Life Without Computers and The Like -- Chapter Two

Dear Grandchildren,

Last time I talked about life as I first remember it. The home where my immediate family lived had more

My Mom and Brother Brian

modern conveniences than our grandmother's and grandfather's house. I recall moving into our home on "the main road" (US 1) in Littleton. It is unclear where we moved from, but it was definitely exciting to be in our new house.

The house had been purchased by my parents and moved about 1/2 mile to the small farm they bought from Grammie Ruth's Aunt Lillian and Uncle Howard Graham. The house sat on blocks at first across the driveway from a rock foundation where the farm house was before it burned. I am not sure just how long we lived in our house on blocks, but it was for a few years.

We had electricity, but no running water. Having electricity meant we had lights in all the rooms, a refrigerator for keeping our perishable food supply, an electric washing machine for agitating and cleaning clothing and a power-driven wringer for getting the excess water out of the laundered items. There were lights in the barn where we had varying numbers of cows, calves, pigs, chickens, and turkeys, so no oil lanterns were needed in our barn! Near the house was our water well with a hand pump. On the other side of the barn was our outhouse -- a two-seater. And, yes, there was a Sears catalog there!

At night and on cold days we listened to the radio. There was music and news, yes. But the thing we liked the most was to listen to the stories. We gathered around the livingroom and waited for one of the adults to tune in the radio. It made strange sounds until the dial was set just right and then it was ALL ears! One program was "Dragnet" with Officer Joe Friday. He always caught the bad men. Then there was Boston Blackie. I don't remember what show he was on. We listened to the "Inner Sanctum". I don't remember much about the stories, but I remember the creaking door that sent chills up my spine. I think there were monsters -- scary, but funny to some. We liked Abbot and Costello -- so funny, always! And there were more. Some of those shows made it to TV a few years later.

We liked to be out-of-doors more than anything. Some of the games we played would not be politically correct today. We played "Cops and Robbers" and "Cowboys and Indians". Those were games that were maybe a take-off on the game of "Tag". Basically we chased each other around pretending to be shooting each other. Boy, would that get us into trouble in the 21st century. We played things like "Kick The Can", "Hide and Seek", "Frozen Tag", and "Alley Over". The only need for real sporting equipment for that kind of game was a ball for "Alley Over".  That was a great game at school, too.

We had clubs with rules. And sometimes children got into trouble with parents or grandparents for making a girl ONLY club or a "No Girls Allowed" play house. Saw horses, planks, tires, just about anything became construction material for our creations! Oh, yes -- we had to put things away, but we turned that into fun, too.

Of course, we played baseball and soft ball in the pasture; we played croquet; and we liked to play horse shoes, too. We loved to play "house" and that was really a role play game. It was fun being the baby and bawling like one. The girls liked to make "Mud Pies" -- it was just stirring up dirt and water and putting it into our tiny cake pans or some other substitute. Sometimes we would decorate them with wild flowers. Grammie Muriel was famous for letting us go to the hen house to gather a few eggs to stir into our mud concoctions. (She rarely said "no" to us but when she did, she meant it!)

What about rainy days? OH, they were great fun. We put our swim suits on during down-pours and played in the mud puddles. On really hot days, we made shelters under the trees and then begged for crackers and milk or some other goody so we could sit in the shade and have a picnic. Another favorite was to get a banana, climb up into a tree, sit on a branch and pretend to be monkeys eating our fruit.

We liked to climb up on a tractor and pretend to drive it. And we loved to go out and pet the cows. Sometimes we even laid on the grass and rested our heads on a nice, warm cow who was placidly chewing her cud. The hay mows were awesome places to play and hide -- and so were the bins of oats being stored for the hens and pigs.

 Every yard had a sand/gravel pile and we used to make awesome roads with the toy graders and run the dump trucks over them to pick up loads of gravel to create new landscapes to go with our network of roads.

So what about life without computers and TV?  Somehow I think childhood was a lot richer in certain ways. Our great and delicious fun knew no bounds except the limits of our own creativity and the inability of  the adults to always see why we needed to do this or have that!

To be continued. . .