Childhood Memories Please!!
 

I love to hear people talk about how they played and what they did when they were kids. It is so much fun to remember these stories and share them.

so please share your memories with us!!

I am an only child and I remember playing on my grandparents farm with my cousin. Jim is 6 yrs younger than me and we used to walk the timber and wade in the little stream above their house. it was so clear you could see the pebbles on the bottom.
we used to slide down the hill or roll down the hill as they had a deep ditch in front of their house.
At my grandparent's Jim and I played in the chicken house. the floor was a combination of sand and straw and was perfect for making roads for his tractors and dump trucks.
I remember using the old outhouse too! and Grandma had a pump by the driveway that everyone used the cup left hanging on the pump for drinks.

Lots of fun memories!!

Okay your turn!! Would love to hear some of your childhood memories!!

I grew up in a smallish city and played outside most of the summer with neighborhood kids. We liked to play cowboys and indians, hide and seek and a game called war. We also roller skated on the street. Stayed out till the street lights came on.

I remember picking raspberries at Grandmom's farm and the cows walking all over. Electric wire across driveway so cows in front yard. Canning peaches and getting all sticky. But we lived in a very small town. Mom sent me to the store at 5 yrs old. Kids were in school and I was walking to store. Had to take a short cut behind the high school and down the alley. The auto shop teacher was outside with his students. I was scared to death. Our housing development was basically a circle. When I was older I could ride my bicycle all the way around with no hands. Never wrecked either.

Until I was 12 we lived outside of town in the country. We had 3 huge fields to play in and all the kids in the area about 25 or so played hide and seek in the fields of tall weeds all summer long until dark. There was an old barn close by and we used to sit on the back stairs and tell each other scary stories. I was allowed to ride my bike in a 4 square mile area because there was very little traffic.
When I was 10 I tried to ride my bike to Golden. At that time there was lots of open space between towns. A state patrolman stopped me and my dog and took us home in his patrol car because he thought I was a runaway. My mom was very upset with me because I hadn't asked permission before hand.

we grew up in a very rural area. it was very safe. we played all over the area all day. the firehouse whistle blew every day at noon so we knew when to come home for lunch :)

I lived on Venus beach in California until 9 yrs old. It was very different than the weirdo place it now is.
Used to walk to the pier in the next town ( Ocean Park I think it was called.) since the Venus pier was burned down yrs before but never cleaned up.
It was fashioned after Venus Italy and even had canals build but it was not a success so was left to get rundown.
All this was quite an adventure for a kid back in the 40's.

I grew up in a small town in NE Montana. We kids did things together in herds. We would make PBJ sands and a quart jar of grape koolaid,hop on our bikes and go all over,wading in the lake,swimming ing the pool,just hanging out. We all had to do chores each morning before we could go...I spent an inordinate amount of time weeding the garden.IMHO! Oh ,I would put a blanket in my wagon and lay down initwatching the clouds.

I grew up in a city of 135K to 150K people and, yet, in many respects, it was like a small town since everyone in your neighborhood knew you. If we did anything, we told our parents before someone else could (and they would). We played outside 'til after dark. During the day we roamed not just our neighborhood, but all over the city. The skating rink owned a couple of busses that travelled the same routes on weekends picking up patrons and then returning them for free! I never would have been able to go every week otherwise. One family, in the winter flooded their back yard for the kids to ice skate. They put up lights and played music. It was great, until someone fell and broke an arm and her parents sued. That was my first lesson in the facts of life of someone ruining a good thing for everyone else. But basically, it was a good place to grow up.

I remember having a wooden cradle that my grandmother had made for me. For my 5th birthday all I wanted was the doll that you fed and had to actually change the diapers. I was so thrilled to get it along with a whole wardrobe of clothes my grandmother made. The baby slept right along my bed. A few days after my birthday we had a house fire and lost everything. I remember the smell going back. The cradle was charred and the doll melted in it. Luckily my brother woke up and smelled smoke and we all got out of the house. A few days later while cleaning up an older lady with white hair wearing a white sweater showed up and dropped of a few items she thought my family could use. In the bag was another doll and handmade baby clothes. To this day I swear that lady was an angel!

I grew up in an area that was changing from farmland to suburb. During the hot summer months, we would run after the ice truck until it stopped so we could pick up slivers of ice from the back to cool off with. My mother would buy a block of ice and place it in a large bowl in front of a fan to cool the air in the living room.

I grew up traveling the world because my dad was in the Air Force. When we lived in Germany there was a wooded area behind the houses. My dad got all the father's to bring hugh shipping crates the airplane parts were shipped in to the woods. They fixed them up to make a miniature village for us to play in. We had a store and a gas station and three little houses.

That sounds like so much fun! My dad's cousin got a boxcar and had it put in the pasture just behind his house. We kids played in that old boxcar for along time. such fun! Makes me think of the Boxcar Kids book series.

We also had friends for awhile - the dad worked for the railroad and they lived in a boxcar for real. their boxcar sat on a siderail and I remember playing in the area around the railroad tracks by their boxcar.

anyone take swimming lessons? when I was really young my dad taught me to float in the crick down at the bottom of my grandparents corn fields. We had to stop swimming there tho later on due to contamination.

then I took swimming lessons but I really didn't like them. Red Cross sponsored free swimming lessons. I was never really strong in my arms and I had a hard time passing the tests. Towards the end of all my lessons over the summers we were supposed to swim from the shallow end to the deep end and back again without stopping. but my arms were never that strong and I had to stop a couple of times. I did make it but didn't pass the life guard test.

I was not real brave about diving either. I've always been one that wants my feet to touch the bottom LOL
But I can swim thanks to the lessons. I even had private lessons also to help.

My story is a little different than most. My dad was park and zoo superintendent at what was then the largest zoo in Kansas. I grew up with baby lions in the house. We also had a variety of other wild animal pets. My mom ran the swimming pool (at the time the "largest free municipally owned swimming pool in the world". ( 220 ft x 330 ft, holding 3,000,000 gals of water). What a way to grow up. My folks are gone now and I am in my 70's, but the memories are still strong. BTW my husband of 55 years was a lifeguard for my mom. Janice

Oh boy! You have really started something. I'll be 80 in June and some memories are SO vivid. When I was about 7 or 8 my mom remarried-to a farmer and we moved to the farm. He hadn't installed electricity yet so it was like going from one world to another. Mom churned butter, we used kerosene lamps. I used to iron her aprons with the heavy sad iron heated on the stove, learned to iron that way.....she'd praise me so I loved doing it. Dad had a beautiful border collie, Lady, who was a champion herder and he bred her and sold the pups. He'd send her out to the field at milking time and she'd bring the cows in to the barn. Sometimes a pig would get loose into the cornfield and she loved rounding them up, grabbing their ears....you could hear them squealing for miles! I loved her so much! If it was cold when she had pups, they'd be in a bed behind the stove....a coal stove. I had a set of tiny china dishes and when I played with them on the back stoop, the chickens would come up and grab the cups--they looked like eggshells! Ever try walking barefoot in a yard with free range chickens?!!! there was a porch/room on the back, part of which was the "coal" room; in the front part of it was an old huge kitchen stove (we'd graduated to a kerosene one in the kitchen). I'd set up tomato baskets upside down for tables and have a restaurant! In the spring we'd get tiny baby chicks from town and put them in the brooder house and if they got out, Lady would round them up, crouching down and being very gentle with them. Later, Mom cleaned out the brooder house and it became my playhouse. I'd rollerskated when we lived in town and on the farm there was a cement porch that went around both sides. I'd wait til mom and dad went to town and I'd skate on the porch (wasn't supposed to!). Also loved to climb the pear tree when they were gone. I was a tree climber....a neighbor had a great apple tree from which you could see the world!! One cold winter night dad wanted to take me down to the barn and I thought mom just wanted to get me out of the house (????), but I went. There was a newborn calf in the barn Dad wanted to show me.....vivid memory of walking in the snow to the barn with Dad swinging the kerosene lantern beside us. SO many more!!! He had a tractor (I loved handing him tools when he worked on it) but he also had a team of huge work horses. I'd go out to the field to bring him in for lunch and he'd sit me up on one of the horses--they were so big my legs stuck out sideways on both sides! He stopped to show me a nest of baby field mice beside a corn shock. I'd better stop before the tears come!! I leaned to love animals....esp dogs and horses, and later thought it was so unfair when Elizabeth Taylor (same age as me) was given a horse she rode in National Velvet when she already had one! So when I was about 13, I got one too---a black quarter horse dad had seen on the fairgrounds. Ok, I'll stop!! There's much more and I should write it all down for the kids!

Pollytink, you really should! Your story was very vivid and I could tell how much you were loved and how much you loved in return :)

I grew up in the 1940's in Brooklyn, a part of New York City which at that time had at least 3 million people in it. We tended to stay in our neighborhood and play on our street, Patsy (hotscotch), rope jumping, marbles. Sometimes the man delivering ice would chip off a piece or two for us to share. I'm the oldest of 7 children so I spent a lot of time babysitting my younger brothers and sisters and keeping them amused. Sometimes I had to hang out the laundry so I strung a little line for them to hang small items like socks and dishtowels to dry. Summertime meant card games on the front stoop of whoever had a deck of cards, playing baseball with a spaulding ball and a cut off broom stick for our bat. When it got very hot we would go to local playground that had a shallow kiddie pool with sprays and later we would dry off on the swings. On our street the older boys would turn on the jonny pump (fire hydrant) and put a barrel over it to create a spray so all the kids could cool off. Hide and Seek after dinner, one time I hid so well that no one found me so they all went home to bed while I kept hiding. I remember playing Monolopy a lot but we never finished a game mainly because the younger kids would get bored with the game. Every once in awhile we would take the bus to the municipal swimming pool and spend the day there. We kids spent may days exploring the Prospect Park, creating secret paths through the bushes and trees, crossing over little streams and laying in the grass watching the clouds. I don't think our parents ever worried that someone would harm us as the park is huge and some days we walked for miles. Very few of us had bikes but they could be rented for rides in the park. As soon as we went back to school in Sept. out came our roller skates. There weren't many cars in those days so we skated in the street. After dinner on Sundays we would go to the movies, double feature with cartoons, newsrell and serial chapters. Some summer Sundays our parents would fill up the car with kids and lunch and we'd all go to Coney Island beach.
Gee it's been fun remembering some of the things we did all those many years ago. Not a single electronic item involved, LOL!

Pollytink you have the makings of a wonderful Diary book to past down to family and maybe they will do the same, as in wright books their on books to add to yours. Lovely story ti be sure.

I grew up inaburbof nyc, right n the border of queens and nassau counties. I have a brother 1-1/2 yrs older than me. I was a tom boy. My stories will be different from every other. I remember lighting fires with magnifying glasses. Jumping off the garage roof at about4 to get a broken arm, never happened, coz all the vroken bone kids got a new bike. Ripping shingle tiles off the garage roof and flinging them like frisbees at cars.. i stopped when i hit a cop car. Vraduated to my moms 45's. Wow, dix thos recordfly and smazh good.
digging a hole to china a out 3 feet deep and trying to get my cousin to fall in on easter zunday in his white suit, we covered it with sticks and leaves.
Making mudballs with rocks in them to throw during mudball fihts. (I was the youngest. Hanging out wirh bilky the kid across theztreet crom me. We made a zip line out of a rope we found in the garave and used pot holder and towels to slide down, till they all ripped.
me and billy taking all his looseleaf paper for first vrade and making paper airplanes and throwing them in everyones yard. Eating a bottle of chox,with him. Sneaking in his house when his parents were outshopping and playing with his fathers trains and setting fires on the tracks with the wire from the locomotive. Playing mary poppins off theroof with my bedsheets. Dont try this with an umbrella either, it doesnt work.
When i was about six or so, playing chicken on the railroad. Filing down pennies to try to get dimes out of the coin machines. At billyshouse, taking all the thorns off his moms rosebushes a few days becore judging. Getting in trouble for that and haveing to rake leaves...not us, we used the old electrolux to vacuume them up. At five or six, draggi.gour bikes to thetop of the slid to ride down. At three to cour, i would wonder the neighborhood,first anut betty for tea and sewing, then to kirbys houseto garden, then the millers then the knights, then turn the crner for more cookies and tea. Id end up arounf the corner and go to julias house and help her make dinner for stanly and stosh, have tea and cookies again and watch her sew, also, and watch soap operas.
I swear this is all true. At one point my mom put a sign around my neck that said do not feed me.
Oh, at a later age, found out i have adhd, hence the jumping and daredevilish actions. That was up to six when i moved down the block...thats another story.

Childhood Memories:

Well, I'm from Alabama and my parents were pretty poor. But I don't remember being unhappy in any way. My friends and I would break sage broom straw (remember the old brooms made from a bundle of straw) into straight pin sizes and 'sew' leaves together. We made skirts, hats, dresses, etc. We took wild berries and stained beautiful rings on our fingers. We played by the creek and stuck our foot in the damp sand, mounding it up and over our foot, then carefully slipping out the foot so the house didn't cave in. These houses were for frogs! We put pebbles and twigs around the house for a gate and other decoration. We were a lil naughty and pulled the 'step-ins' (underwear) down about 2 inches and operated on the other person playing doctor. We even played 'funeral'. I would lie down on edge of porch, my cousins picked their mom's gladioli's and covered me from waist down. They they would 'view' the deceased (me) by going by, talking about how natural she looked, and wailing to high heaven! I was the only one who could keep a straight face with my eyes shut and not laugh as they did this. May sound weird but my mother used to say poor people had poor ways. I guess we kids did for sure, lol! Then there was always making molasses candy for a treat; Mother cooked the molasses til just right and then we floured our hands and pulled and pulled and ate and ate it after rolling the candy in chopped peanuts. We played school on my cousin's steps after regular school. We picked blackberries and watched out for snakes. We made our own paper dolls and clothes from Sears Roebuck catalogs, etc. Lots of fun in the old days using our imagination. No tv, no computers, no record players, just radio.

I also forgot, i was bad to, playd doctor with billy across the street.
No one ever seemed to come look for me, id be gone all day
this was from three tosix. I guess things were different then
But i will tell you one thing...we still had child molesteresback then
we just didnt tell, or wed get our mouths washd out with brown soap.

Oh and wed go to the sumps areas that were fenced in as a reservior for water and go froggin and polin ( getting tadpoles) and paly in houss that were being built. On cranky days, wed sometimes break windows in the houses being built. I guss the six years of catholic school scared those younger years out of me for good. Im a goodie two shoes now.

Ohhh, Lynnie, you were a little devil, hahahahah. I could just see me trying some of that stuff. My backside would have been 'switched' off. I always had to go get the switch to whip me with and was instructed to be sure it was limber! (I'd try to find one that was dried out and would break after about the third lick across my backside/legs!)

when I was 3 my mom tells me I caught the back porch on fire. didnt burn anything down but dad spanked me so hard he swore he would never spank me again and he never did. Mom did all the correcting after that. LOL

We lived on a farm and my dad was a farm hand for the guy who owned the house. We moved when I was five. So I can tell what memories were age 5 or before.

I always had parakeets cause my uncle would bring me one. IF someting happened to it he would get me a new one.
One drowned in the toilet (I had nothing to do with it! We found it that way when we came home from the store. Another one got loose outside and my uncle climbed up this huge tall spruce tree trying to catch it LOL

I had a lab mix dad brought home when I was about one. They named him butterball but i couldn't say it so I called him Pudder. He was my friend my brother my playmate and my protector til I was 12. He had to be put to sleep with distemper.

I remember my dad telling me a bedtime story about the sandman. I used to dream that an elevator door would open up in my wall and the sandman would step out. He would sing to me and scatter sand and I would go back to sleep. I can still see that image in my mind.

OMG the Boxcar Children - my first grade teacher read that to us and we were very quiet and I still remember the warm feeling of that story. NOW, I'm reading the whole series to my Grandchildren and they LOVE it. This whole thing has blossomed into a very interesting adventure. The Am. Girl Doll story of Kit Kitridge is excellent history for children to see. And thru this - 3 quilter friends and I divided up the Hobo quilt blocks because Hobo's (of course) rode the boxcars. My Grama's house was marked with a Hobo sign - wish I knew which one!! Memories!!!

Thanks for sharing Pollytink - loved your story - thanks. You could write a book and warm everyone's hearts. \

This is now one of my favorite threads!

I had ten cousins all in one family that lived across the street from me so I always had plenty of kids to play with in addition to other neighborhood friends.

I use to love to play hop scotch in my back yard, roller skate the kind with the key! I played Jax, rode my bike and I loved playing with paper dolls we called them "cut outs" back then plus Yo Yo's the kind with the string! We had to amuse yourselves. No computers back then!!

I have 4 brothers and we were inseparable growing up. Our front yard was Lake Erie.We fished all year and my brothers took turns putting the worm on my hook. We had one bike to share.We ice skated and jumped iceburgs. We had bonfires almost every night of the year. Mom raised us by herself. We didn't have much materialistic stuff but we were spoiled with a lot of love and quality time with her and each other. Mom's gone now along with my oldest brother but the rest of us are still inseparable and we still go fishing as often as we can and I can put the worm on all by myself now : ) They are so proud of me lol - I will always know we had the best childhoods because of Mom's brand of spoiling

How fun is this!

I grew up in Louisville Kentucky. We didn't have a lot, but a whole lot of love from a large family. In the summer we would catch mason jars full of lightning bugs, make mud pies that my grandpa always sampled and go to play in the flooded street after a typical horrific afternoon summer storm that built up after a steamy humid day. Dad always had a huge garden and mom canned or froze everything. Because summers are so hot and we didn't have air conditioning a lot of the cooking for canning was done outside over an open fire. Me and my two sisters had to help, my favorites were pinching the skins off of the beets after they were blanched and dumped into a big wash tub of cool water from the garden hose and eating the salted cabbage we sliced up to be jarred for sour kraut. I spent a lot of my summer weeks at my Grandmother's farm in Elizabeth Town. My cousins and I had to rise early to get the cows in for milking that started at 6, shuck corn to feed the chickens, gather and clean eggs and help hoe the corn fields - that was well before they soaked corn seeds in round up! Often we would escape the summer heat by swinging on a wild grape vine and jumping into the creek down the hill. We had to take turns because someone always had to sit on the bank and sound a warning when a water moccasin or blue racer came floating down the creek. What a wonderful storybook childhood!

Those were the good o'l days.... where did they go? I remember in the summer at the park, which was only 4 blocks away from where I lived they had craft days, we would make crafts, and everyone would bring a can of some sort of vegetable and we would make mulligan stew over the open fire.... in a big black pot. It was the best ever! I went swimming everyday at the local pool which was also only 2 blocks away from where I lived, and in the winter (at the park they would flood the tennis court) and I would ice skate all winter, there was a warming house there so you could spend the whole afternoon there.... then playing outside till the street lights came on, we played ball in the road ( it was a dead end street) all the neighbor hood kids played and we had so much fun.... I miss those days for my grandchildren...

Did you notice how much time we spent outside compared to kids now a days?

I am in my 70's and am amazed at the fact that we all share so many memories. This is one I haven't read about yet. I have one brother 15 mos younger, 1 uncle 6 mos younger, 1 uncle 2 yrs older, 1 uncle 4 yrs older and so forth. My mom was the second oldest of 12 children. My brother and I spent summers on my grandparents farm and most weekends. I was usually the only girl in the group and we all loved playing cowboys and indians in the woods, which was about a three block walk across a field. A creek ran through these wood with a swinging bridge over it at one point. The creek banks were steep and there were many "grape" vines hanging from the trees. We played Tarzan a lot (as the only girl I always had to be Jane!) and would swing from those vines across the creek or from tree to tree. I really don't know why there was never a broken bone, but there wasn't. Many memories of those long hot summers, homemade ice cream, finding wildflowers with my grandmother, horseback riding, gathering eggs with my grandma, riding on the plow with my grandpa. I wish my grandkids had such wonderful memories.

Donnajean, yes, I noticed. We always had really wild card games when the weather was too bad to go outside, but it had to over 100 deg or below 0 deg before we would stay indoors all day!

I love your story

I was a lucky little girl..I am the youngest child in my family of 5 kids...and the only girl. So I got lots of attention from my entire family. But besides that, we kinda lived in two different worlds. We were being raised in Milwaukee, but during the summers we spent all our weekends and several weeks in a very small country town of 800 people up north. So we grew up with all the newer fancy things in life (swimming pools, rec centers, neighborhood clubs, zoo's, bus rides, fast foods and etc..) then when we came up north, we got the walking in a field, swimming in an open lake, river, camping, sleeping under the stars, wild blue berry picking, raspberries etc.. gardens, bear watching, little country stores, wildflower picking, snakes, woodticks, fire flies, cookouts, huge family gatherings, and church ones, etc... when we lived in Milw we did some of the items Lynnie did... oh the trouble we caused. Dropped water balloons on people from above the A n P grocery store roof, picked tulips from a guys garden to give to our mom on our way home from neighborhood club, climb up a garage and slide accross the huge black pipes connecting one building to another... two stories up, I was 4 years old and went ice skating with my older brothers accross the street, and I couldn't skate, so I got upset and wanted to go home, so I just left and never told my brothers.. they couldn't see me, because I was crawling on all fours accross a 4 lane road in Milw... my mother happen to look out and saw me... oops... lol Then a girlfriend and I decided to take a ride with a stranger and he took us from one side of Milw and dropped us off way on the other side... oh my mom made sure I knew I did wrong... oh did she... lol Then we made the official complete move up north..and at first I didn't like the move, because it seemed like we had less to do here. Until I started school 3 weeks later and became friends with a gal...and we came up with our own fun.. we would ride bike 10 miles into town to go to the Sunday movies, Dairy Queen or Parades... then we would ride bikes to go swimming, fishing for trout, row a boat in the ditch by her house in the spring... yup we were geeks lol... ride our bikes under the irragation system in the summer to cool off. Go behind the harvester to pick up taters, pick dandelions for wine making, (her mom) learned how to officially polka, polish foods, use to play in their clothes shoot, run down stairs and pile all the dirty clothes in one spot and then climb into the shoot and drop down.. lol

missmay your story reminds me of one of my favorite movies a tree grows in brooklyn oh i cannot think of all the actors in it but love the movie

My best memory is comimg home from school and seeing Mother quilting on her quilt hanging from the ceiling. Getting to see how much she had accomplised that day. We would pile our coats and books on the quilt and she would roll it up for the night. It hung over her bed. Then looking at it from the bottom. That to my Mother was the pretty part.

Now another memory.... my grandfather worked for the county highway department. He lived 21 miles from where the shop was, so they stored all the plow trucks etc at his farm and they even put in a underground fuel tank for his work vehicles. We knew right from the start, we could NEVER enter the shop where some was stored, nor ever touch his work items... so they never had issues with that. I remember coming to stay for a week or so at a time, and us kids would wait for grandpa to get home from work, and we would race down to see who would make it first to turn the handle to fill his fuel tank...or get his lunch box to get at his left over food to eat.. he always had left overs..now we know why he did...back then we didn't.. lol and sometimes we could go to work with him..that was a treat in its self..oh those were my special memories. One time we went to drop off his co-worker who had a farm, and he had baby kitties and I wanted one. So my grandpa made me call my mom at his house to ask if I could have one, and she said yes... I brought all four home, cuz I couldn't decide what one I liked best.. lololol I remember sitting on his lap steering the grader in the dump parking lot.. Now days no way can you take anyone with ya to work for the highway department. My dad was a contractor...owned his own business so we grew up with that also on a daily basis.

My fondest memory of all time... was my grandfather, mother and I building our log house together. From cutting down the balsam trees, to peeling the bark to drying them...to building the entire 42 x 36 foot two story house. My dad did the cement work..basement and all three fire places.. but then he had to keep working to keep money coming in for the new house we were building, my older brothers all had jobs..so it was down to us three..grandma cooked all the meals for us. I sure learned tons those three summers it took us... the worse part was peeling the bark off...sooooo sticky and yukky.... and her house is 100% old style log house...even using wood dowls, no spikes (nails) including my grandpa even made all the windows him self, we started in 1973 and moved in 1976. So I was 11 when we started, and I was using chainsaws, hatchets and etc... would I have allowed my kids...NOOOOOOOOO lolol.

I grew up in a neighborhood that was a circle, so mainly played with the kids on my end. We played outside more than in, climbing trees, made tent houses, rode our bikes all over, had Kool-Aid stands in the summer. Sliding on the hills behind our house on the golf course, everyday in the winter. We even went sliding on the steep long grass covered hills in the summer on cardboard boxes. Was great fun. You hardly ever called friends to play, you went over to their house, rang the doorbell and asked in person.