I enjoy remembering how things were back in the 1970’s when I was a growing up. As children we seemed to have had more unstructured free time than kids do these days. For entertainment we had broadcast T.V. and radio, Cassette tapes, and L.P.’s (otherwise known as vinyl long-playing records, for anyone born after 1985 who has no idea what I’m referring to), in addition to sibling rivalry.
There was no internet access or cell phones, game boys or Wii. Video games were rare. A boy across the street from me (Dan) had an Atari game system so most of the neighbor kids would go over to his house to play at least once a week. We got a Pong game from Radio Shack in the late 70’s. Other than that, we played outside on nice days and entertained ourselves with imaginations and indoor games or books on rainy days.
My sister and I frequently played the board games Monopoly and Life, and our mom taught us how to play cards. She was good at solitaire, and we also played Canasta. She taught us how to play poker, and we usually bet with cookies or sometimes my sister and I would play “strip poker” (we would load up on coats and scarves beforehand so we never actually had to take our clothes off). Like most kids we built “forts” out of dining room chairs, couch cushions and blankets.
A wonderful cheap “toy” that gave us days of fun was a cardboard refrigerator box. My dad would go down to Almvigs (local appliance store) and grab one from the side of the store where they were discarded. We would use it as our fort in the living room, perhaps cutting a peephole in one side. We would “camp” in the living room with sleeping bags in the box. Then after it started to get a little trashed, we would take it out to the front yard and my dad would close it up with my sister and I inside, and rattle us around (I think he would roll us down the very gentle slope in our front yard). We thought it was just about the most fun ever. The other kids on the block enjoyed coming over and joining in on the ruckus as well. Eventually the box would completely break down and we would flatten it out in the front yard and play Lava Monster. This entailed wearing socks on our hands and feet and trying to run/scramble up the slippery cardboard before the Lava Monster (usually me) attacked you; then you were the lava monster.
The house we grew up in was built in 1942 and was Cape Cod style. It was two-stories plus a basement. Originally it had an oil furnace so there was an air-return in the hallway that went down to the basement. Our parents had the oil furnace removed a few years after buying the house in 1970 and installed electric baseboard heaters. This meant the air-return grate was just covering an opening that went from the upstairs hallway down to the basement laundry room. My sister and I soon learned that we could easily remove this grate, and lie on the floor and stick our head down the hole, and scare the daylights out of mom when she was down in the laundry room.
The house also had a laundry chute which went down to the laundry room, and was about 8 feet from the air return vent opening. The proximity of the air-return opening and the laundry chute inspired my sister and I to invent a fairly ingenious game that we eventually named “Retard City”. I recall telling my little sister to go downstairs and sit on top of the washer, and then I would drop things down the laundry chute – like her favorite stuffed animals, my blanket, a toy, or maybe some dirty laundry. As I was shoving things down the laundry chute to her, I would yell “mail delivery!”. We had tied an old bicycle basket to a piece of rope, and I lowered that down the air-return hole. I would yell “Retard Truck!” as I lowered the basket, and she would load some stuff back in for me to haul upstairs. This kept us entertained for hours.
The name “retard” became associated with the game because a few times a year we would donate used clothing and toys to certain charities. The ones I remember coming regularly were the Blind and the Mentally Retarded. Our mom would write either Blind or M.R. on the bags and leave them out near the sidewalk, as instructed for pick up. So originally I would yell “Mentally Retarded!” down the air-return, but later we somehow shortened the game to “Retard City”. I also recall our dad started singing “Everything’s up to date in Retard City”, to the tune of “Kansas City” (from Oklahoma). Apparently us kids were little muses for his sarcastic and offbeat sense of humor.
Our dad was (and still is) a real goofball. He would sing and say weird things, and generally enjoyed leading us to believe he was slightly off kilter. Some of the nonsense-words I remember him saying were “Asieu” (‘aszhew’), and yelling “Aqaba!” (a reference from “Lawrence of Arabia”) in the morning as he stretched. He said this helped him wake up in the morning. He and my mom also knew a few French, German and Latin words/phrases so sometimes they would throw those in the mix to confuse (or disclude) my sister and I. He made up nicknames for all the family members (and we in turn made up some slightly unflattering ones for him). All in all, there are a lot of good memories of fun times.
Jen Knapp, Realtor 