That’s Entertainment

What kids did to amuse themselves in the 1950s…

I’ve looked through my old stories written when I first started this blog and my readership was mostly pissed-off family members—“I don’t remember it that way!” to which I’d say “You should start a blog”—and I’ve got enough essays about my mom and my family to cover the rest of this trip (which ends next Monday) and then it’s back to Donald Trump, baseball and Kansas City.

Although…I’m collecting enough material on this trip to write some new stories if I work up the energy for that—we’ll see.

In the meantime, enjoy this one about the incredibly stupid activities kids of the 1950s found entertaining.

This incredibly sweet picture of me (an impression that is totally inaccurate, by the way) has a story behind it.

I’d totally forgotten this event until I recently saw this picture and wondered why I was smiling like an old man who had no teeth. Then I remembered: it’s because I was a young man who had no teeth – at least the two in front.

Back in the late 1950s when the only thing on TV for kids was Saturday morning cartoons, we had to amuse ourselves the other six-and-half days and I’m kinda surprised any of us survived the things we came up with for entertainment.

For instance:

We had a wagon (a wagon was federally-required equipment for kids in the 1950s and handed out at birth) and our wagon’s tongue (the handle you pulled it with) had broken off.

So if you wanted to ride our wagon like a toboggan down a hill – as we often did – you had to hang your head over the front of the wagon and reach back under the wagon bed and grab the front axle in order to steer.

What could possibly go wrong?

Now here’s what could possibly go wrong:

On one of those death-defying descents I lost hold of the wagon’s front axle, was looking down trying to grip it again and when I finally regained control, looked up just in time to realize I was way off course unless my desired destination was a boulder the size of a Montgomery Ward Console Cabinet television set.

I hit it face first.

Fortunately, this first of many blows to my head did no permanent damage.

Fortunately, this first of many blows to my head did no permanent damage.

Fortunately, this first of many blows to my head did no permanent damage.

Bottom line, I knocked out my two front teeth in an effort to entertainment myself and I gotta admit I don’t recall feeling all that bored after launching myself head first into a 500-pound chunk of granite.

I also don’t recall anyone explaining those teeth would grow back, so the expression you see on my face is a kid thinking he’s going to go through life looking like Gabby Hayes and hoping you’ll like him anyway.

That’s Entertainment Part II

But before I was preparing for my career as a toothless Western movie sidekick, my family owned the “Flying Saucer Café” – named by my mom and it featured a neon sign with a cup of coffee flying through the air on a UFO-like saucer.

That’s when we discovered a brand new toy.

No idea why it was lying around outside the restaurant for kids to play with, but it was an exposed electrical cable that had live current running through it. (I think they may have been working on the sign, but I don’t recall because once again my preferred method of self-entertainment cost me some brain cells.)

2025 Update:

In the 1950s we were inventing new things rapidly and didn’t seem to recognize how many of those new things could kill us, so we drove cars that had tailfins and weighed 5,000 pounds, but we hadn’t thought of seat belts yet, so if a sudden stop didn’t kill you immediately, we put knobs on the radio shaped like rockets (rockets were a Big Deal back then) and steering wheels with bullet-shaped center pieces so you could impale yourself efficiently, so the idea that someone would leave a “live wire” lying around isn’t all that unusual.

I’m not sure how any of us got to experience adulthood, or in my case…arrested-adolescencehood.

As I recall, my brother Bobby encouraged me to grab the wire and see how long I could hold on to it, which turned out to be not too damn long. I tried to get a firm grip, but it still blew my ass across the yard.

Wow, just like a free carnival ride!

So, if memory serves, we did it again.

Did I mention we were starved for entertainment? Kids today have no idea of the fun they’re missing out on, but if they stick a dinner fork into a plugged in toaster, they can find out in a hurry.

That’s Entertainment Part III

As a young man, my dad worked in the Northwest woods, so when a tree behind the Flying Saucer needed cutting down, he was just the man for the job.

The tree was then drug into a field behind the restaurant and that night we had a bonfire. We roasted weenies and marshmallows stuck on wire coat hangers just to make sure we ingested our daily dose of lead paint, so important to the development of Baby Boomer children.

(Lead-paint ingestion goes a long way in explaining why we thought the Vietnam War was a good idea and The Love Boat required 249 episodes to tell its incredibly complex story.)

So the morning after the bonfire – being chock-full of lead coat-hanger paint, marshmallows and whatever discarded pig parts make up hot dogs – I decided it would be a good idea to take a stroll through the cool ashes of the previous night’s bonfire.

And what’s the point of strolling through cool ashes if you’re not barefoot?

It was a great experience until I got to the center of the bonfire and broke through the crust of cool ashes and wound up standing on hot coals and my personal experience indicates the people we see “walking on hot coals” are full of shit.

Apparently, that’s made possible by making sure the coals aren’t all that hot and moving along at a quick clip; not standing still on white-hot coals, screaming your ass off.

I don’t know how many brain cells I was working with at that point – I had yet to head-butt a boulder or try do-it-yourself-electroshock therapy – but I think I stood still because my feet hurt like a they were on fire (probably because they were) and apparently it didn’t make sense to me to try walking on them.

One of the earliest memories of my life is seeing my mom run through hot coals to pick me up and get me the hell out of there.

Unlike her offspring, she wasn’t a moron—she wore boots.

2015 Update:

It just occurred to me; my mom hears her imbecile child screaming and takes the time to put on boots? Man, I hope they were right there in the hall closet and she didn’t spend a lot of time looking for them because these days she has a hard time finding anything, including the kitchen.

When I recently asked my mom if she remembered the incident, she said oh yeah and then proudly added:

“And we didn’t take you to the hospital.”

When I asked why the hell not she said:

“Your daddy always wanted to be a doctor.”

So you gotta say it was incredibly thoughtful of me to cook my feet like a Gates BBQ short end so my dad could indulge in his hobby: amateur MD.

Come to think of it, my dad got a lot of practice: he dealt with charbroiled feet, knocked out teeth, scrapes, sprains, cuts, stepped-on nails, misplaced fish hooks, and on at least one occasion, a Shetland pony bite and my sister setting her hair on fire when she bent over to blow out the candles on her birthday cake.

You’d think my mom would have been freaked out by all the close calls, but apparently that’s why you have five kids; you’re probably going to lose a couple of them to firecracker-related accidents or snake bites or the local serial killer and she’d happily watch us ride off on a Schwinn bikes at 9 AM and tell us to be back by dark, assuming we survived any of the following activities, all of which we did at one time or another:

• Unsupervised swimming in a water-filled abandoned rock quarry.

• Wandering through the rattlesnake-infested hills with a loaded .22 rifle.

• Sitting underneath a railway bridge while a train passed overhead.

• Overnight adult-free camping trips which involved starting fires to roast marshmallows stuck on lead-paint coated wire coat hangers.

• Exploring “haunted” houses.

• All-day bike excursions to hither and also yon with no game plan; so if my mom ever had to send out a search party and they asked where to look for us all she could say would be, “Northern California.”

• Jumping off high things into scummy pond water.

• Skateboarding down hills on a piece of 2x4 with a roller skate nailed to the bottom.

• Playing mumblety-peg, which according to the internet involves a putting a peg into the ground and for some unspecified reason eventually pulling it out with your teeth, but in our version meant throwing a pocketknife and trying make it stick into the ground as close as possible to one of your brother’s feet. And it was no fun if you wore shoes.

• Seeing how many kids you get onto a Schwinn bicycle and going really fast down a hill. (In our case, the answer was 6.)

• Tying the same Schwinn bike to your cousin’s Honda 250 Scrambler motorcycle with a rope and finding out how fast that combination could go.

OK, that last activity requires some explanation because it’s even dumber than you might imagine: my cousin Jimmy drug my brother Bobby (Mr. Hey, Try Grabbing That Wire!) around our block at high speed and as Jimmy reappeared on our street, he decided to take hard left and go up our skateboard hill, but Bobby on the Kamikaze Schwinn was still going straight, so when the rope got taught again it jerked the Schwinn out from under Bobby and his bike went left while he continued to go straight and then executed an exciting series of tumbling rolls across an asphalt road and into a ditch filled with blackberry vines and their accompanying thorns.

Which the rest of us found fucking hysterical.

Sure, my brother could have died, but if he had, explaining how he died would have really livened up the wake and if you gotta go, leave ‘em laughing.

And to a kid growing up in the 1950s, That’s Entertainment.

Which beats the hell out of video games.