Here are just a few more of my older-than-dirt memories.
Many hours were spent making those 10-cent balsa wood airplane kits with a rubber band that made the propeller go.
You had to do a lot of cutting, gluing and putting tissue paper over the frames and the wings.
I shan’t forget the many sledding trips to the golf course in the winter.
Sometimes you could make it over a bunker.
At the end of our porch you could yell mulie, mulie and a little bug would come out of a cone in the sand. I found out later in life they were ant lions.
When Rev. Thompson used to plow Gene Biek’s garden with his horse, we could get nice fishing worms.
May baskets were a big thing for us kids. We would get wild flowers from the local woods and made our baskets out of old wallpaper scraps. Usually they were cones we pasted together.
Do kids still blow the puffs off old dandelions that dried up after blooming?
Games we used to play indoors were bunko, cootie, cat, fish, hide the thimble and, of course, Monopoly.
We found another way to get fish worms was put a pitch fork in the ground and shake it back and forth real hard and the worms came right up out of the ground.
Gosh, how I remember the rationing we went through during World War II.
We saved grease and cut the ends out of our tin cans and flattened them.
Gosh, sugar, shoes, gasoline, even whiskey, were rationed. Don’t ever want to see that again.
Not only did we like our comic books, but we also enjoyed our Big Little Books.
I still have some of those great prizes we used to get in a five-cent Crackerjack box.
We were so hard-up we used our mother’s corn broom as a horse when we played cowboys.
My great-aunt made me a saw with a string and a button.
There were not a lot of cereals in the ’30s, but I like Shredded Wheat as it had things in the box you could color with crayons.
Marbles at recess, make a pot in the dirt by the heel of our shoe and stand back and shoot for the pot.
Also, we did stand back and shoot for the pot. We also played bunko with dice.
We had a ball with stilts my dad made for us kids. Of course, our Halloween costumes were not store-bought, but homemade.
I used to like to put peanuts in a six-ounce Coca Cola bottle when I drank it.
I remember the safety patrol kids at Oak Street School with their white straps and belts.
The captain wore a gold badge and the others wore silver badges.
Old Ralph Tice used to weld my bike frame and only charged me 35 cents.
I remember Bazooka Joe cartoons and bubblegum.
We used to collect tin foil and make balls.
We played on John Kauffman’s father’s old truck on our way home from Oak Street in the alley along his house.
I could go on, but I’m 83 and a lot of my memory has disappeared.

“Cardinal Charlie” Gill writes a nostalgic weekly column about growing up in the Grand Old City.
Email him at cardinalcharlie@hotmail.com.