Dad's childhood reminiscence typed here in its original form, date unknown ...
When I was coming up about 8 to 10, out in West Texas, in Childress, which was I'm sure the center of the dust bowl in the 20's and 30's, there was very little entertainment provided for small kids, so we improvised.
We used to get old tires from service stations and roll them around town. Up and down driveways and down the street chasing the tire and keeping rolling.
One of the good tricks of this was for a small kid to crawl up inside the tire and be rolled. It was probably as much of a thrill as a midway ride, and it was free.
My step-father was a cement man and he had a hand-cranked cement mixer sitting by the house he used when mixing and paving cement. It was always sitting there because he never did have any work. One of us would crawl inside and someone else would turn the crank. It was a good ride but only the smallest kids could get inside and only the bravest would do it.
Another thing, we used to get a small hoop about 8" or 10" diameter and two sticks, one about three feet and one about one foot. We would nail the short one across the end of the long one and roll the hoops all over town. Tight now I can't understand why we did that. It was so strenuous but we enjoyed it and did it for hours at a time. I'm sure that it was things like that that make me at my age walk for long periods of time without any fatigue.
Another of our improvised pastimes was jumping off of houses. We started out climbing up a tree or drainpipe to the eave of the house then dropping off. Next we would stand up and yip. Then we would take a few running steps and jump. Each new move that we did eliminated a few more kids. Then we moved to the top of the house and ran down and jumped. Very few would do this. Finally the only thing left was to start at the peak of one end and run caddy-corner down the opposite end and jump.
The way I remember it was that I was only one of two that would do this. Then the big boys who wouldn't do it all would come around and say: "Hey, you know what he'll do? Show 'em." And I would do it anytime I had an audience.
Then there was the smoking. My mother ran a grocery store. The big boys would urge me to lift a package of cigarettes from my mother's store. Which I would do. We would then go down to the town lake and sit under the cliffs and smoke. We dug a hole in the cliff and lined it with rocks to keep us a cache of cigarettes down there.
The big discussion was that if you smoked cigarettes you wouldn't grow. That bothered me so even though I furnished most of the cigarettes, I didn't smoke them.
One of the big deals about that time was picking cotton in the fall. That was the hardest, most dastardly, work ever imposed on man, but we had to do it at eight years old.
We would get up early on Saturday morning, way before sun up, and go out in the country to the cotton patches. You had a small sack made out of heavy cloth with a big strap to go over your shoulder. Then you drug the sack between the rows of cotton and picked on both sides.
First off, stooping over to pick, your back would start hurting. Then you would get down and walk on your knees and they would start hurting. Your shoulder would start hurting from the strap and you would shift to the other shoulder.
Your hands would get sore from picking at the cotton bolls. You would have a small pair of cloth gloves, but they would get holes in the fingers and then you would try to shift your fingers around in the gloves to keep them away from the holes.
I remember one day I chewed a lot of sugar cane and got diarrhea. I ran back and forth to the cane patch all day to go to the bathroom, then back to dragging that cotton sack. I was very young and that was really hard. Looking back on something like that, you can see that it really does put hair on your chest.
Lots of times when I picked cotton all day and they tallied up that night, I had made a dime. And Mr Priest, my step-father, got all the money to buy groceries.
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