One particular favorite in our neighborhood was Old Tin Alley, also known as Kick the Can. It was really just a game of glorified Hide and Seek. The person who was chosen to be "It" kicked a can (or a ball in our case), and while "It" ran to retrieve the can, all the other kids ran to hide. The perfect hiding place would be one that could easily be exited, because the whole point was to beat "It" back to "home base" once you were spotted. Hiding up a tree was a bad idea, because "It" would just wait beneath the tree to tag you when you came down (I learned that after a hundred or so tree climbs.) A good hiding place, for instance, would be behind the rocking chair on the porch -- Easy to be spotted, but easy to escape at break-neck speed. Therefore, a skilled "Old Tin Alley" player wasn't necessarily a good hider or seeker, but a fast runner.
Another favorite in our neck of the woods was Red Rover. The neighborhood kids would split up into two teams and form two lines facing each other with their hands held tightly. The first team would decide whom they wanted from the other team and then chant, "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Frances right over." Of course, they would pick me because I was the smallest and could never break through their line. If the kid they called over could break through their line, he got to steal one of their players and take him back to his side. After a jillion and a half rounds, the team with only one player left was the big loser.
My all-time favorite game to play was Swing the Statue. I don't know if other kids around the world played this or if we made it up, but I LOVED it (mostly because I was very agile and could contort myself into the best statues.) "It" would grab each player by the arm and swing him around and around any number of times and then let him go. When "It" turned you loose, your job was to fall (which was inevitable), and freeze into the wierdest contortion possible. After all the players had been flung into statue positions, "It" got to choose which one looked the funniest. The funniest statue then became "It." A variation of the game was for "It" to secretly think of an animal before he did the slinging, and whichever player looked the most like the animal "It" had imagined beforehand was the winner.
Another honorable mention was "Devil in the Ditch." I think we may have made this one up, too. There was this huge ditch beside Coach Henderson's house (he was our high school's principal, and he lived across the street from us), and that ditch called out to children in the area. A ditch like that just needed kids in it -- it must have been five feet deep and ran the full length of his side yard! The game went something like this: "It" was the devil and the ditch was hell. (Can you guess that I had a good Baptist upbringing?) All the little angels would jump across the width of the ditch, trying to avoid the devil's grasp. If the devil caught you and pulled you into the ditch, you became one of his little demons and worked with him to catch more angels. If a very small angel with short legs (picture me as a six-year-old) had a hard time clearing the width of the ditch, the devil wouldn't have to work very hard to get her into hell. She would just fall into the ditch on her own - her own weak flesh taking her down into the pit... Anyway, the last angel standing won the game.
Other games were Freeze Tag (anybody remember that one?), Kickball, Chinese Chase, and Softball (played in the empty cul-de-sac). The possibilities were endless, and we got tons of exercise. There were very few fat kids back then - We were skinny and we couldn't help it! We didn't know what boredom was except on rainy days! Oh, those misty, water-colored memories of days gone by - when kids were kids, neighbors were friends, and going to church was as natural as eating, sleeping, and breathing...
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