ANOTHER STORY

When I was a lad everyone in town had livestock behind their house. Many had milk cows and pigs. Others had chickens, turkeys and ducks. Several had big barns for their livestock and to store the hay they fed them. One of the barns also had two milking stalls where it was always dry no matter how much it rained or snowed. This story is going to be about two of these barns. There was one south and east of our house about 150 feet and one directly east about 300 feet. There were a lot of fences and a few chicken coops also in the area at the center of the block.

We played war in and around all of these structures with rubber strips cut from inner tubes (the real red rubber tubes from Brazil were by far the best but there weren't many of them available). We would wrap one end around our index finger, pull it back as far as we could, aim it at someone and let it go. If it hit you when you were close it hurt like HE_ _, if you were far away you just knew you were hit. If you were hit you were dead and couldn't play until the next game. Sometimes you would see someone hiding inside the barn and only a small patch of them would be showing through a hole in the siding or through the poles. When that happened you would just pull back the rubber strip and let them have it through the hole but not release the strip. It was always fun to get this shot because there was never any doubt that they were hit. Anyone on the block could hear the scream from the one that got it. The head and neck were off limits for aiming points---if you accidently got hit there it was still a kill shot---no penalty for hitting an off limit aiming point---unless the dude just beat the he_ _ out of you for shooting him there.

I don't know how many hours were spent playing this game but probably about the same amount as we spent playing baseball (another story there too). Everyone on the block and all of their friends would come to play war when we were playing it...even the kids five or six years older than us. We would choose up sides and one side would be inside and one outside the structures. The game would continue until everyone on one side had been hit by a band. As soon as that happened we would re-choose sides and go at it again. This would continue until your parents called you home to do your chores (nobody ever walked away from a game---no matter how many welts you had---that would have been cowardly). If there were enough left to continue playing then the game went on until there weren't enough players to continue.

This was a great game and continued to be played for several years---then we got B-B guns. Everyone knows you don't shoot B-B guns at people right...STAY TUNED...THE WAR GAMES IMPROVED AS THE WEAPONRY IMPROVED.

This started out to be a story about what happened to the barns but it triggered a different line of thinking so you'll have to stay tuned for those stories too.