Fun Times

What would life be like if there weren’t some fun times scattered along the way?  Pretty dull I’d say.  My Dad was a fun-loving person, so I had fun growing up.  He could tell good jokes, and pull jokes on my mother, making her turn red (as her hair was red.)

So, I grew up in a good, cheerful atmosphere.  I had a fairly normal childhood, playing jacks, jumping rope, playing “hide and seek,” “Rover, Rover, won’t you come over,” and other outdoor games, popular in my day.

Growing a little older, I played softball, ½ court basketball, and volleyball.  In 5^th grade at my University Laboratory School, we were taught ballroom dancing, so from then on, there were lots of school dances.  I began to date in 8^th grade, (pretty young, I know) but you have to remember things were much more innocent back in those days. Or, maybe I was just pretty naïve.  I didn’t think of the “evils” of dancing, and my dating was the same way, and most of the time, double dating with other couples.

When Jim and I met at the University of Missouri he had been raised by a strict Church of Christ mother, had dated some, but had never learned to dance.  However, then we became engaged a month and a half after meeting, he and I were both involved in several campus organizations, and one of the activities was to have a dance.   We could attend, and we would kind of walk around the floor.  (I had also jitter bugged, too, but Jim never learned to do that.)

When were moved to Albuquerque, NM, after marrying in 1946, our fun times consisted of getting together with several other couples, both neighbors in our apartment building and couples we met at church.  (Two of those couples, the Coles and the Martins we have kept up with through all these years.)

We were transferred to Phoenix in 1950, and here again we met some wonderful couples at church.

Then in 1951, our children began to arrive, and as they grew we had more fun with them.  Jim traveled quite a lot during their very young years, but always tried to reserve some time on Saturdays just for them.

When we moved to Denver in 1954, and as the boys grew older, we really began to have some fun times.  One of our main forms of recreation was going to the mountains, camping in the summer, sledding in the winter, or just going to the foothills for a picnic with friends.

We became good friends with the Lewis’s  (4 boys) and the Bungers (3 boys), so a lot of our times in the mountains were with these families.  There was fishing involved too.   Lots of times Jack Lewis, Carl Bunger, and Jim would leave Friday evening after work, go to some lake, fish all day Saturday, and arrive back home late Saturday night.  They didn’t want to miss Sunday Church. 

Other times we’d all go as families, and you can imagine the fun with 11 boys.

I remember one trip we made (just us) to Lake John.  It wasn’t a very pretty setting for a lake, rather barren and rocky, but the fishing was good.  I don’t remember how old the boys were, but Jim knew that all six of us in one boat was too many, so we divided up.  Jim took Jimmy and Lee in one boat, and I took Jay and Mark in my boat.  We got our fishing poles and bait all fixed up, and set out.  (You have to realize that I was really not into fishing, to put it mildly).  We hadn’t been out very long, when I felt a tug on my line   and knew I’d caught a fish.  Rather than reel it in, I threw the pole over to Jay and told him to reel it in.   Fortunately, that was the end of my luck for that day.

One summer Jim decided to use a week of his vacation and we’d spend the week at Big Creek Lake, CO.  We rented a small trailer, probably 15 ft., because we just planned to sleep in it.  We had a Coleman cook stove, and a little Coleman fold-out table, where we planned to cook and eat.  However, we picked the wrong week.  It rained and rained, so we were stuck in the trailer.  I guess we played lots of games, and sometimes the boys would go out in the rain and get soaked.  It finally stopped raining a day or two before we were to leave, but we had fun anyway.

Another one of our camping trips was to Chambers Lake.  We borrowed the Lewis’s fold-out trailer, which Jack had made, and two of the boys were going to sleep in our small tent.  We arrived late one afternoon, and because we were there a little early in the season the snow was still on the ground, and there was ice on the lake.  So, the guys got busy clearing off a place in the snow to pitch their tent, and with a tarp on the wet ground, and their sleeping bags, they made it all right.  It was cold though, and I was afraid we hadn’t brought enough warm clothes, but we made it.

The Lewis’s and we decided to take a week’s vacation together to a lake in northern Colorado.  Delores and I shopped for groceries, and filled the back of their station wagon with sacks of food.  I think we left after church on Sunday and planned to return home on the next Saturday.  This lake was about 35-40 miles off the beaten path, up a two-track rutted road.  We had fun.  Delores and I gave the boys whistles, and they were not to go any farther than where we could hear their whistles, unless they were with Jim and Jack.  We cooked and it all tasted so good, and everyone had such ravenous appetites that after we cooked breakfast on Wednesday morning, we were out of lots of our staple food.  So, she and I made the trip down that rutted road, to a little corner grocery store, where we paid double the price for the groceries we needed.  Still, we had fun, being in the beautiful mountains, the guys were having good luck fishing, and the fish tasted so good cooked over an open fire.  Jack Lewis did some of the cooking, and Delores always brought a gallon container with her dough for sourdough pancakes.  My mother could never understand why a person would want to leave a fully equipped kitchen to go out in the mountains and rough it, but with good friends, and 8 boys having fun, and guys catching fish, what more could we want.

One time we and Bungers decided to go on a short camp out, up Bear Creek Canyon, to a camp site called Evans Ranch.  The Lewis’s were going to meet us Saturday morning.  They arrived early enough for breakfast.  As Delores was unloading some things, she set the gallon of sour dough pancake mix beside her, just as one of her boys came running around the car.  He hit the gallon of mix and over it went.  Delores was able to rescue about half of it, but we didn’t have quite as many pancakes as planned.  Delores always made her own syrup, too, out of brown sugar and water, and a little vanilla, and that always tasted as good as you could buy.

We did a lot of camping and fishing at other lakes, including Horseshoe Reservoir and Eleven Mile Reservoir.  We also had many one-day sledding times in the foothills of Denver. 

When we moved to Kansas City, our fun times consisted of watching the boys in their sports, and Jim’s music performances.  We did take a trip or two back to Denver, before they left for college.  I’ll devote another chapter to our travels, which were fun times for Jim and me. 

I’m sure I’ve left out some incidents and events that were fun, but maybe you get in inkling of our life, not all dull, but lots of fun sprinkled in.