Imagination - Playing Army!

I read a blog post recently where the author was commenting about how kids today had so much electonic stimulation of what isn't real that "...they are forced to imagine what reality actually is".  That's a really powerful and rather thought provoking concept.  Like most of you, I grew up playing with the neighborhood kids and we all actively employed our imagination in almost all of our play times.  And I am thankful that we had that in our lives.

I grew up in North Seattle and lived near the Puget Sound.  Some of the best times we had as kids were when we went down to the big park by the water and played army.  It’s a lot more developed now, but when we were kids it was a mainly a huge hillside of sand and Scotch broom bushes.  You can check it out here:

http://www.yelp.com/map/richmond-beach-saltwater-park-shoreline

…here's a view in google maps that shows it pretty well.

I remember that we would literally spend hours there playing war.  Even though there was only half a dozen of us, we would scamper up and down the hills – hiding in scotch broom outcroppings, behind old rusted out cars, sidling up to the few lone trees – and taking every chance we could to “kill” each other.  In our minds eye, we were all Vic Morrow on the TV show Combat! – taking out all the ‘krouts and Japs – not very PC today, but definitely the verbiage of our generation.

Mind you, we didn’t have fancy electronic guns that would make shooting noises for us.  No – that was all up to us – and the kid who could make the best “pekuuu” (single shot)… or “pphthththth” (machine gun) sound was cooler than everyone, even if he did get killed.  And some of the coolest guns we had were those that we hand made out of old broom handles, hunks of 2x2 and a mass of black electrical or duct tape.

I drove through our "battleground" last time I visited my family - it’s now full of nature trails, BBQ’s and playground platforms, and lots of amenities for the family.  I’ll never forget that in my youth, it was a hillside full of imagination of intense warfare in a Wolrd War 2 setting, and made for endless hours of awesome memories.

Halloween

(well - better later than never...)

So - As I was reminiscing about what this holiday was like back in the '70s, there were a couple of things that I remembered so vividly.

The first was making Halloween drawings and cutouts.  Piles of orange and black construction paper and our imagination.  Witches, ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, old dead trees, tombstones, bats, etc.  We would spend hours making all of these things.  We would decorate the windows and the walls and anything else mom would let us tape to.

The other things was candy.  My brother, cousin and I would go out together and we would draw out maps of our neighborhood and plan our routes.  We would start as early as we could and stay out a late as possible for maximum candy!

One other thing - a friend of mine and I made a little haunted house.  Our big thing was wet pieces of string hanging down that felt like sticky cobwebs.

It was fun - I hope kids still have as much fun today doing handmade stuff as we did back in the day!

March of Dimes Walk-a-Lot

Does anyone else remember when in the ‘70s we had the Walk-A-Lot in Seattle? Was this only in Seattle? Did everyone else do them all over the country?


Sponsored by the March of Dimes – a group that provides support for the families of infants who need to be in an NICU in the hospital – this was an opportunity to put your foot where your mouth was. It was a pretty basic set up. You’d start by getting all of the paperwork from a March of Dimes representative – my Mom was a rep which made it easy for us to get everything we needed. The Sponsor Form was a sign-up sheet for people to sign up and sponsor you a certain amount per mile. So – you’d make the rounds and get all your neighbors and relatives to sponsor you. Your Mom and Dad may even take your form to work where they might try to coerce their office mates to sponsor you, too. It was held in the summer. So you didn’t have the chance to take it to school – which was good if you were too scared to ask your friends or teachers.

The Walk-A-Lot was a 20 mile route that started and ended at the Seattle Center. There were a bunch of tables set up by the flag pavilion and you checked in there and started walking the route. There were check points every few miles where you got your sheet stamped to verify your progress. For you Seattleites, the route went from the Center over to Eastlake, under the freeway and then north on 15th NE as far as 130th. We then headed west across the freeway, over Aurora, down Greenwood and ended up on 15th NW, shot along Elliott Avenue and up Denny Way to the Seattle Center.

It was a lot of fun. It was an opportunity to do something good and participate in something much bigger than ourselves. We always kidded about how hard it was when we started, but by the end, we were pretty wiped out. We did it for quite a few years, and every time we were glad that we had done it, and it was for a worthy cause.

Old Fashioned Fishing

I grew up in a family that loved the outdoors. We camped, we hiked, we went to the beach, the mountains, a local lake… anyplace that we could enjoy the great outdoors.

We spent a lot of our weekends hiking and fishing. There are a lot of things that we did a bit differently back then. To begin with, we didn’t have the latest and greatest in fishing tackle and gear. Our rods were made up of two or three sections and when they weren’t assembled, we held them together with rubber bands, not in handy little plastic protective cases. This also meant that they weren’t necessarily all together when we grabbed them. More than once, it made for a bit of last minute scrambling. Our reels usually required a few minutes of attention to get the tangles out and everything set up. We put weights on our lines using our teeth and tied hooks with clumsy knots.

Why in the world would we pay for something we can get for free? That was the philosophy of my dad and uncle, and meant that me, my brother and cousin were out in the yard at night after having the sprinkler on all evening so that we could get night crawlers. It was a fun job for a kid, and did teach us that we could provide for ourselves… we didn’t always have to pay for things you could put forth effort to acquire.

We drove to trailheads late at night and slept in our cars with nothing more than a blanket and a wadded up coat for a pillow and leaning on each other.
Up at the crack of dawn, we did not eat some fancy nature trail bar thingy or drink a high energy drink. It was coffee from the thermos and maybe an apple or a candy bar… just something to get us going. We’d hike through dew soaked meadows and fight off mosquitoes the old-fashioned way – we’d SWAT ‘em. We’d spend the day fishing and would almost always come home with a mess of fresh mountain-lake fish. Limits were like 8 or 12 per person, so 5 or 6 of us would get quite a haul.

I don’t know – do kids still do these things today? It seemed like all my friends growing up fished, hunted, or did something outdoors most every weekend. It’s something the kids of today need to experience for themselves, and, NO, swinging around a Wii does not an outdoor experience make!