I can not say that I truly remember the years before I started going to school. My Father was a prolific photographer. We have many family photos of Christmas, picnics, Easter, Birthdays and other family outings. As a family we would go up to Cedar Breaks and hike and have a picnic. We would go with Dad to some fishing lake or stream and picnic as he fished. Many happy hours were spent in Zion National Park hiking and picnicing. We were always ready to go to Zion. That meant a hike up to Emerald Pool, Weeping Rock, down the Narrows Trail. Driving through the tunnels and stopping in the middle of the tunnel to feed the chipmunks and squirrels. This tunnel is still there but the pull out windows have been closed off and the tunnel is only one way. More people, bigger cars and no way to make the tunnel wider.
My main playmates were my cousins Charlette Cox and Phyllis Buhanan. We would play with our dolls and paper dolls. We would play jacks in the hallway of my house and hop scotch out on the sidewalk. Now a word about a place keeper for hop scotch. You could use almost anything but the best was a small chain. You could use a small rock but they would bounce when you dropped them down and you could lose a turn because it would go out of bounds. If your chain was too long it could get over the line. If it was too small it was hard to pick up as you bent down. Or it wasn’t heavy enough to land in the right box. Once you found the right chain it was charished and protected so it did not get damaged or lost.
Jacks was a fun game of skill, picking up the jacks and catching the ball before it comes down again. Here again the right ball was important. If it bounces funny or not high enough or too high it can throw off your timing. Good for hand eye co-ordination.
One Christmas my Mother spent hours at night sewing cloths for the doll I was to receive that year. On Christmas morning my new doll had a whole wardrobe, dresses, coats, slacks even a wedding dress with a veil. Of course as soon as I got tired of putting them on the doll I decieded that the family cat needed to be dressed up. My Mother tells of seeing that beautiful wedding dress streaking across the lawn on the cat with me close behind.
One of our favorite entertainments was paper dolls. You could get a book of paper dolls for about 10 cents. It would require some work and skill to get them. They all had to be cut out. You had to be very careful or the little tags that would hold the cloths on the dolls would tear or get cut off by accident. Then the paper dolls started coming in punch out books but those were tricky too. They would tear and you ended up having to cut them out if you wanted them all in one peace. We had paper dolls of our favorite movie stars, story book characters, action heroes. One of my favorite doll sets was a ballerina. I don’t think I even knew who the ballerina was but I loved the costumes. They were so beautiful. Years later when I had the opportunity to go to Washington DC and the Smithsonion Museums I found in the gift shops replicas of old paper dolls. I wanted to buy them all. But I didn’t.
I remember the last time I ever played jacks. I was a mother with 5 children (Sherri was only a few weeks old) we had just moved to Orofino Idaho and were living in a rally run down very very old home by the rail road tracks while we waited for the move in day to occupy the home we had purchased on Wixson Heights. I went to the grocery store and saw a package of jacks and a ball. I thought Deann and Tammy might like to learn how to play jacks to help pass the time, since we knew no one and the house we lived in had no yard and was just off the main street of town, next door to a dry cleaners with a rail road track running by the side of the house and a huge creek (looked like a big river to this desert rat!) on the other side of the house. The only problem was that when we tried to play the jacks the floors in our temporary abode were so crooked that the ball wouldn’t bounce so you could catch it. It just rolled away to the down hill side. We weren’t very succesful and I haven’t tried since!