Tipper and Paul
Yes I’ve made Toad Frog houses in wet sand. Lots of fun till a horse drawn wagon came along and crushed it. Made moss beds in laurel thicket. Tied twine to a June bug leg. Called up doodle bugs. Played steal the bacon. Made poplar leaf drinking cups. Chewed rabbit tobacco. Ate green apples. Threw spit balls. Drunk from a long handled gourd at a spring. Hunted pollywogs (?) in a branch. Threw rocks at a hornet nest. Walked a foot log with no rails. Walked a swinging bridge. Used a sling shot. Stepped in chicken manure!! Cracked rotten eggs- UGH!! Made pig pens from split stove wood. Roamed free as the wind on mountain trails with cousins. Chewed birch bark. Chewed ground birch. Made a black gum toothbrush. Climbed grape vines. Rode a home made sled down a slick ridge trail. Jumped over a fence gap. Crawled between barbed wire strands. Picked buckets of wild blackberries. Traced a mountain branch to river.
Ah, sweet memories. No bought toys to speak of. Great childhood.
—Gaye Blaine
I so enjoyed hearing Gaye’s childhood memories. I can’t say I did all of them, but I’m thankful I got to experience at least a few of them. When Paul and I were little it seemed summer stretched endlessly before us with every day bringing new adventures our way.
Last night’s video: Making a Garden in Appalachia – August Garden Tour 2022.
Subscribe for FREE and get a daily dose of Appalachia in your inbox
Summer just seemed so loooonnnngggg, “back then”, didn’t it? Now I’m facing the middle of August and haven’t hardly had an ounce of fun. When we were kids, we’d go on long walks with our mom. A favorite activity was to play house outside with our dolls and if any other kids could come over we’d play stick ball. It isn’t a neighborhood, per se, as its country & we lived on a farm. We are surrounded by pasture, hay lots, etc… and most of the neighbors were my grandad’s brothers & their adult kids. But we made do with school friends who would come for sleepovers. We made mud pies, and played in the rain. One thing we loved to do was set up an old trike over the top of a mud puddle & peddle as fast as we could to make a rooster tail of mud water shoot out from behind the back tire. (my kids liked to do it too & it usually involved a bath afterward). We’d help round up the cows out of the back pasture where there was a creek. They liked to hang down there & not come up to get milked on real hot, sweltering days. We’d have to walk down back & drive them up to the barn. We would catch lightning bugs & I remember one time my parents woke us up to play hide & seek in the dark. They weren’t too adventurous of folk, so I’m not sure where that impulse came from, but its clear as day to me that we did it. My favorite thing to do, during summer was to lay around reading. I wasn’t much of an outdoor kid & had to be sentenced to go outside (even though we did do fun things out there). I still read more in the summer, than the winter. But during the summer we got to go to the public library much more often. The school library stunk & my mom didn’t drive in our harsh winters much. So summer was library time. All 4 kids & my parents would usually check out the max allowance & we’d go home with stacks!!!!! All six of us are voracious readers & luckily, I have passed that on to my kids. They also love summer for reading and the library is the hot spot for us to be!
That was such a cute picture of you and Paul. I’m guessing he was a big Davy Crockett fan. I have heard of some of those games, but not all of them.
One wonderful memory I have as a kid growing up in a quiet small town was watching a neighbor build a Model T Ford from nothing but a metal frame. This gentleman drove trucks for work. I guess as he found parts he slowly put this car together by the curb in front of his house. It took several years but us kids would sit on the sidewalk across the street and watched him build it part by part. His son was a couple of years younger than me. I still remember seeing father and son stopping at the stop sign in front of my house in what looked like a brand new car when he finally finished and took it out for a drive.
My childhood was a lot like Cheryl Miller Brown described in her post. The only difference was I grew up starting in the 60s, even though I was born in 59. Most all the kids ate at our house because my mom was the one that cooked all the time. She never sent a child home when it was time to eat, unless they didn’t like what we were having to eat, which wasn’t very often. We played all the games Cheryl mentioned in her post and I remember playing all those games and even putting old maid cards on my bike wheels to make that flipping sound. I did a few things Gaye mentioned, but I’d have to say mine was a lot more like Cheryl’s post.
Tipper, the picture of you and Paul is adorable! Time sure has flown by from when we all were young kids. Thankful I have good memories. Oh there were bad ones too, but I’d rather focus on the good ones. They make me smile!
I’ve done all those things and more. North Carolina was a great place for a ‘country boy’ to grow up!
My childhood memories in the 50’s in Mississippi consisted of mud pies, making play houses, catching lightning bugs & being able to play all over the neighborhood without fear of someone abducting you. We played Kicked the Can, Simon Says. Chase, Red Light & Dodge Ball. Which ever house we were playing around at lunch time, that Mom would feed all of us & didn’t hesitate to discipline us if needed. I remember putting Old Maid Cards on the spokes of my bicycle (attached with clothes pins) to make that cool sound as I peddled down the street. Mom would give us a bowl with washing detergent, cake color, and an egg beater & we would make beautiful rainbow color bubbles. Of course I remember the ice cream man coming around when ice cream was 5 cents. I loved to ride my bike to the neighborhood stores to get candy, turn in my collected coke bottles & listened to the old folks taught. One particular trip to the neighborhood store was not a pleasant one & I still remember it so vividly. We were having guests for supper & Mom didn’t have enough corn meal to make the cornbread. She had poured all the meal she had in her usual green bowl & had poured buttermilk in when she realized she was short of corn meal. She sent me to the store to get more meal. I rode my bike to the store & watched the man scoop meal out of a bin & hand me the brown paper bag. I headed home but quickly realized I couldn’t hold the meal & the change he had given me & ride my bike. So, in my childish wisdom, I threw the coins in the sack of meal. Mom quickly grabbed the sack from me & dumped it all into her bowl. While we were eating supper, one of our guest bit down on a coin & broke his tooth. My heart dropped to my feet because I remembered I had thrown the coins in the bag of meal. Boy, did I get a flogging & for a year or two, my dad, sister & brother would say, “Are we sure there are no coins in the cornbread tonight?” They rubbed it in a long time. Dad had to pay for the man’s broken tooth to be repaired. My little 4 year old brother would throw our little neighbor girl’s flip flops on top of our house every time she came over to play. By the end of the Summer, I bet there were half a dozen pairs on top of our house. I never understood why my brother never got in trouble for that.
I’m blessed to have had a wonderful childhood growing up in the country doing all the things that were so simple but yet so much fun. Riding bikes, playing in the ditch water, mud pies, climbing trees, swinging on a tire, hopscotch, getting to go to the country store and get penny candy and a pack of peanuts and pouring them in my Coke or Pepsi. Sweet, sweet memories.
Proud to say I did most of them plus some. That is what you did in the mountains before they made so many cheap plastic toys. We did have a real sled. Childhood was unique in that if a toy was purchased and we did not play with it, it would be repainted and gifted to another child. The sled disappeared after a couple of winters when it sat against the wall of the basement. I had my bicycle until I broke the sprocket chain…rode it daily except in the winter. My favorite toy was a pair of homemade stilts.
I don’t know what “toad frog houses” are, I never played “steal the bacon”. I don’t know what ground birch is. I did eat wintergreen berries and chew the leaves. I never chewed rabbit tobacco but I’ve smoked it. If polliwogs and tadpoles are the same thing, I caught them and kept them in a mason jar until they turned into frogs. I didn’t drink from poplar leaves I used grape leaves or laid down on my belly and drank directly from the stream. The rest I did and many more.
Sadly, I don’t have a whole lot of happy childhood memories. When you come from a broken home, it just trickles down from each generation. I guess that’s why I love your videos so much’ They take me to my happy place.
Sandy-I’m so sorry you had to go through that!! Glad you enjoy our videos 🙂
I think Mr. Havilah Babcock (I may have misspelled his name) wrote in one of his books that it should be a law that every boy should have his own creek and be raised in the country. This could also apply to a lot of girls. By the way, he and Mr. Dave Henderson are two of my favorite book authors. Their books have many stories about bird hunting- bobwhite quail. Bird hunting along with rabbit hunting was the joy of my hunting life. I mean wild quail, not these pen raised birds on shooting preserves.
I have a funny memory.
We had left West Virginia in 1950’s. My momma did not want her boys working in the coal mines like my Daddy did. So we had left the Appalachian Mts, but they never left us!!
Every other fall we would go to West Virginia from California for a month. We would stay with our family. My Uncle Jack had a huge farm out in a place called Dutch Ridge. So we would go out there, so my Dad could go squirrel hunting. And I was the oldest girl so it was my job to fry up the squirrel and make biscuits. That was always good eating. We were picking apples one day on the farm,, and I spotted a huge hornets nest, it was freezing cold so it was dormant. So I asked my Uncle if I could have it. So he put it in a brown poke. And yes I took it to Calif. to show my science teacher, I never imagined he would want to cut it open and dissect it. Now as you can imagine that hornets nest was no longer in cold WV, but in WARM Calif. I said to my teacher as he began to cut into the nest, I don’t believe that’s a good idea. And the teachers said. Oh it will be exciting for the kids to see inside the nest…. So he cut it open, and needless to say kids were climbing over each other to get out of that classroom. I remember boys jumping out the windows. Those hornets were every where. And I remember when I went home and told my Daddy what the teacher had done. He said “ well my Lord, how in the world could someone with a University degree be so ignorant as to cut open a hornets nest”. And that was 57 years ago and I still chuckle as I remember that nest coming alive in that classroom.
Janet-that is so funny! Thank you for sharing it 🙂
How can I get your “previous night’s video”
OP-Hope you are well! You can always click on the words in color after Last night’s video to watch it. Here’s the direct link to make it easy though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke5B9Mt0qaM
Gaye’s childhood memories are a lot like mine. We didn’t have store-bought toys, we made our own. It still amazes me how we escaped broken bones while swinging on grapevines, jumping sky-high on jump boards, and riding a homemade sled straight down a mountain in eastern KY. As we headed out to play with our cousins, the only warning I remember getting from mom was to watch out for snakes.
As kids we always headed to the tiny branch down the hill from our house to play. We always built a dam to make a large pool to catch tadpoles. We’d collect rocks, slip and fall down in the mud, and come home so filthy that we weren’t allowed in the house until we were hosed down thoroughly.
After the hose down, shoes and outer garments were left at the back door on the metal chair and we’d pad through the house, leaving wet footprints on the linoleum. In the bathroom the Lava soap came out and it left our skin red-sore.
Then the next day we would gleefully do it all over again down at the branch.
Wish I understood the mystery of the different speeds of time between childhood and adulthood. I believe we all know it is there. But just exactly why escapes us. I don’t really think is the amount of activity. Children are busy little bees to, jumping from one thing to another all day long. I’m even doubtful that it is the kind of activity, such as adult “real work” I suspect it is more than anything about how we think. Children’s thoughts are much more in and of the present. Adults pack the present with memories of yesterday, plans for today and the worries of tomorrow. It is, I believe, a rare thing for an adult to just be completely in the present time. Even if we think it would be a good thing, we don’t know how to get there or stay there if we do.
Anyway, that’s my musings.
Whatever the difference is, we recall childhood as a happier time. And there is a thread of wanting to get back to the secret of that. Maybe, in an indirect way, that is a reason many of us like to have “artifacts” from our childhood around us; the wish and hope they will transport us back to that fondly-remembered state. It seems we had a secret then that we were not old enough to know but now that we are old enough we can’t have it.
I know. My mind works differently than most folks. As JC posted the other day, “That’s just me.”
So well expressed, Ron! Thanks for the post.
I have done some of these things. Three things I enjoyed the most was playing in a creek and fishing for the minnows or horny heads as we called them and playing with a baseball with my best friend. A lot of my early childhood was spent spending every minute I could with my granddaddy. I was blessed to live beside of my maternal grandparents A few of of the things I did with him was being with him while he plowed his mule Kate, walking a foot log across the above mention creek, cupping our hands to drink water from this creek and walking through the woods in the fall of the year looking for lightened knots.
I mentioned his mule, Kate, the other day in the blog about dinner bells. Kate had been badly abused before grandaddy got her and won her trust. I think she loved him as much a he did her. He cried when she died.
I didn’t grow up in the country.
I had a wonderful childhood though.
Sitting under a big weeping willow and no one could see us. Catching horny toads. We would paint a nail each time we caught one so we would know if we had caught it before. Going to the convenience store, with a dollar, getting a coke a whole bag of candy and a comic book and still get change back!
Climbing in the fruitless mulberry tree and eating the candy and reading the comic book.
Walking the whole neighborhood on the cinder block fences! And no one hollering at us for doing this, because in those days we didn’t create mischief. No vandalizing, stealing our things like that.
Coming in when the street lights came on.
Not a care in the world! I miss those days!
It makes me so sad that my grandchildren and now my great grandchildren didn’t get to experience that “freedom”. And funny thing, we thought we were without adult supervision, but every single Mom in the neighborhood had eyes on us!
Sure do miss those days!
I’m with Miss Cindy. I loved creeks and what they could teach me, and that curiosity about all things aquatic carried over into adulthood. I became a scuba diver as part of my job with a lake and stream survey team. A whole new world exists under water: new plants, new animals, ancient artifacts, discarded objects, you name it. That aside, my first “toys” as a toddler were box turtles. I would love it when one of my terrapins was fearless and extra active. Some wouldn’t come out to play at all.
Gaye Blaine surely did a lot as a child! Today kids sit like bumps on logs for lack of interest in anything to do. It’s so sad I think. Back in the day from the time a kid woke up til they went to bed, there was always something to think up to do. I sat in mommy’s umbrellas opened up in the house thinking maybe I could fly. The second one was cause I put my baby sister up to getting in one. All I know is she sure was mad! I never did fly without Boeing… lol
I am so blessed to have had a wonderful childhood doing many of the things Gaye described. And time seemed to stand still back then. I love reading your blog each morning and reading the books you recommend.
Goodness, what memories. Summer in the south is for sure different above the Mason Dixon line. Blue Ridge, Ga does have 4 seasons and I so enjoyed every one of them, other than the snow…I don’t do driving in the snow, especially living up a mountain, sliding…not fun. Some of the things you and Paul did are some of the same ones for me. Time to go inside was when it got to dark to see, no street lights in the county. Playing stickball, hide and seek, red rover and just about anything when neighbor friends showed up. Gosh, what the kids of today are missing. Thanks for reminding me what it really is to grow up in America and love the olden days.
I remember my childhood I played many of those things listed by Gaye but my favorite think was the creek. I loved the water, I loved everything about it. I loved being near the creek and listening to it talk. I loved being in the creek and collecting rocks. I loved sitting by the creek and feeling the rhythm if the flowing water. I loved trying to catch all the little critters in and around the creek. The running water was just so very soothing.
I definately enjoyed summer. There were 3 girls in the neighborhood we climbed trees,caught frogs and tadpoles, played in the sprinklers, tried to catch doodle bugs.
Ee tried to catch lightening bugs too, but were never very good at it. It was a carefree time. Loved the post it brought back many memories
Sheryl, what you missed was that weird smell that lightning bugs left on your hands. 🙂
I did all those things except play steal the bacon, I am not familiar with that. When I would call up doodlebugs I would say “Doodlebug, doodlebug come out, come out your house is on fire” while moving a small twig around in the hole. They would always come out! Those were simple, fun things to do. I sure enjoyed doing them. Dennis Morgan
I enjoyed Gaye Blaine’s post! Like you and Paul, summer seemed endless when I was growing up. Sometimes I wonder if it did for me because there really are no huge season changes in El Cajon (San Diego County) where I grew up. Many years it can start being in the 90s beginning in late March, early April, and stay just as hot until the first of December. I remember many Christmas days roller skating in shorts after our big Christmas dinner. When I moved to Iowa, I discovered four distinct seasons, and I loved it. Here in North Carolina, the seasons are not as individually intense as in Iowa, but definitely different than the previous season. So I wonder if, as an adult, since I notice those seasonal changes more, I wonder if that is what makes summer seem shorter to me than when I was a kid. Or maybe it is because I have so many responsibilities now that fill my days making them appear to whiz by, and as a kid the only thing I had to worry about everyday was making sure my toys were put away by the end of the day.
Donna. : )
Loved your story I remember do most all of those things I cherish all of themy I wish children today could have memories of there childhood that we have.So sad.