Games We Played at Home
Mad Dog!
We loved to play. Usually we made up our own rules to the games we played, often making them up as they went along. “Play like…” was a good way to make an addition to what we were doing. Play like Jim’s the daddy and Peggy is the mommy (or the little girl) and Bobby and I are the little kids (or uncles, or strangers, etc.)
One of our favorite games was “mad dog.” In this game we’d lay all the kitchen chairs on their sides, along with any other boxes or little furniture available, including a black box with a lid on it that Dad used to develop pictures. These were walls, doorways, etc. Someone would be “IT.” The object of the game was for the rest of us to get across the room without the mad dog touching us. If we were touched, we became “it” and the former mad dog was just another player. We played this game by the hour,–screaming from “fear”, laughing a lot and we were very loud. Somehow Mother tolerated this game for long periods of time. It was one of the best games we could play when the weather was cold and rainy outside.
Pirates!
A game we played was to be pirates. We fought with stick “swords”, swinging and clacking away. Sometimes we would pretend to stab another, who then fell down and died. As soon as he was down, he “came back” as “another man” and began to fight again. A cat may have nine lives, but our lives were without number, but always as another person. The same rule applied when we played cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians .
As pirates, we had lots of jewels and money. The money was almost real. Bobby and Jim made it from rolls of receipt tape. They made hundreds of dollar bills of various denominations.
During the summer Jim and Bobby both caught the chicken pox and mumps (or measles and mumps) at the same time. They were very sick, and had to stay in bed. They were miserable. I did not get sick. Somehow, I was required by my sick brothers to go out one rainy day and dig up a lot of the dollar bills we pirates had buried in a “treasure chest” the back yard. I guess my retrieving that treasure was some comfort to my brothers-in-need.