by Just Lin
During the last several months, I spent quite a bit of time in the house I grew up in. That brought back memories of my childhood and all the great games I played with little more than my imagination.
One thing that always fascinated me was the switchboard operators that I would see in old movies. They were always so busy connecting their callers to the right office or hotel room or whatever. I discovered that I could make my own switchboard by placing a shoe box upside down and putting the top of the box at right angles to it in order to make a backboard. I would then poke small holes in the surface of the box and also in the "backboard". I would use the elastic bands from doll bonnets to be my telephone cables. The metal ends on those bands kept the band in place when put through one of the holes. In this way, I would connect my pretend calls.
I'm still kind of fascinated with switchboards. Several years ago, I came across a beautiful wood and brass one in an antique store. I imagine it came from a grand hotel. I swear, if I had a bigger house I would have bought it just as a conversation piece. It was kind of expensive but it would have made me happy and maybe I would have played with it late at night when no one was watching. LOL
What pretend games did you play when you were a child?
21 comments:
Splat!
I use to pretend I was David Cassidy and strum loudly on my pitiful little guitar and sing badly to the Partridge album. My mother wasn't too impressed.
thats cute J/L!! Switchboards are fascinating....but I am wondering...did you ever have an unruly caller that left you with no choice but to say..."OH SHUSH!"?
I always wanted to be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz...I would slip on a pair of Mothers heels and spread her dresses in a circle on the floor one after the other...then I would step into them one at a time and.....
melt.
I liked to play royalty too! Usually involved my sisters being knaves or oafs....ahhh...good times..
My younger sister used to have these silly tea parties with dolls and stuffed animals. I usually crashed them. Once I tossed a cup of tea into "Chatty Cathys" face for something smart she had said....
Anyhoo...one day I crashed a tea party hosted by my younger sister and she was using her pink plastic goblets one of which I promptly grabbed and took a big swig out of. Rather than the water I had expected that little bitch had sprayed that goblet full of hairspray knowing I would crash the party and probably drink it!!
She did not go unpunished...
One summer she was gone for a week and I got her Barbie dolls...Barbie..Barbie..and Midge.
I cut thier hair to the "scalp" and fashioned beehives with cotton balls for each of them. When the cotton was layered high enough I sprayed it and put a dixie cup over it and secured it with rubber bands. By the next morning when it was dry...I removed the dixie cups and viola! Three perfect Beehives!!
I placed then back in their Barbies thing where they stood side by side behind this little plastic "rope" and closed it up....
Well to my surprise when she returned home she was mad! I thought she would love the new "do's"....
Mother wasn't happy either....
My favorite toy at the time was a pink jeep with a surrey on top just like the ones at Las Brisas in Acapulco....my aunt had brought it to me as a souvenir...
Mother removed the wheels from it...
I glared at Vicki...she KNEW better than to tattle on me...I always had the last word!
Later...when I was out on the lawn...trying to push my jeep around...WITH HO WHEELS....I spotted her playing too.
So I went to her...thinking we would put this endless fussing and retaliating to an end....but I changed my mind and held her down by straddling.. her pinning her arms down with my knees and every time she screamed I filled her mouth with dirt and grass...
When I was young and we would go out to my grandmothers on Sundays my cousin, Izetta, and I would play school. She would give me math problems to solve. Not like 2+3=5 but big numbers like 256897 + 635124 = 892021. Sometimes it would be subtraction or division. That's probably why I like working with numbers.
thats funny Shirley....what was pitiful about your guitar?
Kids and their playing and make believe is always so dang cute...well with the exception of me possibly...
Michael it must have been a blast in your house!
It was just a cheap cheap cheap guitar that wasn't tuned properly, and I had no clue how to play it.
during summer visits to my Mothers sisters farm we would sometimes walk to the Holiness church at night if they were having a revival....
being little Baptist kids we had never seen anything like that!
Then we would go home and play church...
we had to have 3 people...one for the preacher...one to sing and one to get the holy ghost...
We really put on a show....til Aunt Gladys caught us that is....
she was livid! we didn't mean any disrespect....we didn't know what it was....but we definitely liked that church better than ours....
never saw anyone jump a pew at our church....so boring..
The church we went to when I was little was a really stuffy church. Full of old cranky people. One woman sat in the same pew every week (almost as bad as bingo player and their seats!), and used her white gloves to check the pew in front of her for dust. If she found any she reported it. Old cow!
I also had a bakery in our yard. I made the most beautiful confections in mud and flowers!
I only used the best mud!
when i was little....i used to make mountains out of mole hills~
Shirley Congrats on being the prettiest today in all your splatting glory. I bet you were cute playing your little guitar even if it was out of tune.
Michael I never imagined unruly callers but if I would have, I would have just unplugged them. :)
In second grade, by friend, Buddy, and I would play "Royalty". We would act all proper and genteel when being "royal" having our tea party and holding our pinkies out when holding our cups. Then we would act like peasants by being all slovenly and slurping from out cups and eating in a piggish way.
That would be "my friend".
Tina I still do that on occasion.
My grandkids don't play as many make believe games as I did. I guess that's a sign of the times. My granddaughter, 8 yrs old, will play pretend games more often than my grandson, 10 yrs old. The other day my granddaughter was taking pretend orders for a school fundraiser to sell cookie dough. She was writing down her orders and also being the customer, using money from her cash register to "buy" the dough and then count out the change. I remember playing something similar when I was a kid and would play "store".
wow....Steve Jobs died.....he was old, though....56~
Just read that. That is NOT old. You just wait.
Jodi and Hodi's info...
US Airways 20
Latitude: 21-31-12.0 N
Longitude: 151-31-12.0 W
Speed: 506 mph
Altitude: 36000 ft
Bearing: 269 deg
To HNL: 358 nm
From PHX: 2207 nm
arrive HNL 8pm CST
3pm HNL time....
Don't tell the Ho's......but it's raining in Honolulu~ shhhhhhhh~
Where is everyone? Did they ALL to to Hawaii?
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