Games the Babcock Neighborhood Kids Played

Reading what John and Craig said they did kind of jogged my memory a bit. We, and I am going to name names in our “play group”, had some great times when we were kids. Hope you’re ready for this!

There was really a wad of us that used to get together: Stanley Prock, Jim Monk, Sylvia Ledbetter, Hal Dowden, John Tatum, Bud Cooper, Noonie Cooper, Tommy Apple, Bud Thompson, we four Babcock boys, Sonny Roberts, Gene and Annis Baucom, Lou Tatum, Reeder Jr. Thornton, and sometimes Betty Jo.(she wasn’t too much of a tomboy like the other girls were), Roger Webb, Teddy Ray and Nancy Livesay, Kay McCoy, Pat, Mary Lou and Bobbie Jo Westmoreland, Bill Hinds, Bob McCaslin. Now, this was not all of them, just the ones that come to this ol’ feeble mind at the present.

Now for what we did. We played real exciting games like “Pig in My Pen”, “Anty-over-pigtail”, and “kick the can”. This was probably one of the most favorite.

Some evenings we would get a fishing pole, tie a handkerchief to the end of it, get out by the streetlight, whip it around, and knock down “bats”. Sometimes we would toss small rocks up in the air. The bats would think it was a bug, chase it to the ground, and we would swat it with a tennis racquet.

Another favorite pastime (in season) was to sharpen a stick about 16 inches long, stick plums or persimmons on it, and sling them at each other. We also had a pretty good corral full of stick horses and we would ride until they were too tired to travel any further. Then we’d go and trade them for a fresh one.

In winter time, when it snowed, we would find anything that would carry us down the hills west of the house and “away we’d go”. We used a sled if we had one, but generally we used an old car hood or piece of sheet iron. It’s a wonder we didn’t get our heads cut off.

We strung string between two paper cups (no styro-foam back in those days) and made us a telephone, where we really, I’m sure, had some in depth conversations. The voices would carry over 100 feet, as long as nothing touched the string!

Inside games ??? I don’t ever remember any. Inside was for punishment, except for my brother Bob. He would sit inside and READ. How boring! He’d watch us out the window.

All this went on in the younger years. We ventured out of the neighborhood in later years and had an entirely new group. But I would NEVER tell what the “new group” did or got into. Those stories are for another place and another time.

Maybe someday YOU could get one of the above named playmates to explain some of the games we played in detail. At our class of ‘56 50^th reunion, we had so many of the group present that Stanley Prock came to me and asked “Where is the can? We have most of the old gang together, so lets get a game started.”

Oh, but for those memories.

Bill