Growing Up in Savonburg in the Sixties, Part 4

I've started a series of articles reminiscing about my childhood in a small Kansas town. If you missed them, you can read the earlier installments by clicking on the links at the end of the article. In this installment, I will tell you about how we entertained ourselves.

Cousins Come to Play

My Mom's brother's family would often come to visit my grandparents and we would get to spend time with our cousins. My cousin Steve was two years older than me and Dave was just a year older, so we played together a lot. My sister was the same age as our cousin Sharon. And the youngest two boy cousins were near the age of my younger brother and sister, so we all had playmates. We would play on the trolley swing and tree house and granddad's log cabin workshop.

On the fourth of July, we would shoot "cannons" that we made from short pieces of pipe, putting a firecracker in one end and sticking a crab apple or maybe a persimmon in the other end. We could shoot the projected fruit about 30 feet and had great fun trying to hit targets in the backyard. When it got dark, we would launch bottle rockets and often had to put out fires they started on the roofs of the garage or other outbuilding. But that just added to the thrill!

Sometimes, my grandparents would take all of us out to the "farm", a wooded acreage about four miles East of town, that they owned. We would go hiking in the woods or hunt squirrels in the trees. Sometimes, we would go to the spring and have a picnic. It was a great place to learn about nature; my grandparents or Mom would tell us the names of the various plants that we saw.

Our cousins also usually brought us some "hand-me-down" clothes and occasionally, some toys. The best, though, was one Christmas when my uncle brought us all used bikes to ride! One summer, my oldest sister and I stayed with our cousins for a week in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and we went to Robber's Cave, a nearby park. We were amazed that the dirt was mostly red!

Playing in Cat Creek

The creek that ran behind my grandparents' house also ran next to our house and we spent many hours playing in and near that creek, finding "crawdads", frogs, and other "playthings". The outdoors was our playground in those days and we spent most of our daylight time exploring nature and inventing "games" to play. We used "hedge" apples as baseballs, using thick branches to hit them as far as we could. Of course, they didn't last long, but the supply was endless.

Entertainment without Television

We didn't even have a TV, although we could watch it at our grandparents' house after school. We were frequent visitors to the local library and all developed a love of reading. I was also interesting in Boy Scouts, but there were no troops meeting nearby and so my brother and I kept the Boy Scout Handbook checked out of the library for months at a time. We taught ourselves how to tie all of the knots, used the Scout handshake, and recited the oaths.

Victrola Phonograph

I bought an old Victrola record player at a local auction for 50 cents. It included a number of records - the old thick "78s" that were played on these players. There is nothing electrical about a Victrola player; it amplifies the vibrations of the needle acoustically, channeling the sound up a hollow arm to the output "trumpet". The volume was regulated by opening or closing the doors in front of the box. The turntable was powered by a large mainspring mechanism that was kept wound up by periodic winding of the handle. There was a speed control that allowed the record "pitch" to be adjusted until it was pleasing. We got a lot of entertainment for 50 cents, but eventually the spring broke and we were without a record player until Mom bought a modern electric player, which played at four speeds: 16, 33, 45, and 78 rpm. In those days, most "singles" came on 7 inch 45 rpm records; albums were on 12 inch 33 rpm records. The other speeds were only infrequently used.

Old Upright Piano

We also had an old upright piano that the previous occupants had left. It was badly out of tune and the keys weren't in great shape. Mom found some of her old lesson books from piano lessons she had taken as a child and we were "turned loose" to do whatever we wanted on the piano. So, we tried to tune it a little and we learned Chopsticks and a few other simple melodies and three of us pretty much got tired of it. But my brother learned to play "by ear" and started what has been a lifelong career in music; he is currently a professional keyboard player in the Branson area, the music entertainment capital of the world.

To read the other installments in this series, click the following links:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7813060/growing_up_in_savonburg_in_the_sixties.html?cat=43

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7815314/growing_up_in_savonburg_in_the_sixties.html?cat=43

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7819548/growing_up_in_savonburg_in_the_sixties.html?cat=43