For your reading enjoyment, we continue to publish Rambling Vines by the late Marylea Vines as she recalls events and names of Corning folks from many years ago. We are currently in the year 1990

It’s that time of the year… time for the youngsters to busy themselves outside each day after school until dark runs them in… I suppose it is still like that.

Used to, we were so anxious to get outside and out of our mother’s eyesight that we could hardly wait to go make the rounds of the grocery stores, asking for wooden cheese boxes, cigar boxes, hat boxes… anything that could be converted into toys.

We made our own kites, using a double-size newspaper sheet, short pieces of twine string tied together and homemade flour and water paste; made our own stilts, sling shots and rubber guns; engaged in lots of games of marbles, jacks, pickup- sticks, jump rope and tin can shinny; walked around clang, clanging on mashed-in quart size oil cans, plus hop scotch… all without spending a penny, mainly because we didn’t have a penny! And if we lucked into a penny or two, we headed straight for Clyde Lasater’s Store to try to win one of those bitter-chocolate covered marshmallow candies on one of the punch boards that sat atop the candy counter.

What we didn’t have, we traded for. This was the time of year that I usually parted company with my Blue Horses.

All Winer, I saved the Blue Horse pictures from the cover of my school tablets, hoping to someday have enough to send off for a free bicycle… which was never close to happening. I usually did pretty good in trading but one year I let Dixie Polk talk me into trading all my Blue Horses for a Morton’s salt balloon which he had gained in an earlier trade. These balloons had small pebbles inside and had a long rubber string which was attached after they were inflated. The trick was to walk around, constantly bouncing the balloon and making nonstop noise. Only the people who traded at Martin Fowler’s Store got the balloons, and then it was only the families that purchased a box of Morton salt during the promotion. We always traded at H. Goode’s store and our only hopes of getting one of those balloons was second-hand; We played “property” by throwing a knife with open blade inside a circle made in the dirt; made darts out of wooden match sticks and a straight pen. We made our own hope and guide, using flattened Prince Albert can on the end of the guide stick.

We made a lot of quick sandwiches out of cold biscuits and butter sprinkled with sugar, a green onion rolled up in a biscuit or biscuit smeared with mustard.

When it rained, we made sail boats out of the wood in the cheese boxes. We built tree houses in the orchard and set up our own communication line like that had in Oliver’s Store… of course, we were in normal talking range from one tree to the other, but it was more of a challenge to make lines out of twine string and send messages from tree to tree in an oat box; we valued old innertubes to cut into “bullets” for our rubber guns; cut the tongue out of old shoes to use as the pockets on sling shots; challenged each other to see who could walk around on the tallest stilts; curled up inside an old tire to be rolled end over end… and when we had absolutely nothing to do, we would all gather at the back of the orchard and have another funeral for “Lindy” our little Spitz dog.

Other times we would go over to the tie-yard along the railroad (even those we had been told to stay away). We played on the stacks of ties, would play in the Black Lumber Company sand bin down by the old Boomer Mill office building; would climb the mulberry tree and eat the ripe fruit… spider webs, dust, and all!

It was fun to go barefoot, and to practice our balancing skills by walking the railroad tracks. We also enjoyed basketball, baseball or softball, (whatever kind of ball anyone in the neighborhood had), in the court yard; played “May I” on the wide courthouse sidewalk; played lots of games of tag, wolf-overthe- ridge and New Orleans; sometimes sat in the grass underneath a shade tree and played “books” for hours, and when there was nothing better to do, would try paperdolls, even though I never cared for them. Most of my friends would carefully go around the paperdolls with the scissors, giving them arms, legs, heads, etc. Not me, I cut them our square!

We also had a dirt tennis court in our backyard, we had bag swings and tire swings, had our own track meets with high hurdles and all those things, enjoyed rolling skating, read at least one library book each week, played office in the tiny next door law office of Attorney F. G. Taylor on the days that he was out of the office… he never locked his office door; spend many hours practicing string art (I never mastered the ladder); Nancy Sheeks would let us come inside her huge house and play hide-and-seek on rainy days; captured June bugs and tied a length of thread to a hindleg and let them buzz all around; captured lightening bugs soon as it began getting dark; liked to play with a big button and a string.

We made whistles out of those little things that fall off maple trees in the Spring; spent hours with tiny beads and thread, trying to make Indian jewelry one Summer. We made clover chains, hunted for four-leaf clovers, ate lots of “peppermint” grass and sheep shower pickles, smoked all kinds of dried weeds and hitched a lot of rides on the coupling pole of a team-drawn wagon… and still had time to do our chores around the house, and if it happened to be on Tuesday, we had to pump up three Number Two tubs of wash water, plus fill the old iron kettle. Most people washed on Monday, but our mom always said that she had to wash mid-week so we wouldn’t run out of clothes before the weekend.

No wonder we hardly ever saw an overweight youngster back then… we ran it off each day.