Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun

WHOOPIE TI YI YO!

WHOOPIE TI YI YO! Reprinted with the permission of Victor Carl Friesen and HSBC Bank Canada. In Pioneer News 21, 3 (Fall 1998), published by the HSBC. Victor Carl Friesen dreamed of being a cowboy. His interest was fostered by weekly funny papers, radio programs, books, and movies. So I was a cowboy in my heart and mind, an ordinary individual and defender of the right at home in the great outdoors, alive to my surroundings and forward-looking. The world lay before me. Being a “cowboy” affected my work, and everyday chores I had to do, from chopping wood to gathering eggs, for I performed them with a self-reliance that made my parents proud, they not knowing of my new-found sense of honor, my code of the West. I was nothing daunted by whatever tasks fell to me. Each presented “visions of unlimited possibilities.” Carrying in wood was a replenishing of the “campfire” in the kitchen range (with Mother as camp cook). Collecting eggs was a scrounging for food in a “vast treeless plain.” It was in my play, however, that my being a cowboy most overtly affected my activities. For several months on end, I walked about with a gun at my hip. It was wooden revolver of my own carving (with a handle wrapped in hockey stick tape) fitted into a black denim holster. The latter I asked my mother to sew for me, and she also added a wide belt to which she had stitched a row of spent cartridges from somebody’s .32 calibre rifle. My further accouterments included a high round-topped farmer’s straw hat, which I had soaked in water and reshaped to flatten the crown, to give a Spanish aspect. To this end, too, I had added a wide silk band and bent up the brim all around. Then I had a colored handkerchief about my neck as a bandanna, and one of Dad’s old vests over my regular shirt and pants. The vest, of course, was too big for me and did hang much below the belt line of my usual trousers. Sometimes, for show, I wore my older sister’s trim rubber boots under the pant legs. That footwear, I felt, had the appearance of a real cowboy boot that would fit well in a stirrup—if Creating Their Own Equipment 151 only I had a saddle and, more importantly, if only I had a horse. Ah, well… Dad supplied the final item of my outfit—a rope. It was a new one and, full of twists, would not coil smoothly. I remember soaking it in a tub of water and then circling it between two posts to take the kinks out of it. Then, since I had found a brass “eye” among some old junk, this was spliced into it to give a genuine lariat or lasso. I used it for letting myself down from the barn loft, where I sometimes slept as though I were a hired hand. The Spanish words “lasso” and “lariat” had a nice Western sound to my ear and, dressed in my assembled outfit, I used them pronto on all occasions. I also bolstered my vocabulary with Spanish terms like remuda, arroyo and sombrero and particularly liked that language’s names for kinds of horses—pinto and palominos. When one of my cousins, another “cowboy,” came for a visit, we would ride the range together, horseless, running about like loping horses, playing Cowboys and Rustlers among the willow clumps of our pasture, our log smokehouse being the guardroom or jail for lawbreakers. We practised lassoing fence posts, drawing guns from holsters, and rounding up dogies. Whoopie Ti Yi Yo! INFECTED BY A RADIO BUG Rolland Lewis recalls life in the Point Grey district before it became part of Vancouver. On a number of occasions I have somewhat facetiously remarked that I had the good sense to be born into a “comfortable ” Point Grey family. My father was a small employer, about 20 employees at the peak of his business, in an industry which held up well when I was a child during the Depression years. Consequently, I had a secure, stable upbringing. During my young years, I did the usual boyhood things, such as play cowboys and Indians, build model boats, and play “scrub.” The content of our weekly play was often determined by the nature of the Saturday afternoon matinee for kids at the local theatre. 152 Freedom to...