Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun

SONGS TO SING, GAMES TO PLAY, AND PLACES TO EXPLORE

relatively good hockey. When one of the nearby town teams was going to play a competitive game against another town team, they’d phone up and ask if I could help reinforce their team. I played centre and I did a little bit of coaching, although there was a coach in town. One brother played defense, a second played goal, and Dad was the referee. As I said, I was “athletics crazy.” Just across from the railway tracks was the sports field. There was a race track there, and before I went to school I’d run around the race track eight times because it was five miles—and then I’d walk to school. I was fortunate because my Dad was a station agent and they needed a clerk to meet two passenger trains—one at eleven o’clock at night and the other at six o’clock in the morning. I made application for the job and I got it when I was only fifteen years old. I’d meet the early morning passenger train, and rather than go back to bed I’d jump on my bicycle, go out to the outskirts of town where there was a small field where the ducks used to come in the morning. I’d shoot five or six ducks, come back home, have a quick breakfast, and then go off to school. Like all kids, on Saturday we’d get our Saturday nickel. We used to pool our nickels, buy a package of cigarettes, and go climb the trees on the outskirts of town where we would smoke the cigarettes. But that was when I was young. I wanted to be a professional hockey player and my dad told me, “Professional hockey players don’t smoke and they don’t drink.” And I didn’t! Not even a drink of beer until I was 24 years old. SONGS TO SING, GAMES TO PLAY, AND PLACES TO EXPLORE Peggy Sherman recalls Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, as a wonderful place in which to grow up. I had twin sisters who were eight years older than I. Their mother died just after they were born, so my Father married her sister. The four of us were born with just a year and a half between. We admired and looked up to our older sisters, but the four of us Go Outside and Play 55 were very close and we did a lot of things together. My father died when I was six. In summer we went on picnics, and it didn’t seem to matter where we went as long as we took something to eat. We picked berries. Always on Saturday we picked flowers for the house— tiger lilies, roses, etc., as they came along. We played soft ball, “work-up” it was called. All you needed was a pitcher, catcher and batter. If there was a fourth you had a fielder. We often played on the corner lot just outside our yard, and you know how noisy we could be. Sunday evenings it used to upset Mother that we were out there making so much noise. She’d say, “Why don’t you come in and we’ll sing some nice hymns?” She’d play the piano and we’d have some kids come that never came to Sunday School. I remember singing “You in Your Small Corner and I in Mine.” And after singing we would always have some cocoa or something. We played marbles and jacks. Everybody had their tin of marbles, we called them alleys and they were made of glass. And there was hopscotch. We used pretty pieces of broken pottery for our toss for playing hopscotch. Our house was just on the brow of a hill that went down to the river road and then on down to the river. In winter we had our choice of which of four hills we wanted to slide down. When we didn’t want to wait for somebody to came back up with the sleigh, well, my father had a big box of shingles left over from shingling the roof—so we used those shingles to slide on down the hill. We went skating practically every night, home by nine o’clock. We played fox and goose and made angels in the snow. I played with dolls. I can’t remember for how long, but I had one beautiful baby doll that I just adored. We played house a lot...