While some painted by numbers, my mom cooked by the smoke alarm – Part Two

Atari, Colecovision and the future wave of electronic gaming systems hadn’t yet come along – those were still a few years off. The most sophisticated things we had were pocket football games with super bad graphics, and of course “Operation!” which was always out of batteries because no one had a steady hand. We read books, played Checkers, Candy Land, Chinese jump rope, and Twister. If we wanted to be spooked out, we had the Ouija (pronounced “wee-gee”) board and the Magic 8 Ball.

There was always the Big Wheel to get around in style (and there was no recovery once your plastic tire wore down and got a “flat”), and if you didn’t want to go anywhere, you sat down on the Sit and Spin right after lunch…going around and around and around until you vomited the meal onto the sidewalk. Of course there were the yellow cones that you strapped on your feet and held the rubbery strings and nearly broke your neck when the cones finally gave way to your weight and collapsed. The pogo stick was for advanced kids who could walk and chew gum at the same time. Most of us uncoordinated kids just stuck to the old-fashioned hoola hoop and the lemon twist that you put around your ankle and skipped with (if you were really uncoordinated, the lemon twist was known as the “shin buster”).

If all your toys of the day still didn’t make your world go ‘round, you always had your brothers and sisters to beat up on, introducing them to the “Horse” family. “Charlie” Horse was rough, but his brothers “Irving” and “Pony” always hurt more. Then you had the dreaded “melon baller” (you firmly grasped the person’s head down by their ears and with the palm of your hands applying most of the pressure, you forced your hands up and it “burned” the sides of the skull for a moment or two). The meaner version of that was the “match stick” (you made a fist and with a pressured stroke, you ran your knuckles fast upwards from the base of the skull, which left the victim howling). There was always a good old game of “Flinch” to be played (palms up on the bottom, palms down on the top; the person on the bottom shakes their hands and tries to slap the hands on top. If they miss, they have to take the top position). The meanest of the mean was the post-sunburn “lavin peachie” (a good slap on your lobster back).