Kid's Stuff: What Did You Miss?

Yep.

Anything that requires you to be upright under your own power I never learned.

Did everything on the list as a kid except ice skating (I think the first rink in our county opened when I was in my early 20s, and before that nobody had skates because the water on rivers and streams rarely was solid enough to support a bunch of kids on skates). I’d add sledding and climbing trees to the list.

Roller skates were crappy things in the mid-1960s, but we all had 'em, and would try them out on the roads or driveways where the asphalt was smooth enough for long enough. And of course “sidewalk surfing” was briefly a fad so that those of us who weren’t in southern California could pretend we were sort of getting in on the surfing thing (which we wanted to do, thanks to Jan and Dean, and then the Beach Boys), but the skateboards were only marginally better than the skates back then.

Skateboards were invented with I was 25 years old.

My mother was convinced I was an uncoordinated clod. Then some fool kid fell off a bike cracked his head open and died (helmets were utterly unknown in those bygone days). That was it for me. No bike, no roller or ice skate, skate boards and the like were unknown. There was something called a skatebox, a kind of do it yourself scooter. And only girls jumped rope.

On the other hand, we played either a baseball type game (“boxball”) or touch football, or at least had a catch nearly every day of the year, weather permitting. These were in the days that cars had not become ubiquitous (say, 1940-1950) and we played on the street. We didn’t play basketball, although I did some in HS.