Mind games and other diversions

Walking out of a store this week, I noticed a display of hula hoops.

That's right. A circle of stiff hose in a variety of colors.

I guess it's because everything in our world is getting high-tech, but the hula hoops caught me by surprise.

When hula hoops first came out, every youngster had to have one. I had some friends who could keep three hula hoops going at the same time.

Me? I wasn't good with hula hoops. My body doesn't shimmy, and it takes a particular gyration to master a hula hoop.

Growing up on the farm on Killough Valley in the Ozarks over yonder, youngsters contrived their own amusement for the most part. I got a bicycle one Christmas, one with big, fat balloon tires and coaster brakes and white handle grips with holes in the end for attaching plastic tassels.

But most of the things we did for fun involved creating something on our own.

Everyone had a homemade sled with wood runners. One winter I decided to make a sled of my own. I found some lumber in the barn, and after a good deal of sawing and hammering, I had what passed for a sled.

One slight problem, however, was the fact that the lumber I had chosen was white oak, a dense wood that weighs about the same as granite. I quickly discovered that I couldn't go down any snowy hills, mainly because the sled was too heavy to pull up the hill.

One Christmas someone at Shady Nook School got a pair of brightly painted stilts. We all tried to walk on the stilts. In just a few days, most of the boys and some of the girls had fashioned their own version of stilts from hickory saplings, which several inches of a low branch serving as a footrest.

Hickory limbs were also popular in the early spring when the sap was rising. The bark could be slipped off a piece of hickory 4 or 5 inches long. With a notch and a slender passageway for air cut into the wood, the bark could be slipped back on, turning the limb into a whistle. If you kept your whistle in a glass of water, it would last for days.

Another popular do-it-yourself toy was made from large tin cans and baling wire. Tomato juice cans were the biggest and best. After punching a couple of nail holes near the top of the empty cans, you slipped a piece of baling wire through the cans and made the wires long enough to reach your hands when you stood on the cans. Holding the wires, you could walk on the top of the cans until the metal eventually crushed.

Almost any tin can could be used to play another game: kick the can. There were rules, but I don't remember what they were. But it was fun. Really, it was.

There were lots of games we played with balls besides softball and baseball. And there were lots of games we played with no props at all. Some had mysterious words. I still wonder how "ollie, ollie, come in free" got started.

Batteries? There were two in our house, and they were both in the flashlight.

It's not easy explaining to children and grandchildren the fun we had with an empty tin can, but even the most gadget-advantaged child still gets big eyes when you cut a branch from a tree and, after just a few minutes, start blowing on a hickory whistle.

The biggest part of playing when I was growing up was our imaginations. We could be anybody. We could do anything. We could be in the Old West. We could be in a castle surrounded by knights in armor. Sometimes we made our own armor, and it saved us from the spears and arrows of our attackers. Every time.

And our noble steeds were special too: They didn't eat.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.