, against my twelve, and still beat me badly every time! He surely knew something about checkers, though I don't know how he would have fared against another really good player.
The indoor games we played were mostly card games. My Mom was a staunch Methodist, from the time she was a girl, and therefore we could not have a deck of regular playing cards in the house, let alone play with them, because she thought they were evil. She and Dad had played some kind of card game with neighbors, before we kids came along, but I can't remember the name of it, though it might have been "Pitch." There was a big thick deck of numbered cards, and we kids sometimes just monkeyed around with them, not knowing how to play the game. But we did have cards to play "Old Maid," and "Authors," and "Pit." The latter was one of my favorites, and I loved the busy trading of cards, trying to get a corner on the market in some grain. That may have been a wee bit educational, I suppose.
Then Mom discovered the game of "Rook." It was played with a special set of cards, with four different suites of different colors, with the cards numbered from 1 to 14 in each suite. It was quite complicated, calling for careful estimation of what cards your partner and opponents might have (revealed by how they bid to declare trumps), and very good memory of what cards in each suite had been played. We all really enjoyed that game, especially our mother. I don't think Dad ever played Rook with us. I suppose I had more fun playing that card game than any other I ever knew. Many years later, when I was in the service in World War II, I discovered that the experience with Rook helped wonderfully in learning to play contract bridge! In fact, except for the different cards, the rules were almost identical! I don't recall ever mentioning this to Mom; I wonder now what she might have said had she known!
We had a few toys with which we played indoors, but not too many. I always liked to shoot things with a pop gun, and can remember setting up dominoes (aha--there's another game we played and enjoyed) as enemy soldiers and shooting them down. I didn't think the cork ought to be on a string, as they were attached when the popgun was received, so would cut off the string, and thus have something like a real shooting gun.
Reading was another fun activity. We didn't have many children's books to read or look at, but the folks had accumulated stacks of old National Geographics and other magazines, and we had lots of fun reading and looking at the pictures in them. I remember that the relatives in Wisconsin sent out whole bundles of old Sunday papers, with beautiful sepia colored pictures, comics (we called them 'funny papers'), and one feature which especially appealed to me. In each week's issue there would be a story about the "Little People," a mythical community of tiny little folks who lived in a little town. I read those so carefully, and knew the names of just about everyone in the town. For a time, at least, I believed the stories were true, and that there were such little towns and people. I would pour over those stories and pictures by the hour. Another type of printed material which captured our attention for long periods of time, especially just before Christmas, was the mail order catalog. We always received the Sears, Roebuck & Co., the Montgomery Ward, and I think it was Spiegel's catalogs, both the Fall and Winter and the Spring and Summer issues. The coming of the Fall catalogs would start us off dreaming of what we would like for Christmas. In each catalog there would be pages and pages of beautiful Christmas things, toys, dolls, just about anything one could want. Our folks usually set a limit for us to choose one gift, only one, which couldn't cost more than a dollar, as our chief gift. Also, we could plan on ordering less expensive things for our brothers and sisters. Oh, what careful thinking that took--all of it fun. Then about the first part of November, we had to give our choices to Mom, and she would make up the orders, sometimes from several mail order houses. Of course we didn't get to see everything she ordered, as we usually received the gift of our choice, plus something else she thought we would like or needed. Lots of our Christmas gifts fell in the latter category, items of clothing, or things for school.
Those mail order catalogs would get absolutely dog-eared, with our thumbing through them. We thought the companies were great, and there is no question that they did provide a wonderful service to isolated families such as ours. I don't think we ordered much from Spiegel's, but we were surely familiar with their catalog. In late 1945, when I was in the Air Force and stationed in Chicago, I was pleased to find that a lot of our Air Force surplus disposal business had to do with the big warehouses owned by (and leased from) Spiegel's. I felt rather at home going there!
When we were recuperating after having some illness--measles, mumps, scarlet fever or plain flu--we liked to make and fly little paper airplanes. Then pages would be torn from old catalogs (or from less important parts of current ones) and folded to make simple gliders which we threw about the room. We had lots of fun with that, and it was very inexpensive fun. Standard disposal of the outdated catalogs was to move them to the outdoor toilet, where they would be sometimes read, and otherwise put to good use. We never had, so far as I can recall, any store-bought toilet paper on the homestead.
Swimming was an idea of Robert's--one summer he thought we kids should all learn to swim. Since neither of our parents were swimmers, we had to teach ourselves. The closest swimming water was John Goodmanson's pond, nearly a mile south of our place. We got his permission to swim there, and wearing cut-off bib overalls and similar old clothes for Jean, the three of us would walk down to Goodmanson's, carrying old inner tubes to keep us afloat while learning to swim. The mud was nearly as deep as the water, and it was quite a trick to wade out far enough to reach water deep enough to swim in. Then to launch ourselves into the water, freeing our feet from the sucking mud, wasn't easy.
But with a partially inflated inner tube around one's waist, we could manage a sort of dog paddling which we called swimming. We really worked at that, and all three of us got so we could truly swim, even without the inner tube. It wasn't particularly cooling, since we had to walk back home again in the hot sun after our swim, but it was great fun. We boys usually had spent the forenoon working at something around the place, maybe hauling water to the garden with team and stone-boat, or hoeing in the potatoes or corn, or something like that, and we would enjoy an afternoon, or part of one, spent swimming.
After a year or two, we all bought cheap swimming suits, again from the mail order catalogs. If I'm not mistaken, in those days we could get an all wool swimming suit for a dollar or less. We had choice of colors,too-- either navy blue or maroon. The skirts of those suits came half way down our thighs, on both the boys and girls suits. The boys suits had big cut-out holes under the arms. Swimming trunks were unknown in those days! We proudly wore those suits for our swimming times. Sometimes some of the other neighborhood kids would come to Goodmanson's and swim with us. We had some dandy mud fights, I remember. Later, when we moved away from the homestead down to the Milk River valley, we did lots of swimming in the river, where there was plenty of water, even enough for diving. Then we learned to use other strokes than the dog paddle!
On rare occasions we would swim in Brush Fork, a creek about two miles east of our home coulee. That stream had some deeper holes, though still awfully muddy, in which we could at least get wet. I remember one time, in the hot summer, when we rode on horses over there with Ralph Carter (or was it Vernon Richter?). Robert and I were riding double on old Snip, our saddle horse. We all went in swimming, and then decided to play Indian--I think that was it, anyway. We left our clothes on the bank of the creek, took the saddles off the horses, and on that hot summer day rode bareback up and down along the hills of Brush Coulee, on a dead run, pretending we were young Indians. Riding bareback without clothes wasn't that much fun that day, as the horses got as sweaty as we boys did, and we all ended up with some pretty touchy thighs and bottoms from that afternoon. We never tried that again, though it was fun--for a while!
With that I will tie a knot in this blog--though I may come back later to the subject of fun and games. The real truth of the matter is that we were happy youngsters, not at all deprived from not having radio or TV or ipods, or whatever, those devices that modern children think so necessary.