Heber was a town where we had to think up our own entertainment. There was not a single TV in the town. Most people had radio’s but they did not provide a lot of entertainment to a growing boy. We had to find ways to entertain ourselves in other ways and we did pretty well. Since it was such a small town, if one kid thought up something to do, every kid in town was soon doing the same thing. We almost seemed to have seasons for various activities. There was a marble season, a jacks season, a stilts season, a track season, a beanie flipper season, a top season, a pogo stick season, a baseball season, a basketball season, a hunting season, a ROOK season, a pole vaulting season, a CLUE season, a MONOPOLY season, a cops and robbers season and so forth. I am sure there were others I don’t remember. I will try to explain some of these just in case you don’t know what they mean.
Playing marbles was a game kids learned very early in life. Marbles were inexpensive and almost everyone could own some. If you didn’t have money to buy some, someone was always willing to share some with you. I had a drawer in the desk in the bedroom that had the bottom covered with marbles of different types. I had cat eyes, clearies, steelies, and multi-colored ones. I also had different sizes from pee-wee’s to giant ones. We played several different marble games. Probably the most popular was “holes”. It was played by digging four holes in an L-pattern. Three holes for the long arm and one hole at the end of the short arm. There was a line about six to eight inches long in front of the first hole. We determined who went first by lagging. Lagging was done by lining up everyone wanting to play, about six feet away from the line and then tossing our marbles to try to hit the line. The one whose marble came closest to the line got to go first. The players had to shoot their marbles into the holes in order and then return in reverse order to the first hole. The person then shot their marble to the offset hole. When a person got there, his marble was poison. If he hit anyone’s marble after that, that person was dead and out of the game.
I also played “rings” where we drew a ring and put marbles in the center and tried to knock them out of the ring. Sometimes we played “keeps” where any marble you knocked out of the ring you got to keep. Everyone put the same number of marbles in the center of the ring and everyone had a chance to knock out their opponents marbles and keep them. I learned pretty quickly to play with people who were about as good as me so everyone got about the same number of marbles. Most people had a favorite marble they used most of the time. It was called the “taw”. Some people would chip it a little to make it rough so that they could get a better grip on it when shooting. A good taw was very important. Most people would trade several marbles to get their taw back if they lost it in a game somehow.
We usually played jacks during school because it was a “girls game” and we played it with the girls at recess. I got to where I could hold my own but I was never as good as the girls.
We walked on stilts at irregular times. When that fad hit, everyone either found their old pair or built a new pair of stilts. We walked all over town with them. It was especially fun to walk on them when the creek was running. We would try to walk across without falling off and getting wet. Sometimes we would walk on them when the snow was several inches deep so that we were above the snow.
Track season usually came in the spring when the schools began doing track. We actually dug a jumping pit in our yard and filled it with sawdust so that we could practice high jumping and pole vaulting. We also did long jumping. We would often have quite a few of the kids in town at our house to play in the jumping pit. In those days the jumping pits were filled with sawdust rather than having the large pads they have today.
Beanie Flipper season usually came in the summer when we had lots of spare time. Everyone knew how to build a beanie flipper and most people had several. We would roam around town or in the hills shooting small rocks at whatever target we selected. I got to be pretty good at hitting what I was shooting at. Most beanie flippers were made out of a small wooden branch that formed a “Y” but I also made some out of coat hangers and rubber bands.
Once in a while someone would get a new top for their birthday and we would have “top season” for a while. It amounted to spinning the top so that it knocked other tops out of the circle. It was like marbles but played with a top. I never was great at throwing a top but I was pretty good at jumping on a pogo stick. Several of us had them and we would see who could jump the longest. I used to enjoy jumping on a pogo stick on the front porch or the rock house or down the sidewalk to the gate and back. Some people didn’t have large porches with a concrete floor so our porch was a good place for jumping on a pogo stick if you didn’t jump too high.
Another season that usually followed “track season” was pole vaulting season. We would all make long pole vaulting sticks and run around town vaulting over things like fences, bushes and ditches. I got pretty good at jumping over things for fun but none of us were ever able to jump very high because the longest poles available were probably only ten to twelve feet long. We got the poles from the sawmill. They were 1″x 1″’s and they broke if they got too long.
The seasons for board and card games were usually in the winter time. Our family had a pretty good assortment of table games and we had several card tables so our house was the center for those sessions most of the time. I never did care much for MONOPOLY but I played the others. We always seemed to had some activity going on at our house and a lot of our friends ended up at our house to play with us. During the regular sports seasons we played sports with everyone else but at other times, we did a variety of activities and had a lot of fun on our own or with friends.