The rock house was often the center of activity for the boys in Heber, especially the boys the ages of me and my brothers. I think there may have been several reasons for that but at least one of them was that we seemed to always have ideas about things to do. I think Mom also encouraged us to stay at home and do things rather than wandering around town getting into trouble. She could keep an eye on what we and our friends were doing if we were around the house because invariably we would need some supplies that were in the house and she could ask us what we were doing.
I can remember one time when we all decided to make “beanie flippers” out of clothes hangers and rubber bands. We had a supply of the required materials at our house so a lot of the kids in town came to our house to make their “beanie flippers”. Everyone knows that a beanie flipper is of no use unless it is shooting beans or rocks and we did plenty of that after they were made.
On one particular day, Brother Petersen from Snowflake who was on the High Council with Dad was working on the little house across the road from the rock house. He was remodeling it and painting it inside as I recall. Anyway, I don’t remember exactly what happened, but apparently one of the beans or rocks someone shot with their beanie flipper either hit him or near him or hit one of the windows in the house he was working on. Anyway, he came out and he was not very happy. We were just playing around in the yard having fun and didn’t pay any attention to him coming over to our house. He went in to talk to Mom.
As Mom describes the visit he came in and complained about someone shooting a rock or bean toward the house where he was working. Mom told him it was just a bunch of kids having fun and assured him she would talk to us about it. His response was “Sister Porter, do you have any idea how many boys are playing in your yard? You don’t have a bunch of kids, you have a mob!!” Mom said she went outside and counted and there were about twenty boys playing together. I think that happened many times. Vard had a bunch of friends, Terry had several also and I had a pretty good sized group of friends so if they all ended up at our house, it was a pretty big bunch of kids. I don’t ever remember us getting carried away and becoming a mob but we could probably never convince Brother Petersen of that fact.
Because there were so many kids, we could play lots of different games as teams. We played not only sports like football and baseball, we also played army, cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers and many other games where we needed teams. One of our favorite games was to put one team on the porch and another team scattered elsewhere around the yard and buildings, and then let the battle begin. The team won that had the last man alive. We killed a lot of people and used up a lot of ammunition in those games. I guess one of the advantages of a small town is that everyone knows everyone else so playing together was very natural. I don’t remember the older kids not wanting to include us younger kids in the teams although there were probably times like that. I do know they included us most of the time and we had lots of fun playing different games or building different things at our house. I think my Mom was pretty wise. With us close at hand, she could monitor not only the games but the way we played together, the language used and other things. She did it without our being any the wiser.