games kids play

I was thinking that you didn’t run with the herd as much as other kids did. I was thinking that where you grew up, on the other side of 51st Street which is kind of a busy street, might have something to do with it. Now it is all the Central Steel and Wire parking lot, but I’m guessing back then it had a lot of empty land because if it had been chockablock bungalows like the streets south of there, it would have been hard to buy it all up. And that whole area north of 51st Street is even now kind of empty. So maybe you had a comparatively more rural upbringing than the kids to the south.

Our prairies were generally just vacant lots, but there was an area just northwest of 56th and St Louis that was maybe half a block. We called it the St Louis Laundry, and the word on the street was that it had been like a dry cleaner and you know those guys have all kinds of strange chemicals and one day the whole thing blew up just like that.

I don’t know how we knew this, or if it was true. None of the adults seemed to know anything about it. There were still parts by 56th Street that had cement foundations and there was a ditch in the back that could have been a basement.

There was one of those little stores where your mother sent you to get a quart of Wanzer and a loaf of Wonder bread on 57th between Christiana and Spaulding. The sign above it said Connie’s, but we kids always called it Bendrooms. I have no idea why. Perhaps it was once owned by a guy named Ben Droom, but that is just conjecture. None of the adults called it Bendrooms.

I was just wondering about those little things that get passed down from kid to kid and none of the adults know much about it, and maybe it goes back hundreds of years, well I am just speculating.

I’m thinking of one game we used to play called fox. The fox would go and hide and then the other kids would come walking down the sidewalk chanting “One o clock and the fox ain’t here. Two o’clock and the Fox ain’t here. Three o’clock and the fox ain’t here,” and so on, and the fox would lay in wait until they had walked past him and then he would jump out and tag as many as he could. There was another called Patty Cake, where one of the kids would bend down over one of the stoops with his head in his hands, and the chant would be “Patty cake, patty cake, baker man, something, something,” ending up with something about he baked a pie and somebody stuck their finger in it, whereupon one of the kids would poke him in the back, and then, I am not sure, the kid would have to figure out who poked him in the back, and everybody else would run and hide and the guy would try to find them and tag them.

That patty cake thing strikes me as kind of old fashioned for modern kids, as we were then, and what did we know about foxes, and why the o’clocks, and why the ain’t?

We played red light, green light, but that is still widely played in the city today as I discovered when subbing. There was statue. which was like it except that when you were tagged you had to freeze, but the other kids could unfreeze you if they got to you before it got to them. And then there was goul. It was where you could go and it couldn’t tag you. I expect goul was a corruption of goal, but I don’t know.

I guess I went a little off the subject but I went a little awry talking about the St Louis Laundry, it was so distant (two half blocks), and so mysterious, and that explosion, and did anybody get killed? Nobody knew.

I was mostly a run with the herd kid. Because of circumstances I have been alone a lot, but I would generally rather be with a bunch of people. Being with one or two people is ok, but generally the more people the better for me.

I generally didn’t like going on trips with my parents. Not that I didn’t have a good time, but I would rather be running with the herd.

Love the name Orin Bolin, sounds like the kind of names that people in southern Illinois had. Tell the story, and include the story of Orin Bolin in it.