Once Upon A Time When It Was Winter The Games We Played

PHOTO: An old Baseball Board game.

by Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr.
Weirs Times Contributing Writer

One of my grandsons and I stood looking at some old board games and I asked him if he thought he would like to have any of them. His reply was that he thought his family had the modern versions of those games.
We didn’t have a winter of coronavirus restraints when I was a youngster, but we did not have all the conveniences my grandchildren enjoy today. No television, little radio reception at night, none of the electronic game devices youngsters enjoy today, and, of course, no internet.

But that was okay because we don’t miss what doesn’t exist. We did have games, however, and sometimes manufactured our own games to play.
One of my first games was a card game called “Old Maid.” If I remember correctly the object was to get rid of your cards and the person who was left with the old maid card at the end of the game was the loser. A game where the focus was on the loser, not the winner. I expect in today’s world where we have to be super-cautious about offending anyone by how we label them that ‘Old Maid” is an off limits game. There could be cries of “discrimination” or “oldmaidophobia.”
Another card game was the game of “Authors” where each player tries to collect sets of four cards depicting the same author. I remember gathering around the sitting room stove on a winter’s day and playing that educational game teaching young minds the names of classic authors and some of the books they wrote. The card table was set up for the games using regular playing cards, and until I came to the realization that those games were used by some to gamble their money I was unsure why I heard warnings about playing cards.

Of the board games I mentioned the most popular had to be Monopoly. There are many versions of this game today, but there was only one when I was a child- one that took a long time of playing to produce a winner. Many a game had to be suspended to be continued, and possibly completed at a later time as Monopoly was difficult for a player to attain a monopoly..
Then there were games of checkers and chinese checkers and Parcheesi. This is a royal game of India. There were sports board games which someone would receive as a Christmas or birthday gift which also provided entertainment on cold winter days or other times of the year.
The most used sports board game by our family was the All-Star baseball game. Player’s names were printed on round cards with 12 numbers representing possible results of the player’s turn at bat, A spinner determined which outcome the player experienced in a fantasy game. Another version of baseball had a diamond shaped board and players were able to swing at a miniature baseball and the place it landed on the board determined if it were a hit or an something else. Plastic figures represented the players. I suppose our interest in baseball heightened during the spring and summer, but there was probably more time for board games in the winter.
We had a football game that was electronic to a certain extent in that it had a light bulb in it to display plays on paper for offense and defense which revealed the result of each play when the light shone through them.
Winter games were not, however, limited to inside board games. While we couldn’t afford new skis and skates we did have some old skis and skates available for us to occasionally try out our skills in those sports. They weren’t usually games, but it was play even though it may have seemed at times to be work,and we probably did some racing with each other.
There were also some attempts to play hockey on the ice. Finding a good place to skate was a challenge and some small “ponds” of water in the woods had to suffice for some skating adventures. The hilly fields provided a venue for attempts at skiing. I learned that falling and hitting one’s head on the ice and tumbling head first into deep snow weren’t the proper ways to skate and ski.
Getting out of bed on a winter’s morning in an unheated room when the temperature was minus 20 or 30 degrees outside meant a quick trip downstairs where the fire in the kitchen and living room stoves had been rekindled and the temperature was above the freezing point. Until the room temperature increased it was “rally around the stove, siblings,” but don’t get too close and burn something.
A hearty country breakfast helped to relieve the discomfort of the winter cold. Fried eggs and potatoes cooked in bacon grease or lard (which was bought by the small bucket load), along with toast with a butter spread provided fuel for the day. Certain chores such as feeding the animals and sawing and chopping wood and filling the wood boxes in the kitchen and sitting room were things that had to be done every morning and evening (or late afternoon).
The barn sometimes served as a gymnasium for our games. We played basketball on the barn floor (the space in the center of the barn between the tie-up, where any cattle spent most of their winters, and the haymow where the winter hay for those few head of cattle was stored. Those games usually were made up of two or three players on each team, and sometimes as few as one against one. We often used real baskets instead of metal hoops, baskets that had fulfilled there usefulness for that purpose, and had developed holes in the bottoms. There were no gym shorts and typical basketball style numbered shirts, though, as the cold meant we played with our jackets and knit hats on and enjoyed it. The court was small, but we were still playing basketball under rules we made to fit the circumstances.
The barn was also used for games of tag which were particularly trying for the person who was “it.” There were built in ladders that went from the lowest level to the highest in the barn, which was a scaffold built high above the burn floor in the middle of the structure. The lower scaffolds had open support beams which we would use to scramble up and down to escape the tag of the one who was it. I think we found the most fun in testing our climbing abilities while preventing falls. When the neighbors installed television in their home and invited us to watch the Friday night fights I found an interest in boxing. The barn-floor thus became a boxing ring as I encouraged my brothers and neighborhood boys to box with me. It didn’t matter how big they were, at least until they got into the ring (which wasn’t a ring) and I found out how hard they could hit.
I’m at the end of this article and I haven’t yet mentioned snow-ball fights and sledding on the public roads (dirt)and in the fields..