Reflections on 4th-7th grade.
This one should be sub-titled: TSO has lost his ever loving mind, and this is the longest most boringest post in history.
(*Editor’s Note: this will interest maybe 3 people in the entire world, but Jonn told me to post, so I am posting. Besides, I did kind of want to hear about a memory from 1979-83 that didn’t deal with Reagan or the Olympics.)
I don’t usually go through any serious bouts of melancholy, largely because my memory sucks. But every now and again I remember something from my childhood and I end up googling the hell out of it and living the wonder years of 4th-7th grade, back when dopey blogs and Stolen Valor knuckleheads hadn’t become my daily grind. In the past 2 months, all the things on this list have been brought up to me, and I almost wish I was 11 again. So, without further ado, I give you the Top 5 things I loved about being in the 4th-7th grade.
In no particular order:
AVALON HILL GAMES
You remember board games? Those were the things we played back before World of Warcraft and Diablo et al. The only actual computer game I remember from back then was this dopey game called “Pillbox” where you had two artillery pieces on mountains and you shot at each other by putting in an azimuth and a correct amount of powder. And you just kept bracketing until you hit the target, which is what I envision the 13 series guys doing now.
Anyway, in like the 6th grade I joined the Mt Everett Regional High School Gaming Club (we were 5-12th grade at my school), mostly for the chicks. OK, mostly because they accepted me for the gigantic nerd/tool that I was. And they had a ton of board games from Avalon Hill, and Mr Milukas (my math teacher) and Herr Kolmer (my German teacher) would administer the games. My favorites were Magic Realm (pictured above), this game called “Origins of World War II” and Diplomacy. I also loved Wooden Ships and Iron Men, although I lost every time, and Gladiator, but I always lost at that game too because I picked the dopey dude with a trident and a net.
But Magic Realm was boss. I was always the White Knight and would go hire the “Order” which was some pseudo Templer Knight type organization. In Diplomacy I always tried to get France, although now I question the wisdom of that. I used to convince myself that “Diplomacy” was not nerdy because it was Henry Kissinger’s favorite game. Now I realize I was a nerd for playing Henry Kissinger’s favorite game.
RETURN OF THE KING RECORD BY Rankin/Bass
UPDATE: Blackfive found this for me:
For Christmas of my 5th grade year my Dad inexplicably bought me the book of The Return of the King, and I got the Rankin/Bass Record of the same to accompany it. Now, ROTK is book 3 of the trilogy, and there are 15,000 characters (and again, I was like 10) so the thing almost could have been written in Cyrillic for all the good it did me following what was going on. But I read every page about 14,000 times, and slept to the audio from the record player each night. (NOTE: A record player was in the 70’s what a CD or iPod is now.)
In the 5th grade my friend Chris and I got an opaque projector and we made this 6 foot square copy of the record (see above) and colored it in. I was big fan of painting the hair on the Hobbit’s toes, because as mentioned above, I was a nerd.
Now, I would eventually go on to read the entire series to the point where I had the damn thing memorized. I can still quote from the record, despite not having either heard that version or seen the movie in like 20+ years. In fact, SuperBowl6Romeo and I were just singing the “Where there’s a whip [crack] there’s a way” song a minute ago, and I wonder why that never made it into a marching Jody. In fact, I knew the story so well that I taught myself German outside of class by reading “Der Herr der Ringe” (“Grond” in German is spelled “Grond.”). I also read Bored of the Rings which was a spoof. And I bought the maps, everything. I even found the entire Lord of the Rings on cassette (by the Mind’s Eye) one time when my Mom made me go apple picking in Upstate New York and we stopped in a book store near Saratoga, and to this day it remains the best thing I ever purchased.
Even back then I hated the Elves and loved the Dwarves. Which is why if I were to go to a Marine Corps ball and ask a celebrity I would be torn between Peter Dinklage and John Rhys Davies. And if Orlando Bloom was there I would kick him in the scones.
MUCH BETTER CARTOONS – i.e. Herculoids and Laff-A-Lympics.
In 1981 the Herculoids was brought back from the 60’s to run on the Space Stars show. Dude, those cartoons were money. I still hold out hope that they will make a movie of it eventually, because if there was anything sweeter than a Brady to Gronkowski touchdown pass in the history of mankind then it was a ten-legged, four-horned rhino/triceratops hybrid named Tundro who could shoot explosive energy rocks from his cannon-horn who runs around with a rock simian named Igoo who is invulnerable to even molten lava.
Forget this My Little Pony crap, give me the Herculoids, except Gloop and Gleep who I long suspected where the first attempt to mainstream homosexual protoplasmic creatures. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
OK, not a Herculoids fan? Fine, show me the rock hearted SOB who didn’t cheer for the Really Rottens to finally win a day’s competitions and I’ll show you someone who has no heart. (For the record, 1979 came to Western Mass 2 years late, so I am counting this in my 1981-84 time frame.) Dude, I wanted the Dread Baron and Mumbly to win so bad it would throw me into a funk every time they lost at the last minute. It took until the second year before the Really Rottens (with Coach Belichick) won their first event, and they would only win one more.
But who among us can fail to break into tears when reminiscing about when in New York and Turkey the Really Rottens would win the cumulative events of Hansom Carriage Race, Crown the Statue of Liberty, Unicycle Race and Swimming Relay Race. Even now I shed a tear. Screw the Miracle on Ice, as a society we should be watching specials on that awesome day when the Really Rottens finally won.
INTELLIVISION
The fights between Atari 2600 folks and Intelivision owners was like the Crips and Bloods, the Hatfields and McCoys of the early 80’s in Berkshire County. On the mean streets of New Marlborough where I grew up amidst the squalor and above-ground pools (and New Yorkers flocking on weekends to look at our trees) you were an Intelivision guy or you were dead. Although now that I think about it, I don’t actually remember anyone fighting about this.
All I know is that my aforementioned buddy Chris would ride his bike down off his mountain (technically Brewer Hill, about 2.5 miles away, just before the Konkapot) and we would play Intellivision, unless Betsy [last name redacted] came over to swim with us, which was not often after she got her bikini bottom stuck on the inner tube air valve and we laughed. (I still feel guilt over that one.)
Anyway, dude, they had this game called SNAFU, which was essentially just the game from Tron with the motorcycles. You had 4 people and you started going in a direction and you just turned before you hit a wall. When someone ran out of room to move they died. That is the single worst explanation of an all time classic game in history, but I can’t describe it any better than that.
We also played a hella-lot of Utopia (which was the first SIMs game), Ice Trek (which I remember owning but not what the game was and Google isn’t helping) and later some Commando.
UPDATE: Dudes playing Utopia. a) This is probably NSFW because they swear a lot. b) wow, this game did not make the test of time.
If you didn’t own an Intelivision back in 1981, just give up, your life is devoid of any true meaning.
OZ BOOKS
(I would like to admit up front that Lucky looks like he might have caught the ghey at some point here, but back then not as much.)
In the basement at New Marlborough Central School there’s a library that can’t be bigger than my wife’s walk-in closet. And there lies to this day (I would imagine anyway) the one thing of my neighbors that I covet; a huge collection of Oz books. If you didn’t know that there are like 50 books after the Wizard of Oz, you might as well have owned an Atari 2600, because you missed out on the things that make life livable. (As Conan once said, what is best in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women while you steal their Oz books.)
I discovered these things (and the library) during the 3rd or 4th grade, and I haven’t stopped reading since. I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t reading a book. Generally, like now, I am like 4 books deep. (Mongoliad by Stephenson et al is what I am reading now, and will be shifting to John Adams next.) But the Oz books were straight cash homey. On one side they had the story, and the other page was a picture of what was going on.
My two favorites were Lucky Bucky of Oz and the Giant Horse of Oz, which I didn’t realize until about 10 minutes ago weren’t even written by Frank L. Baum. Lucky Bucky is rather sterily (apparently that is not a word, but it should mean “having the qualities of sterility”) described by Wiki:
Bucky Jones is aboard a tugboat in New York Harbor when the boiler blows up. He is soon blown into the Nonestic Ocean where he meets Davy Jones, a wooden whale.The pair take an undersea route to the Emerald City, and have many adventures along the way.
That description as analogous to saying Tom Brady and Kate Upton are kinda okay looking. Dude, “many adventures”? Hell yeah they did, dude was a wooden whale that could talk, and had a bedroom in his head that Bucky could live in. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish Davy wouldn’t pick me up and swim me off to the Emerald City too, and then I realize that I am a good 1,000 miles from any water large enough to house a wooden whale with a bed in his head.
Purchasing a first edition copy of Lucky Bucky remains on my bucket list. I think it is only about $300, but that’s a lot of money for a book I probably would never read again.
************************************
OK, how many of you actually read to the end of this? I guarantee my wife didn’t make it.
OK, so give me your top 5 memories from 3rd-7th grade (roughly.)
Category: Politics
Disco
Girls
Drivers license
THAT was this time period for me. Rockin’ it!
I’m so very breaking out the Atari this weekend.
Got to talking with my grandson the other night as he was riding his BMX bike and I mentioned that before the BMX was the Stingray bike. Anyone remember those? Yea it’s a decade earlier. Schwinn made them – Banana type seat, big handle bars, shifter on the front bar. Names like Lemon Peel, Grape Crate. Man those were the tops back then.
TSO,
Awesome flashback, brings back some good memories:
@53…We had a Stingray!! Red, with a sparkly kinda banana seat, 3-speed…my second grade friend taght me to ride it…
I had a Stingray in my 3rd to 7th grade years! Also Carter years for me Sparky…
@55 Defend
With the shifter on the nad bar?
Damn TSO…
I can’t remember shit from 4th thru 7th grade! 50+ years is a long time. I went to two room school for 1st and second grade.
Somewhere in there I had paper routes? AND a Stingray (I think?)!
First computer game was Zork, but that was much later.
Other than LOTR in book form I can not relate to much in your post. Three TV channels and a B&W TV, etc…
in 1973 as a high school sophomore I played pong at a friend’s house on an Odyssey…it was really pretty cool…also played a miniatures game written by Gary Gygax called Chainmail…I think I still have a set of the original D&D booklets (the 6×9 inch small brown booklets) somewhere in my gear…
TSO,
Awesome flashback, brings back some good memories:
– Squad Leader and Axis and Allies were big favorites of ours; when we wanted to get geeky, we played Divine Right (think it was a TSR game?), it was a cross between D&D and Risk.
– Intellivision rocked! We must’ve had 50 different games. My folks still have the Intellivision and all the cartridges up in the attic, it hasn’t worked for years but I’m going to keep it in cryogenic storage and someday, like Ted Williams’ head, we’ll bring it out and bring it back to life…
– Always liked Underdog and the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, not much on the animation but they were engaging (to a kid…)Never figured out why Bullwinkle had “Rue Britannia” on his foot, though…
– Watching The Night Stalker with Darren McGavin on TV, man that show scared the hell out of my brothers and I, I’m still scared of Spanish Moss after that show!
Thanks for the rememberies!
#53 – I had a Sting Ray. Kinda the predecessor of BMX bikes, but hard to jump what with that banana seat/roll bar contraption at the back. But that didn’t stop us – my brother got a broken collar bone for hsi jumping efforts.
And the game we liked best, as military folks you might relate – “Risk”, where the object is to conquer the world.
@61- My brother broke his collarbone trying to fly while wearing Superman pajamas (with the red cape) by jumping from the back of the couch to the ceiling fan in order to get a little boost. Luckily, the fireplace broke his fall.
It would appear that jumping and collarbones do not mix.
What a nice trip to the past. I am glad somebody else remembers the 1970s. I still have several AH games in the extra bedroom closet… Panzer Leader, Kingmaker, etc.
@59, 58: red Schwinn stingray with the 5-speed shifter on the nad bar and a banana seat, but no sissy bar.
@59: I also have the 6×9 D&D rule books and several supplements, on the same shelf as the AH games.
Now it’s time to enter today’s unSweet Sixteen votes.
TSO-
If nothing else thank you for “where there’s a whip there’s a way”. It’s been 30 years since I heard that song and I can still remember most of the words. My four, mostly from 7th grade were…
1) D&D (blue box and white box editions). My constant nattering about my “magic-user” acted as “girl-kryptonite” for years (unfortunately).
2) Avalon Hills Advanced Squad Leader. The full rules were a little above me at 11-12, but we LOVED making up our own.
3) Riding makeshift BMX trails all day. Obesity was never a problem for any of us.
4) Conquering endless streams of “Krauts” and “Japs” with the other kids in the fields behind our neighborhood. We had BB guns, pinecone “grenades” and if one of the kids had been down to Kentucky recently we had fusilades of bottle rockets… good times.
Thanks for the memories,
-Ed
@65
BTW, we never quite agreed on the blast radius of a pinecone. Did anyone else have that problem or were we alone in this particular dorkiness?
Got my first .22 in that timeframe. Also spent a few months in a 1-room schoolhouse where my sister and I were 1/3 of the student body (K-8.)
Any older we would have had to drive into Ogalala or Paxton for high school.
@65
Grew up in Indiana, too. Used to use bottle rockets in our BB gun wars all the time, we’d stick them in the BB gun barrel, light them and then use them like M203s (I guess they were M79s then…) We had a “1 pump” rule on the BB guns, but that never survived contact. We also permanently borrowed lab glasses from the chemistry lab in a bid for some safety (didn’t want to end up like Ralphie in A Christmas Story…) but always ended up ditching them because they fogged up when you ran. good times…
4rh to 7th grade? 4th grade, we moved to a farmhouse out in the sticks. The place had a forty-acre pasture and 150 acres of cropland. We raised sheep. One of the neighbors kept an obnoxious small horse in the pasture until I decided to be a smart alec and climb on him. He went galloping around the barn, stopped short and threw me, and I got a broken arm out of it. The neighbor sold the horse after that. Then my dad bought a horse for us to ride, but I was the only one interested, and spent most of my free time riding as far as I could go between 8AM and noon, and then went home. Always took a sandwich for me and a couple ears of corn for the horse. We had two English setters. One of them always went with me. My father thought TV was trash, so we didn’t have one. It was a big deal to get an order of baby chickens from the Sears and Roebuck farm catalog, and take them out to the brooder house. Big vegetable garden, small orchard of apple and peach trees. We never went hungry, never were bored. On Sundays after church, in the wintertime, my dad always made breakfast: fried egg (sunnyside up) on toasted shredded wheat biscuit, bacon, sausage, pancakes and syrup, hash browns. I got a Brownie Holiday box camera for Christmas one year and immediately started shooting pictures of the sheep, the horse and the dogs. I still have some of those pictures. I got a box of Post Tempera paints for another Christmas. My dad paid one of the art students where he taught to give me some lessons. I took the cardboard sheets that came with my dad’s shirts from the cleaners and used them to make spaceships and dioramas. I also painted pictures of horses and landscapes and jars of flowers. On weekends, if my folks were going into town, I’d go to the public library and check out every book I could get my hands on, and then spend… Read more »
Ahhh, yes, remember those radios programs. They were great fun. There was one about Johnny Dollar, Insurance Investigator that was among Mom’s favorites.
@69, I kinda want to go back in time and get adopted by your parents. That sounds simply idyllic.
@OWB, I completely forgot Johnny Dollar! Thanks for reminding me.
@TSO, if there is a Cracker Barrel store/restaurant near you, get your favorite girl and take her there. All the candy and other silly things I remember, like the toys we had, are there. I think you can get a Whirly Pop popcorn popper at Cracker Barrel. Closest I can get to going back in time.
@72, my wife and I go every Sunday. Eggs in a Basket, over easy, hashbrown casserole, side of sausage patties, Arnold Palmer and a Coffee. And if I have a trip that week, I get a book on CD.
She usually gets some sort of pancake item.
You have no idea my love of all things Cracker Barrell.
Avalon Hill Squad Leader series. I was so bad at it, I never went into the military. Still have them. I loved the black German SS pieces. They looked awesome.
Hmm, memories from 4th to 7th grades?
1. First day of 6th grade. New kid in school (had moved from California to Texas over the summer), and developed a HUGE crush on a girl in my class.
2. You can keep your Herculoids. I watched Speed Racer.
3. Avalon Hill games… yep. We played a variety, most commonly Third Reich. I usually played Italy. (yeah, yeah, I know, but I was really into Roman Empire history at that time, too)
4. There was this pretty girl in my class from 6th through 9th grades that I really liked. Yeah, I know I mentioned her already, but she really deserves a repeat mention.
5. There was this one little movie that I remember from that time frame. Maybe you’ve heard of it… it was called “Star Wars” (pre “Episode IV: A New Hope”, and HAN SHOT FIRST!).
When I was 13 I discovered Airfix HO scale toy soldiers. My friends and I had been building 1/72 plastic kits from then and then suddenly we found the small boxes with British 8th Army and German Afrika Corps minis! That was great,
That same summer I found a set of rules by Charles Grant for playing wargames (WWII) with those Airfix tanks and figures. The hook went in so deep that the barb came right out my navel.
I’m still playing wargames today. Mostly Ancient period in 25/28mm scale, though.
Back to the past. I remember TSR’s Chainmail, which was the forerunner to the D&D stuff. It was a set of miniatures rules for wargames in the middle ages, etc. Apparently some folks had asked Gygax to write some rules for games with Arthur & Merlin, etc, and stuff like St George and the Dragon. So, their was an addendum published that dealt with all those extra rules.
A couple years later, the 3-book set of D&D was published. The rest was history.
Mostly, my summers from the mid-60’s on were spent playing outdoors with cap guns and rifles, recreating westerns or WWII battles, and using dirt clods for grenades. I also had a Stingray bike and lots of comic books. I never got into the super-hero stuff. Mostly I was buying the military stuff. Sgt Rock & easy Company, the Haunted Tank, Johnny Cloud Navaho Ace, etc.
I graduated HS in 1973. By then i was also into the AH games, playing a LOT of Panzerblitz especially, with some friends.
Great post, TSO. Thanks for the memories.
@75, that actually came out a few years earlier, which is why I chose the range I did, because damn near everybody I would think would have Star Wars in their top 5. And I also stopped it early, because Red Dawn had a HUGE impact on my life as well after that.
TSO – Oh yeah, I read it all the way to the end. Hard to find fine literature like this. (No seriously.) In 1981 I was in Korea, fond memories of that year. But yeah, Avalon Hill, Intellivision, LOTR been there done that. Then and now, deep inside my old brain, I never really got older than 12, mentally. Great post, brought back many great memories. And those 3 people who read this? Man they have a lot of aliases!
TSO…I so miss Cracker Barrel. Nearest one is at least 2 hours away.
This is a really fun trip TSO…..thank you! Thanks everyone for sharing!
Lets see 83….12 at the time…GI Joe had just come back in 3 3/4 inch figures, Mom and Dad figured out that if we give the boy enough plastic models and for the 10 time the AMT USS Enterprise (Movie Version) he’ll stay put in his room and work all day and all night and we won’t have to hear from him. Little did they know I was pretty much stoned from the fumes(I never did open a window)…go figure…
Crossman came out with the AIR17 BB gun (looked kinda like an M16) for the then outragious price of $35.00.
Star Trek III came out.
GI Joe was a hit TV show along with Voltron (both versions I and III) He-Man was still on (and you say the two Globby things from herculoids were gay).
This was also the year that the movie “The Day After” came on ABC (When we still watched the big three channels) – pretty tame by todays standards…but it was just down the road in Lawrence Kansas (I lived in a suburb of Kansas CIty, MO)
The Kansas City Royals were a pretty decent team (espcially in 85, World Series Champs…lost $50 on that series..thought for sure the Cardinals would win)
Malls were safe, arcades were the shit (could blow 20 in a half hour).
Thinking back on it…I had a boring childhood.
Ronald was in the white house and a badass the enemy – The evil, Godless, heathen, Commie, bastards of the Soviet Union. (Again—pretty tame by today’s enemy)
84 I discovered why girls are nice.
What a great thread, thanks for all the stories! Letmesee, 3-7th grades for me woulda been 19 and 68 through 72. I had a cousin who finished his tour in Vietnam in December 67 (missed Tet by thaaat much), which had a huge impact on my wanna be career moves, then the TV show “Emergency!” came on in 72 (or maybe 71) which had an even bigger impact – I wanted to be Roy or Johnny in Squad 51 so bad that I could taste it. I played a lot of AH games, too, during that time, though we stuck on Tactics II for the longest time, “perfecting” our tactics. We ended up playing a lot of the S&T games that came with the magazines, my best friends dad (who was in the 11th ABN in WWII) got him a subscription for his birthday every year. My dad (a USAAF radio operator in WWII, mostly in B-17s) bought me a really keen chemistry set during that time, which we did our dead level best to use to blow up/set on fire/gas out everything possible. We also had a set of lawn darts. Yes, we played “catch” with them on occasion. Somehow we managed to survive unscathed. Mostly. I also read a whole lot, was far too nerdish/bookish to attract any attention from the girls in my class, so I spent most of those years buried in some book on history or SF. Dad gave me a whole footlocker full of books from his teen years in the 1930s, mostly hardback “young adult” fiction about pilots of various sorts. I had them until a few years ago, when they all quite literally fell to pieces, they were printed on cheap, high acid content paper. The only really unusual thing we had that I remember from those days was a toy we called “clackers” – they were two pretty heavy glass (or really hard plastic) balls connected by a string, that had a washer in the middle that you held. By moving your arm rapidly up and down, you could make them… Read more »
Totally remember those clacker things. I don’t remember how they worked or anything, but I totally remember them.
I think my grandmom had them because I remember them being in teh same drawer with the rubber guns that shot ping pong balls.
I still have Wooden Ships and Iron Men…
TSO, Sparky, I love Cracker Barrel the way flowers love the rain, especially the big fireplace in the dining room. And the hash brown casserole is to die for.
I’m so glad you brought up this trip down memory lane. Worth every second of your time to indulge in it.
He-man
@TSO, I think you can get those clacker things at a Renaissance Faire.
Staley balls for jacks, pickup sticks or jackstraws, the REAL Monopoly game, my sister’s 4H pies, my 4H strawberry jam, getting eggs from the broody hens, the screen door banging shut on its hinges…and when the weather was just right, you could smell the green chlorophyll in the corn growing out in the north 50.
@33.
Commodore 64: Zork.
In 1981 I was 10, so I was in 5th grade. We had nothing electronic, at all- not even cable. I had a bike that I loved… I swore I was going to be in the olympics with that bike! ha ha
when I was in 6th grade I found my mother’s stash of historical romance novels (and other borderline smut) and read about 1000 books that year. My social studies teacher even called my mother in to “talk” to her about the crap she caught me with– think eulalie mckeknie shinn from the music man (it’s a smutty book!) My mother laughed at her.
That was also about the time my sister worked at a drive in and I got to see all the Cheech and Chong movies.
Looking on Wikipedia for what was on TV at that time, I was a dukes of hazard fan and facts of life. ha ha
Boo,
My mom about died when she found me reading some Kurt Vonnegut novel and I was reading her some parts that made her blush….. Probably was Slaughterhouse Five.
I had 5 younger sisters and my mom was always riding herd on them, trying to keep a sense of innocent decorum around them. I thought it was more like trying to herd cats. I’m seeing the same thing with my two daughters. 🙂
TSO….we just played diplomacy. I ended up with Germany so me and the IG and the JAG attacked Russia or the chaplain…once he was done I quit. The doc had England and its now between him and Turkey (jack) Its passing the time.
Heheheh… I have that video on VHS… It is hesitatingly in my “get rid of stack” along with some Megadeth, Van Halen, Gloria Estefan, and other CDs.
Great post… I read it in its entirety, chuckling all the way through. Technically back then I don’t think you would have been considered a nerd unless you carried those interests beyond Grade 7. I’m a few years older and my memory sucks from way back when, but from Grade 4 to 7, I distinctly remember going to Disneyland and getting myself a mini metal R2D2 on a silver chain (I wonder whatever happened to it), being good at math, my 5th grade teacher thinking that I needed reading assistance (yes, that bothers me to this day), but my 6th grade teacher putting me in an advanced reading program, being introduced to the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and getting into sci-fi/fantasy books. Oh… and regrettably, Abba was somewhere in that time frame as well.
I played Avalon Hill games all the time. During German class in high school we had a free period once a month. One day my friend and I played AH’s “Luftwaffe”. The German teacher came over to see what we were doing and saw that my friend was planning bombing raids right over her home town. She mentioned that that was where she was born, and he replied “I know”. We got in a little trouble for that one.
Holy frickin’ crap! I love Magic Realm! Let’s play sometime, huh? 8)
I don’t even know how to answer a Matthis from NYC.
But, since I am a lover of all people, sure.
We had EPIC bottle rocket wars! I mean, each different block was like its own faction. We got smart and started sawing off the bottom off of a plastic yellow whiffle ball bat and using them as muskets instead of getting the shit burnt out of you all night. The wars would spread to the cornfield behind our house and that shit was intense. I knew what it was like to react to near ambush by the time I was 9. That was back in the day when there were those one or two girls in school who had boobs and all of us drooled over them. Sandlot balls games with indian rules because we didn’t have enough players for full teams. Tried to nerd out on D&D but just couldn’t get into it. I liked being outside too much
[…] the wake of the Aurora shootings I’ve been re-appraising my own skill set. Toss in TSO’s trip down HIS memory lane and I realized there was room for some geezer ruminations here. And a question or […]
[…] In the wake of the Aurora shootings I’ve been re-appraising my own skill set. Toss in TSO’s trip down HIS memory lane and I realized there was room for some geezer ruminations here. And a question or […]
I am a nerd and proud of it!
I started High School in 81 so I guess I fall into this group’s age range.
Some favorite toys; GI Joe with ‘Kung Fu’ grip and ‘eagle eyes’, the computer game Rogue. As for books, I would raid the library weekly for history books, mainly WWII aircraft focused.
Just read through the entire thread- Honestly, I’m quite a bit younger than this crowd (I was, ahem, born in ’82), but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Times sure change quickly, don’t they? I visit this blog often, just to read, but this one particularly made my evening. Thank you.