We did play touch football and sandlot softball.  By this I mean that a bunch of kids would just get together in a vacant lot.  Often this included girls and boys.  Some kid might have a softball and another a bat.  Few had gloves.  We would all use the same bat.  If the kid who owned the bat had to go home that would end the game.  No one had uniforms.  The same situation existed with football.  Some kid might have a football.  We would just form teams on the spot and play.  No referees, no umpires, no sponsors.

We played with what we found in nature.  We would try to catch fireflies and put them in a jar.  There is a spider called daddy log legs (scientific name pholcidae).  Its venom is harmless to humans.  We played with them a lot.  If they bit us we never felt it.  They have a very, very small body with very long legs.  One type of lizard is a horned toad.  It is about 4 or 5 inches long with a scaly back.  We played with them. Sometimes we would tie a matchbox to them and watch them pull it along.  There is a small insect called a doodlebug (scientific name antlion) that is about ½ inch in size.  It builds a coned shaped house.  We also played with them.

Daddy Long Legs

Horned Toads

We also made rubber guns.  We would take a piece of wood, attached a clothes pin at one end and attach a piece of rubber formed in a circle or oval across the other end.  By releasing the clothes pin the piece of rubber would fly away.  In essence the piece of rubber was just a rubber band cut from a worn out car or bicycle inner tube.

If we could find an old car tire we would roll it around.  An old tire also makes a good swing when tied to a tree limb with a piece of rope.

On a farm we would search for arrow heads.  

We also made slingshots.  We would take a tree limb shaped as a "Y" to each top end of the "Y" we would tie a string.  This string pound then be tied to a piece of fabric or leather to form a pouch.  Inside the pouch we would place a stone.  You would pulled the pouch with one hand, hold the "Y" with the other and then release the pouch which caused the stone to fly.  With a lot of practice you could aim so the stone hit a target such as an empty can.

We made other toys.  We would take thread empty spools and make cars and trucks.

Like all boys we climbed trees.  When I was 11 I fell out of a mulberry tree and broke my left arm.  When I was about seven we lived next door to the Jackson family.  Lonnie Jackson and I climbed up the door of their garage to sit on the roof.  A chinaberry tree grew next to the garage.  We decided we would climb down the tree.  As we started we disturbed a wasp nest.  We got down in a hurry yelling “bumblebees, bumblebees.”

An old roller skate attached to a board became a scooter.

Younger girls played house and paper dolls.  Dresses from sears catalogs were used to dress a cardboard doll.  Pictures of furniture from the catalog became house furnishings.

We played other games such as dominoes and a game called 42 that was played with dominoes.  I think there were three or four chess sets in Coleman when I was growing up but almost everyone had a checker board and checkers.  If you did not have checkers, soda pop caps from bottles of soda pop made good checker pieces.  One person might use Coke caps and another Orange Crush or Dr. Pepper.  If you did not a checkers board it was simple to make one.

Other games played were Chinese checkers, Canasta, Backgammon, Parchese.  We also played with jigsaw puzzles.  It was not unusual for the whole family to sit around the kitchen table putting a puzzle together.

Marbles were also played.  Other games were horseshoes and washers.  Two stakes are driven into the ground about 30 or 40 feet apart.  Players take turns trying to place horseshoes around the stake.  In washers holes are dug in the ground also about 30 or 40 feet apart and players take turns trying to toss the washers in the holes.

When we were in about the fourth grade, some Japanese men came to school to demonstrate tricks with yo yos.

Among other things, we also made paper airplanes and flew kites we made ourselves.  For kites we would save up string.  We also would take two sticks and glue them together.  One would be horizontal and the other vertical.  To these we would glue newspaper then tie rags tied together to form a tail.  The glue was made from flour and water to form a paste.

Just a brief note about movies.  They were first called moving pictures, then motion pictures.  The first ones were in black and white and were without sound.  Some theaters would hire someone to play a piano or organ as the picture was shown.  Later sound was added to the film.  Still later, color film was invented.  The theater would receive the film in 35 millimeter format in metal cans.  Now some of it is received by the theater digitally.

In Coleman, there were three theaters.  The Gem cost a nickel.  It played mostly cowboy movies and serials.  The serials were episodes of a program that played week after week.  Among these serials were Flash Gordon, the Green Hornet and Buck Rogers.  Some of the Western movie stars were Tim McCoy, Bob Steele, Wild Bill Elliott, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lash Larue, Hoot Gibson, Johnny Mack Brown, Ken Maynard, Tex Ritter, and Buck Jones.

A second theater was the Dixie.  It cost a dime and played a lot of war movies and things such as Casablanca.  It showed a lot of John Wayne movies and movies with Randolph Scott,  Henry Fonda and the like.

The final theater was the Howell.  It cost 25 cents and showed gushy movies such as Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz, Mrs. Miniver, CitizenKane, To Have and Have Not, Snow White, White Christmas, Sergeant York,  and the like.  Musical movies played there.

A bag of popcorn cost five cents.

After we got old enough to drive sometimes we would just park in the downtown area of the main street (Commercial Avenue) and just talk with friends.

I have mentioned there were no places to dance in Coleman.  I also wrote about the Hitching Post.  To refresh your memory, it was in a building around the corner from the high school and came into being in 1946.  It was just for high school kids.  There was limited dancing there.  It was open for just a few hours after school.

Some of us who wanted to dance were inventive.  There was a farm to market road west of town leading towards the town of Valera.  About three miles west of town on that road was a concrete bridge.  Some of us would drive to the bridge, park, turn on a car radio, sprinkle cornbread meal on the bridge and dance.  The cornbread meal made the concrete slick.  Car radios at the time were very unreliable.  Too, if the radio was on you had to keep the motor running or the car battery would run down.  One kid had a battery operated portable radio.  That radio used eight D size batteries and was called a Zenith Transoceanic.  The batteries would last about one hour.  The Transoceanic was the top of the line portable radio.  In addition to regular broadcast stations it would also receive foreign stations and some military or aircraft signals. We would sometimes listen to that instead of a car radio and dance.

All in all the toys and recreation activities were just things for the most part we made or developed ourselves.