Ray's Corner

Making our Own Entertainment

"...Hello Chris and Jill; this is Grampy. I’m gonna tell you some stories of when I was a little feller, about your size, when I lived way back in the woods here from Bear River; we had ten of us kids in the family there was six boys and four girls, and we was very poor and didn’t have much to do with, in fact we was so poor that every time the mouse went buy our place he’d put his front paws up over his eyes and run buy on his hind feet because he knew that if he ever came into our place he’d never get anything to eat and he’d starve to death. So,……..we didn’t have any radios and TV’s and there weren’t any cars around there then and all we had for entertainment was a mouth organ and we used to play that mouth organ at nights when we was kids and we used to sing and we’d make our own games and play outdoors in the summer time and in the wintertime we make bob sleds and we’d make snowmen and we’d play around like that and make our own fancy and funny things because we didn’t have any place to go. We couldn’t go to any theatres, we didn’t have any ski places to go to or anything like that. We did have a lake up by home that we used to go up there at night and slide on the ice on our feet because I put skates on once and went to skate and made one run and fell down and hit the back of my head and I never put skates on after that. Well, in the wintertime when the roads was broke down good and smooth we used to have the hills handy to home we used to go coasting on these hills with hand sleds, there’d be about 25 or 30 of us. We’d go out at night with the hand sleds and we’d coast them all together and we’d go down the hill for maybe, oh, a quarter of a mile and then we’d all have to turn around and haul our sleds back up the hill again. ..."