Along the Way: ‘You could get your eye put out’

Once upon a time before television and video games.…We rode willow sticks for horses and shot each other dead with a finger, or with a cap pistol.

And we pretended there were cowboy boots on our bare feet and jingle-jangling spurs on the boots.

Southern Oklahoma in the early 1940s was like most other places in the country for buckaroos and bad guys ?— roles were interchangeable depending on what you wanted to be on any given day — and the only taboo I can recall was sword-fighting because, as every kid in the country was told on a daily basis by his mom.

“You could get your eye put out.”

You could get your eye put out with a BB gun, too, until you were 12. At that age, if you were still alive and not in reform school, you qualified for an official Red Ryder lever-cocking, spring air, smooth bore Daisy Air Rifle.

If you never missed, you could drop 650 bad guys, if you could find them.

More likely, you could put 650 BB-dents in a tin can that had once held Borden Condensed Milk or Pet Evaporated Milk (marksmanship you yearned for with armor-piercing bullets while the cans were full and in mom’s pantry, considering how bad the stuff tasted).

But the age of 12 when a boy became BB gun-worthy always seemed too far away, especially when you were 10 or 11. And so you forgot about air rifles and made do with your finger or a cap gun. Exploding caps came in a roll that fit inside the cylinder of a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry or Buffalo Bill revolver.

None of us ever heard of computers but we knew what to do with a mouse.

A mouse, preferably dead, was what you put it in the pocket of your overalls and when you saw the little girl down the block, you’d tell her to close her eyes. When she opened them she saw a dead mouse and — hopefully ?— went screaming and running into her house.

Lawanda was different. Dad-gummed Lawanda would grab the mouse by the tail, twirl it around a couple of times and hand it back to you.

We wouldn’t let her play cowboys.

The Western Hero wasn’t our only game. We take the metal hoops off a wooden barrel, nail a small strip of wood (like the head of a golf club) to a larger strip and push the hoop all over town. This homemade amusement was called the “hoopy-T.”

We made all kinds of walking stilts, and played ice hockey on dirt roads (we didn’t have a lot of ice in southern Oklahoma).

We had to play a version of ice hockey called “tin can shinny” in secret because those sticks could. . .put our eyes out.

I can’t recall at what age you qualified for a pocketknife, but it preceded BB guns. You whittled your stickhorse from a willow branch with that knife. And if Mom was nowhere near, you could engage in mumblety-peg, in which contestants flipped the knife from various distances and positions and tried to make the blade stick in the ground or in a log.

Tree-climbing was a major sport but not something that could hold the interest of a kid for more than one ascent of a stately and beautiful sycamore.

We’d fill a gunny sack, made of burlap, with straw. Then we’d tie the sack closed and affix it to a rope, hung from the branches of what was known in Oklahoma as a “horse apple tree.” That gunny sack on a rope made a perfect swing.

The most fun was with toys or equipment we constructed ourselves. Today’s kids are denied that privilege. Incredible toys and noisemakers today are bought at huge prices off store shelves for buckaroos and bad guys.

Imagination isn’t required — it is pre-packaged and provided for the kids.

I saw an advertisement for a new computer game the other day, something like, “let video games read your mind with this new headset.” And I wondered how much fun that could be.

With all the wonderful electronic, cordless, chirping-tinkling-whirring video marvels and the amazing virtual-reality of today’s toys — do they even call them “toys?” — I wonder what kids today do when they get bored.

Whatever it is, I hope they’re careful.

They might put an eye out.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson was the first inductee into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame. He writes a Friday commentary for the Green Valley News.