No TV

You know, I'm so glad we didn't have television until I was 10 years old. And even then, there was little on TV that we watched. We didn't watch TV every night, all night. Nor did we watch it all day, every day. Saturday morning there were cartoons -- Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Popeye, etc., but nothing else on after that, except for Hopalong Cassidy.

The few programs we did watch in the evening were The Lone Ranger, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, Roy Rogers, Liberace, and I Remember Mama.

But when I was little (before I was a grown up of 10) there was plenty else to do, and I was thinking about that today. What do children do these days?

I know my grand-daughter who is in third grade comes home laden down with homework, so that by the time she's finished doing the home work, there is no time for play. Don't they want children to play any more? Can't the children get the work finished in school, during school hours? My granddaughter is very smart. She really shouldn't even have homework. Plus, I never had home work in grammar school, so why do they have homework these days.

I came home and I played -- either I played with one or two of the neighborhood boys, pitching a ball or batting a ball, or climbing trees, or I played with my sister -- pushing a doll coach or playing brides or pretending I was a teacher and she was the student, or pretending I was a nurse, using my mom's nursing caps to make it more real. I also made nurses caps out of paper when mom's needed were being laundered and needed starching and ironing.

I often played with "bricks" -- which were like Legos, but they were made of wood. And I built villages with those bricks, or I built houses. I often sat down at my desk and designed houses. Of course, they were mansions, not small homes like the ones everyone in Runnemede lived in at that time.

So, I was wondering today, as it was such a beautiful day, and I don't see our few neighborhood children outside playing, are the children cloistered inside because they have homework, or do children these days not know what to do outside?