This week’s rain would have been a bittersweet occurrence when I was a kid.
In the early 1950s summertime activities were pretty much whatever me and my little friends wanted to make of them. We didn’t have TV, the many electronic devices of today were beyond anything even Buck Rogers’ innovative creators envisioned and there were no organized recreation programs in Humboldt.
Our parents, not far removed from the Great Depression and winning World War II, were concerned with our upbringing, but that was sandwiched around work-a-day lives and homemaking chores that didn’t have the benefit of today’s time-saving appliances.
Dad worked at Monarch Cement, at a job physically demanding, and understandably wasn’t much in a mood to play games when he got home; besides there were homestead duties, such as tending the yard with a reel-type push mower.
Mom was sequestered in the kitchen much of the day. We had three sit-down meals, every day, and washing was done in a two-step process, soak in suds in one tub, rinse in a second and squeeze the water out with a wringer. I had a role, daily taking kitchen scraps to the chickens and carrying out wash water.
Consequently, we kids — the neighborhood was home to several of the same age — were left to our own devices.
A half block that the owner let grow up with what we called horse weeds, become “the jungle” each summer. We made trails through the undergrowth and even built a few flimsy structures with cardboard boxes.
We also had an area in another neighbor’s yard where we constructed small underground fortifications, occupied by plastic soldiers. It was a confrontational game, with lead fishing sinkers the missiles we fired — thrown by hand — that had quite a devastating effect on matchbox bunkers covered with loose dirt.
When it rained, we were forced indoors, which wasn’t as boring as it might sound in a world without TV.
I read books. Sometimes in a summer I’d consume close to 100, including every science fiction novel I could find. The first of that genre, and the one that got me hooked, was “Forbidden Planet.”
After the rain stopped, we immediately dashed outdoors and headed for “the ditch,” a rock-bottom slough that wound its way through east Humboldt.
We’d float homemade boats, build dams when the water started to recede and, most fun of all, hunt for crawdads.
It was quite the sport to see how big of a crawdad we could find, and then pick it up by its back without it painfully grabbing a hunk of skin. The real prize was a mommy crawdad, with a bunch of little ones under her tail.
Our fun and games changed dramatically in 1957 when Humboldt’s swimming pool opened, boys found girls and vice versa and I’d like to think a good many crotchety old crawdads pined for the days of having to avoid capture by a rambunctious kid.
Crawdad with a tear in its eye
