Happy Throwback Thursday! This piece originally ran on April 29, 2014. Given that so many of these pastimes were summer-oriented, I decided to post this because summer is nearly over. Sorry to be such a buzzkill.
Today I noticed a Facebook posting about talking into the fan “to hear my robot voice,” complete with a picture of a windblown little girl facing a fan and either talking or singing. That is, if robots sing.
“Admit it…we all did this,” the caption concludes.
Duly admitted. However, DF says he never did any such thing. Perhaps that’s because he grew up mostly in Alaska, where fans aren’t a common household appliance.
Do kids still do that – talk into a fan to hear their voices oscillate? Or is that too lame for words, given that they can download apps to make their voices sound like Darth Vader or, yes, a robot.
How about this one: Do kids still let the fan blow bubbles for them? Show of hands if you’ve ever held a dripping bubble-blowing wand in front of a running fan to watch bubbles shoot out.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the aging process, but this got me thinking about other things that I and my siblings did but that perhaps children no longer do. Such as:
Make rings or chains from plants. I never could figure out how to make chains from daisies or clover. None of us could. But I could make a decent ring from a stalk of plantain weed. I rarely wore them, because a classmate on the playground would inevitably notice it and say “Ooohhh, did your boyfriend give you that? Are you getting married?” Besides, it wasn’t the wearing that mattered. It was the making.
Make temporary tattoos. The simplest was plain old ink. A popular theme was to draw a face on one’s fist and do simple puppetry. Invariably my mom scolded us and made us scrub it off with Ajax. Ouch.
Then there was a plant we called pokeberry, which grew along the edges of the school playground. Squishing the purple berries produced a very dark stain onto fingers, arms or whatever. One time I dipped the pointy stick from a push-up ice cream bar into the juice and “wrote” with it on a discarded ice-cream wrapper. All the girls with me instantly scattered to look for their own writing implements. Interestingly, we never tried eating the berries – and a good thing, too, since apparently they are poisonous.
Jumping, spinning and stomping
Play hopscotch. Scratching squares in the dust, finding flat stones to use as markers and hopping for hours in the hot sun. That is, when we weren’t playing jumprope: Someone’s dad would get us a piece of rope and we’d skip until we couldn’t do it any longer. If you were young you’d get stuck as a “steady ender,” i.e., you never got a chance to jump.
Wrap rubber bands around their fingers. You’d do this as tightly as possible until all sensation was lost. Feeling the blood rush back in was interesting.
Spin until you almost puked. We would do this until we were so dizzy we fell over. The residual, still-spinning feeling was almost as good as a ride at the fair.
Hold dandelions under chins. Otherwise, how will they know whether their friends like butter?
Stomp on a soda can until it molds itself to a foot, then walk home clanking all the way. We liked the way it sounded crossing the road and also on the two sections of sidewalk that existed in our little town. Never tried this with two feet at once. Now I wish I had.
Yep, we were easily amused
Perhaps I need to believe my childhood activities were more fun than they actually were because, well, I’m getting older and starting to look back over my life. I expect today’s kids often have a lot more fun than we did – they’ve got plenty of toys and electronics, and access to amusements we could never have imagined. Our little town didn’t even have a stoplight (it still doesn’t), let alone Build-A-Bear Workshops and bouncy-house emporia.
Still, I feel a little sorry for today’s children if they’ve never had the chance to roll down a grassy hill or spend an entire afternoon following a butterfly from flower to flower. I remember dropping tiny crumbs near anthills and watching the workers trundle them off for storage. Sometimes I’d see a team of ants lugging a large (by comparison) insect; I don’t remember ever seeing them get it into an anthill, though.
I had a cousin who fried marbles, rolling them around in a hot pan and then pouring on cold water so that the glass balls cracked. Once she gave me a clear glass version whose cracks made it look like a diamond. To me, anyway. I kept that marble long past elementary school; it was in my old jewelry box when my dad’s house burned down.
We could ride our bikes forever; “be home before dark” was the only rule. It was possible to go shoeless from after-church Sunday to the next Sunday morning, except maybe flip-flops if the road got really hot. A family-owned convenience store sold Popsicles for five cents, the kind you could break in half to share with a friend or a sibling. My brother and I would pool change to buy a Milky Way bar and put it in the freezer until “Astro Boy” came on the UHF station (remember those?) in mid-afternoon.
Or how about the chance to catch fireflies (which we called “lightning bugs”) all evening, imprisoning them in a jar with holes punched in the lid, and then letting them go? The idea was that if you got enough you’d be able to read by their collective light. I was a little skeptical, since they tended to go off and on randomly. Moot point, though, since my mom would never have let me bring a jar of bugs into the house.
When I was really young my sister told me that another cousin pulled the lighted parts off the fireflies and made rings out of them. That horrified me, because I figured it really hurt the bug. Couldn’t she just have stuck with plantain?
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We never did the tattoos. One thing that some girls did that Mama would allow us to do was sew on our feet. The girls took a regular sewing needle and threaded it with very colorful thread. Then, they just sewed designs on the outer edges of their feet where the foot was tough from going barefoot on asphalt in the Southern summer.
They also made designs on their fingers the same way even though their fingers and hands were not tough. It actually does not hurt if you are careful and only use a small needle and only go under the top layer of skin. But, Mama made those older girls go home and would not allow them to come back. I sneaked and sewed on my finger one time, made a pattern and ripped it out before she found out. Maybe it was my foot that I sewed.
We had long hair that would be pulled into the fans, the round, black kind with very little protection across the front, something like four wires. My mother would not have not like the bubble in the house.
We were never bored because we could always sit and peel off the asphalt stuck to the soles of our feet. We hated shoes and wore them to church and when Mama made us wear them when we went to town.
It was a real challenge to get into the back door because we had to not step in chicken poop. We learned to watch where we were going. We learned to watch where we stood after I stood in fire ants while picking plums for jelly. I was bitten/stung to my panties on one leg and to above the knee on the other.
Picking blackberries taught us about chiggers and how to poison our skin and clothes to avoid them. We picked pecans on the ten-acre paradise.
We also had sidewalk skates and played baseball. We played Red Rover if we could get enough children. All the rest you listed, we did, too.
Now that you mention it, I remember sewing under the skin, as well as most of the others mentioned.
Mama would NOT allow us to sew on our fingers! Oh, we also played marbles outdoors in the summer and jacks in the house in the winter.
My five yr old son asked me to draw him a hopscotch board the other day. He played on and off for an hr.
Enjoyed reading your post, it brought back great memories! I never did the bubble thing in front of a fan, but I plan to soon! LOL! Of course, I will say it is to show my granddaughter. I also loved the Chinese jumpropes we had as kids. If we couldn’t find 2 people to hold the ends, we would just hook them up to chairs. Then the homemade fortune tellers(the piece of paper that was folded many times to fit on your fingers with different fortunes inside). Ohhhh I miss the simpler days of childhood.
We made Chinese jump ropes with rubber bands knotted together. You?
There was a vacant lot a couple of doors down from our old house in Pittsburgh that was full of spearmint. I can remember sitting in a field full of spearmint at dusk watching the lightning bugs come out. It was magical.
Most of our games involved running around and screeching like banshees. Anyone remember “Release,” “Freeze and Defrost,” “Red Light, Green Light?” Jump rope, hide and seek… yeah, it was a great way to grow up. Funny, you didn’t hear about school shootings then… I guess we were busy getting along with each other and learning how to handle ourselves.
So agree! I think our world today is to much about “me” and not “us”. I remember walking to a friends house to see what they were up too? I remember going outside of my own house and playing with the neighborhood kids…whoever was out there.
Good point…You never heard of “play dates” until fairly recently. Sigh.
You are so right!
I had a Skip-it, a plastic ring that went on one ankle. It was attached to a line with a weight and a jingle bell on the other end. You’d spin it around and hop over it with the other foot. I loved my Skip-it.
Oh, I wanted one of those! Except the one I saw advertised was called a “Jingle Jump.” Since I knew I wasn’t going to get one, I tied a shoelace to a bangle and slipped it over my foot. On the other end of the shoelace was a ball of aluminum foil with a small rock inside. It was kind of fun for a while but then I realized that was enough. Perhaps that nurtured my inherent frugality: All that money for a toy I’d play with once? No thanks.
I didn’t have a “Jingle Jump” or Skip-it either. But I also made one myself but cutting a ring from the lid of a five quart plastic ice cream bucket, attaching a string–and I can’t remember what was on the end.
I also made my own doll houses out of shoeboxes and made the furniture and clothes too for my dolls. I think necessity was part of it, but it also made me more creative.
Just as when I made my own Jingle Jump: You felt the sense of accomplishment. Heck, I used to play with scrap wood in my grandparents’ garage, pretending that it was doll furniture. It worked.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving comments.
I remember attaching playing cards with clothes pins to the spokes of my bike so it made a clapping sounds when I rode. Sometimes we would take a gallon plastic jug and drill a small hole in the bottom, fill with water, then put the lid on almost tight, but enough of a drip, so we had pretend gas tanks for our bikes.
We made forts out of blankets tossed over the clothes line.
We ran through the sprinkler when we would call “time and temperature” and were told it was over 90 degrees.
We played in the irrigation ditches.
And I read lots of books.
Great summer memories!
I was babysitting for a family whose home was close to an irrigation ditch. We heard “peepers” so I suggested we go find them. We took an old aquarium outdoors and the deliriously excited two girls and I collected more than 100 dime-sized frogs. When it started to get too dark to see we let them all go. The TV set never went on that night.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
My niece makes a tent with a sheet over the clothesline: Free fun for her two boys. On a warm-ish summer day last year she set the sprinkler underneath their backyard trampoline. Very refreshing!
Kandace, you beat me to it! I remember attaching playing cards to our bikes when we were young! The more cards the louder we were! And the skip-it. I played with mine constantly. Maybe that’s why my knees are so bad today! 🙂
Does anyone remember walking on upright tin cans like they were stilts? How they stayed on your feet was that a long, heavy string was punched through the sides in a loop and pulled up by your hands to keep it taut.
I remember reading about that but none of my relatives drank coffee that came in a can (instant only) so that was out. It never occurred to me to try it with, say, a soup can.
My son had those in 1971, called Romper Stompers–after Romper Room. I still have them and the lemon on a ring that he put on his ankle and whirled around as he jumped. He could not do it, so his sister used them when she was big enough.
Thanks for mentioning those items. I also had both of them, probably in about 1970 or 1971 as well. I would have never remembered them if you hadn’t made your comment. We also played a lot of jump rope and Chinese jump roper. We also did hand trick with the Chinese jump rope. “Jacob’s Ladder” comes to mind at the moment. I am going to go look for a piece of string and see if I can still do it.
OMG, I can still do Jacob’s ladder with a string. I think once you learn it is forever embedded in your DNA.
Anne,
I could also still do it. I probably hadn’t even tried in more than 35 years.
We did a lot of those things and I credit my love of nature as a result of spending a good portion of my childhood outdoors exploring.
I had roller skates, a skateboard, three bikes, a hot cycle, and other sporting equipment. I would go out and catch fireflies, caterpillars, and toads and would keep them in the habitat I built for them before releasing them that same evening. It was great!
It’s really sad because my step children, who don’t live with us, don’t even know how to ride a bike! One wasn’t interested at all and the other gave up after his first try because he didn’t expect to not be able to do it straight away. The brand new bike started to rust in the garage until he got too big for it and we sold it on Craigslist to a little boy who was thrilled to have a new bike for himself.
I remember learning to ride a bike very fondly so it made me sad that my step children had no interest. They aren’t too much into nature either so all the forest preserve visits my husband and I enjoy are on the weekends they aren’t over.
Nicole,
I don’t know if this will work for you, but when my kids were young and I took them to a nature-like place, they might have started out kicking and screaming but they always enjoyed it fantastically once there. Especially if there is a stream.
Just give them 30 minutes to readjust from their normal, over stimulated environment and they will find things to do.
Fan-talking? Never heard of such a thing. We didn’t have soda cans in Arabia, so that was out. Dandelions did not grow there, though we used to suck the sap out of jasmine blossoms.
Actually, I think cans in those days were actual, real tin cans, a little too tough for one to stomp. And my mother would’ve brained me if she’d caught me wrapping rubber bands around my fingers in an attempt to cut off the circulation.
LOL! Today’s electronified kiddie entertainment, IMHO, is too exciting by a factor of five and too boring by a factor of ten.
A vining form of honeysuckle grew along the chain-link fence in the school yard. In early June we’d be out there sucking the sweetness from the blooms. Good times!
I think my mom would have whupped us had she caught us messing with the rubber bands, but we were sneaky little rascals. Oh, and we used rubber bands around our knee socks when they lost their will to remain upright.
I’m a tad older than you but I remember when knee socks and Bermuda shorts were the height of fashion.
This made remember that just the other day I was thinking about how we would go into the “woods” at recess and eat crabapples straight off the tree. I was thinking about it because I saw some kids a little bit away from the playground and figured they were about to get yelled at. I don’t know if the teachers didn’t see us or didn’t care.
The best part about fan talking was when the fan got turned off or on, and the speed of the blade changed, which also changed the pitch of your voice. Singing into the fan was also great to listen to.
I remember making mud pies in used pie tins and decorating the pie with violets and dandelions. I sewed my own doll clothes.
We played our own version of rummy 500 with girlfriends for hours. We rode bikes everywhere and with the neighborhood kids made a bike path out of the vacant lot down the road. We were outside in the summer until dark playing kickball in the street. I remember the honeysuckle vines were sweet. We would cut “punks” or cattails and burn them to try to keep the mosquitoes away with the smoke. The real difference between then and now is that I was free to roam outside.
Free-range children are in the minority these days, for sure.
Yes – and I’m sad for my daughter missing out. 🙁
We also played kickball for hours, both in the street and at the nearby park. It was a game that both boys and girls could play together without the boys having too much of an unfair advantage.
Such sweet memories…thanks to you and your readers for the reminders.
Loved hopscotch but playing jacks was my favorite. We played for hours. I bought some for my daughter when she was about ten. She quickly got tired of it, but my 50+ year old sisters and I sat on the back porch and played for quite some time. It actually came back to us more quickly than you might have thought.
Jacks were very popular when I was a kid, but only for girls. According to DF, some boys in the villages did play — they preferred marbles, but jacks were cheaper.
We played in the backyard, a whole bunch of us, cooperating on building a town, surrounded by farms. I recall one kid going on and on about her alfalfa field and how good it was for horses. We also would go across the street to an empty lot with a high, dry eroded bank. We carved rooms and roads, paths, and apartment complexes into the bank. We decorated the rooms with stone and stick furniture, and also used small figures of animals to populate them. We were So.Calif. kids, and now it strikes me as ironic that we were in a way mimicking the changing world around us: fields becoming towns, apartment complexes, etc. We were so engrossed in that project. It went on all summer, with no specific schedule, and no fighting or arguments either. Everyone worked on what they wanted, no one was a critic. It was creative and satisfying. It may have taught us how to collaborate and be cooperative, but I don’t know. The older I got, the less I liked working on projects with others. We played Statues, team tag, Red Rover, and Army. Army was the game where you turn off all the lights (indoors) and try to sneak around and find and “kill” the other soldiers before they found you. Outside, we played it in the dark. I don’t remember the adults being concerned about us being outside at night. We also played jacks, Chinese jump rope, regular jump rope (double Dutch) and we had jumping rhymes for both kinds. Do you remember the hand clapping? There were rhymes for those, too. I can recall how we all knew rude versions of TV ads (Comet, it makes you vomit …) and we’d sing them with gusto. How about the song “Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell,…” I heard a girl singing that song a few months ago, and was amazed that the words and tune were the same, and she evidently enjoyed it.
I know there’s a field of study, “kinder kultur,” that researches how children’s culture is transmitted from one generation of children to another, how it does or doesn’t change, etc. Lately I’ve been thinking darkly that electronic media have probably destroyed that culture, but no, a girl in my town knew the Lucy song. So, maybe things are not all lost. Kids are still kids.
Funny you brought up the Comet song — I was just remembering it the other day and wondering whether my niece would kill me if I taught it to her boys.
Was also wondering whether kids are still singing jumprope or clapping songs about Miss Sue from Alabama or Cinderella dressed in yellow, or are playing games like Red Rover or hide and seek.
We learned from older kids, and when they stopped playing we became the older kids who taught the younger ones. Now that people have play dates and so many electronics, I do wonder whether in some areas these games will die out altogether.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Thank you!