Jump Board

             A Jump Board works on the same principal as a Seesaw, except it is not attached in the middle as a Seesaw is. You use a plank that is about a foot wide and close to two inches thick and somewhere around 10 to 12 feet long. You center this board over a log that is around 10 to 12 inches in diameter and about 2 feet long. Instead of sitting on the board like a Seesaw you stand on the board, one person on each side of the board which is centered over the log. Each balances themselves on their end of the board and they start to seesaw back and forth

picking up momentum as they go until when one person comes down on his end of the board and sends the other person up in the air which results in the person in the air coming down with more force which will send the other person even higher. Eventually they are propelling each other higher and higher until they will be going up in the air with their feet being 4 to 6 feet off the ground. If one person comes down and hits the board crooked the result will be a spill for both of them.

            If one of the persons on the Jump Board weighs a good deal more than the other, they can either center the board more on the side of the log of the person that weighs less or the heaver person can move in on his end of the board until a balance is reached. It looks dangerous but I never saw anyone get hurt seriously doing this fun sport.

            Where I went to school girls were particularly good at this sport. Both girls and boys would many times position the Jump Board next to the side of the school building to help them keep their balance. Many times there was a girl on one side of the Jump Board and a boy on the other side. It was a lot of fun. 

Fist fighting

              This was not an everyday event or even an every week event but fist fights were something that happened every so often. We did not have school monitors during recess. The teacher did whatever it is that teachers do during the recess time and the students played outside.

Occasionally a fight would break out between two boys. They would fight until one boy was beating up on the other or until they were tired. I never knew of boys getting into trouble with the teachers for fighting, it may have happened but I don’t remember it.

            The last fight I had in school was when I was about 15 years old. Vernon Serratt and I got into a fight. I have no idea what we fought about. We went at each other for about 5 to10 minutes. He was a year older than me but no larger. We most likely weighed about the same.

I was wading into him and giving it my all. I backed him up the width of the school building. He gave me as much I gave him. I thought I won the fight but he gave me a black eye and there was no end of the teasing I had to endure because of that black eye.

            I went toe to toe with my older brother many times and I always came out the loser. I would give him some good licks before I turned tail and ran.

            One day at recess we were playing basketball and my second cousin and I were bad mouthing each other during the game. One of the school bus drivers decided take up for my second cousin. He started coming on to me pretty strong and my second cousin and I both turned on him. In the course of our encounter I made a statement about the character of his mother.  He went to the principal and complained. The principal came out and got my side of the story. He told me to apologize which I promptly did. The bus driver did not like it that the principal did not give me a whipping. So the principal and the driver got into an argument in which the driver told the principal that if he did not give me a whipping that he would give the principal a whipping.

The principal said here I am come on and do it. Thankfully the bus driver backed down. My take on the situation was the principal did not think that an adult bus driver should mix in with boys at play.

Spelling and math competition

           We had spelling and math competitions through my grade school years. I did ok as a general rule, but I never won a competition as an individual. When we would compete as a team we won some and lost some. There were some girls in my classes who were simply too good at spelling for me to ever win.

            I consistently made an A in spelling. This was not because I was a great speller but I was great at short term memorization. The teacher would give us 20 to 30 spelling words for the next day and I would memorize them in short order. The next day I could spell them all. One week later it would have been a different story if I had ever been tested on those same words.

            I would have most likely won some math competition but for one boy who was in my class who was a whiz at math. He was not good in other subjects and he spoke with a stutter, but he could make the chalk fly when he was at the board doing math problems. 

The way we did math competition was to chose two people to begin at the board with chalk and an eraser the teacher would give the problem and let them write it on the board. Then she would say begin. The student who got through first with the correct answer would win and the next student in line would come to the board and the process would repeat itself. When all the students had been to the board, whoever was the person who won the last problem was the winner. I don’t remember if the math whiz won all the time. He most likely did not. I don’t remember me ever winning. Although, I was most likely in the top 25 percent of my class.

Basketball

Basketball was ’’THE” sport where I went to school. I began playing basketball on the Junior Varsity when I was in the seventh grade. This was a small mountain town with a consolidated school district which bussed kids from twenty miles away and still only had a school population of around 200 in first grade through 12 grades.

Seventh through eighth grade was Junior Varsity and tenth through twelfth grade was Senior Varsity. As I remember it you could only have 15 players on a team. We played a few teams that had 15 players but most had less. When I first played while in the seventh grade we had ten or twelve players but by the time I reached Senior Varsity around seven to nine players which meant that the better players were expected to play the whole game without a substitution.

            The best record our team had of any year that I played basketball was my first year. our Junior Varsity team that year had a record of twenty two wins to two losses. I was the first person to come off the bench to substitute for the point guard position. My older brother was the starting point guard. I got to play a good bit that first year and I was the starting point guard every year after that through the twelfth grade.

            The only game I got to start during that first year was the championship game at an Invitational Tournament  at Harrison Arkansas. The coach started the second string players and when we were down about 20 points he put the first string players in and they would come storming back and get ahead by a few points then he would put us second string players in and the team we were playing would charge ahead of us again. He did this for the game making sure that the other team would win the game which they did with the help of our coach.

            After the game he took us out to a nice restaurant and told us to order whatever we wanted to eat because he would pay for our meal. I don’t know who paid him to let the home team win but it was obvious to us that there had been a payoff. The other tournament game we lost was because of our overconfidence. We had already beat the team two time that year during regular season, so we thought we have this game already won. We lost.

            In my best year I average 20 point per game. My highest scoring game was 48 points.

I had two people talk to me about a basketball scholarship during my High School years. One was my High School coach. He told me there was no question about it that he could get be a scholarship at Clinton Teacher College. The other person was a referee at a game that we played in Hector Arkansas. He asks where I planned on going to college. I told him I did not have the money to attend college. He said if you can play ball all the time like you did tonight you can get a full scholarship to attend college. At that time I had no plan whatsoever to attend college. Two years later I was married and enrolled in California Baptist University and working my way through school. I did not even attend a basketball game during my college years.

Softball

           Softball was not an organized sport where I went to school. We played softball during recess at school. The number of players depended on how many people wanted to play on a given day. Two of the better players would flip a coin to see who would chose first and then they would alternate choosing until all persons who wanted to play had been chosen. This meant that sometimes we would have less than nine on each team and sometimes more than nine. Very seldom would there be the normal nine on each team.

            The softball was used, or maybe a better word might be mostly used up. Often times the cover on the ball was missing so the size of the ball varied depending on how much unraveling had taken place. The bats were pretty well used up also and the number was two or three. We had no adult supervision, no umpires and no referees. We called our own game. Sometimes arguments would ensue and mostly peer pressure was what kept things from getting out of hand. We could not play nine innings in the time allotted for recess so whichever team was ahead at the end of recess was declared the winner.   

Running Base & Stink Base

 Two games we played in my school in the Ozarks that I have never seen reference to in any way was Running Base and Stink Base. Any number of people could play the games. Two of the better runners would flip a coin to see who would get first choice in choosing his team. They would then alternate in choosing until all people who wanted to play had been chosen.

            You would take a stick and draw opposing lines in the dirt. The distance between the two opposing lines would depend on what land was available. I would say that the distance was usually about the distance between home base and second base on a baseball diamond. Sometimes we set out of bounds as off the school property and sometimes we set no out of bounds.  The object was to capture all the opposing players. One team would send out a player from its base and when the opposing player would come after him a faster runner would be sent who you would hope would catch the runner from the first team. The player who had touched his home base last was considered poison. If he caught the player he was chasing before someone from the opposing team touched him that person was considered captured and they would continue back to the base of the one who captured him. The captured person would then be a member of the team which had captured him and when one team had captured all the players on the opposing team the game was over.

            Stink Base was different in that on the right of each line drawn in the dirt you would draw a circle attached to the line and each captured player was placed in the circle. If one of his team members could touch his out stretched hand before being captured by the opposing team he was free to go back and actively compete for his team. Each person who has been placed into the circle (Stink Base) had to have one foot inside the circle. He could reach out as far as his arms could stretch as long as he left at least one foot inside the circle. When all people of an opposing team were captured the game was over. 

            I preferred playing Stink Base to Running Base because there was no penalty to Running Base. I believed that some boys would intentionally get caught so they could be with their friends. We mostly played Stink Base. I never did see a game won, but I think it had to do with time restraint. We played during recess at school. We had at most 45 minutes which with the number of players it was not possible to complete a game.   

Clearing new ground –We had 140 acres on our farm in Arkansas. My father purchased our farm over the course of years. The first purchase was when he mustered out of the Army. That was the land on which our house was located and it was 60 acres. The next track the land that he bought was across the road and it was 40 acres. He later bought a track land behind the 40 acres which was 20 acres. Around half of the 60 acre plot was covered in timber. The 40 acre plot had somewhere between five and 10 acres which were timber. The 20 acre plot was all timber.

The first 60 acres had somewhere between 20 to 30 acres that had trees covering it. It was this land that we were cutting down trees and turning the land into agriculture farm land the clearing of trees was done mostly in the winter months. We would cut down the large trees and turn them into wood to burn in the wood heater which we used to heat our home. The smaller limbs and underbrush we piled up to dry out and we would have large bond fires when the wood was dry enough to burn. This was time consuming since we cut the trees down with a cross cut saw. Also it was hard work but most work on a farm is farm work