The games we played

Craig had a question one day last week – his topic of the day – and it involved “what did you do for fun as a kid?”

Well, since we didn’t have a lot of money as kids, we improvised. A group of guys, or kids, I ran around with quite a bit: Jim Patterson, Ed Stinson, Jerry Jack Stewart, among others, played a little baseball game every so often. Every day during the summer, practically.

We all gathered at Jim Patterson’s house, probably much to Jim’s mother chagrin. Maybe it wasn’t that bad, because she always knew where her sons were. There were very few times when she failed to bake cookies or had something as treats for a hungry gang of boys.

Yep, we all had fun at Jim’s house. One might think we gained weight with all the cookies, but as kids we burned off all the excess calories. We listened to records, ate snacks and played our games, by golly.

Jim had a little home-made plywood game board, maybe 2 feet by 3 1/2 feet, and we played our version of baseball.

It had a small nail in a “bat,” which would revolve. One guy would roll a marble and the other guy would twirl the bat. The board had nails at strategic places and holes for the marble to go in.

Sort of a poor man’s version of pin ball, if you will. Each hole was “designated” as a hit -- single, double, triple or home run -- or an out.

I was always the Yankees, naturally. Jim was the Giants, Ed the Orioles, etc.

Whomever was on offense kept the scorebook. That way, we could keep up with each player’s averages. We knew the lineups of our favorite team.

I always had Mantle and Maris, etc. Jim always had Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, etc. We had enough guys to represent each team in the American and National Leagues.

We even posted the individual stats, to keep up with leaders.

Of course, we kept up with the win-loss records, and eventually had a World Series between the winners of each league.

Joe Babcock made a board for me. He could build almost anything in his dad’s Hobby Shop.

It was a good-sized board, so it was known as Yankee Stadium. It had a small piece of tin around it for a fence. Really, it was so large, I kept it in my bedroom and usually had only one guy over to play. There was hardly room for the other guys, and my mother worked, so she wasn’t around to have cookies and goodies for my friends.

We also had an electric football league. We had enough guys for each team in the Big 8, and we usually played at Jon Hall’s house. Jon was always Oklahoma, I was the Missouri Tigers. John Marvin Wright was Kansas. Don’t exactly remember who Jim was.

We painted the little football men, complete with school colors and numbers on each player. Again, we kept stats, win-loss records, etc.

Probably, keeping stats so much as youngsters, had something to do with Jim and I going into sports writing as careers. Who knows?