WHAT DID KIDS DO BEFORE VIDEO GAMES?

When I was a kid in the back hills of Kentucky.

Finding Fireflies, four-leaf clovers, baby rabbits, watching spiders spinning their webs, was good for a few hours of entertainment.

Catching Craw fish in the creek offered an interesting challenge  the craw fish  for some reason always scuttled backward to hide beneath a rock,when you tried to catch them .

 Looking for foxfire  presented lots of excitement when you could find it.

Now for those of you who may not know what foxfire is, it isn't a search engine on the internet.

Foxfire for us kids was a type of decaying wood that glowed at night giving off a phosphorescent  light you could see long before you got to it.

Growing up knowing all these things, about country life gave us a fascinating world to explore.

To catch a craw-fish you had to have it back up into your hand that was the trick to catching it .

And to use it for fish bait you just used just the tail part to be successful.

Knowing a four-leaf clover meant good luck, us kids would  sit for hours trying to find one, so we'd be lucky.

All the little girls picked plantain leafs from the field,and counted the veins running through the leaf, which supposedly would tell them how many children they were going to have someday.

And the little boys all wanted a pony, of which most families couldn't afford one even if it was available, so they used  broom handles as a make believe.

Making bows and arrows, was something the boys enjoyed doing when they weren't riding their make believe pony.

Finding a peace of wood straight enough to be an arrow, was a bit challenging,  as well as finding a length of string strong enough for the bow.

These were just a few of the non-electrical ways us kids found to amuse our selves in the days before modern day games were invented.

Coleman Schell