My friend Clyde, who I met on the way to Little Grandma's house, became one of the play partners with my cousins, when they visited at summer and Christmastime, and it made four children for games. Dale and Clyde usually ended up as a pair, and Marva and I were partners, in whatever game of our deep imaginations we concocted. Marva grew up surrounded with boy cousins on both sides of her family, and she would often lament she was the only girl. But she became very athletic, and a tomboy by nature. John, after the age of 14, would become a part of the group. In the summer. One time, when John and I were out of high school, we went over to my cousin's maternal grandparent's farm to visit Dale and Marva, and we would play in their huge three story barn. It was massive. In those playtime events, we'd end up having a corncob fight. What could go wrong with a corncob fight, right? Well, we left the corn on the cob, so it would shatter like a grenade. Yeah, not a bright idea. This went on for about four or five summers until it got nasty. John was a great hunter, and an excellent shot. One summer he and I were getting peppered from above by Clyde, Dale, and Marva, who were in the top loft of the barn.

Dale would keep popping his head up and firing down at us, and we were being peppered heavily. I couldn't get a good shot at him, and John couldn't see him at all. I noticed the timing of Dale popping up. It was like clockwork. I signaled to John when to throw, and to what degree he should lob his shot. I signaled. He fired his loaded ear of dry corn. Dale popped up and was greeted with a face of hard corn on the cob. He was out like a light, and fell one story into the grain bin. We all rushed to the bin and he was still out, and when he woke in the pile of corn he looked up and was all bloody-faced, with a broken nose. It was the end of our play. No more corncob fights ever again. He was rushed to the hospital by his folks, but not before we all got a bawling out. Dale healed, and we went back to college, to work, or school, and we never played in the summer again.

Some of the fun things about growing up in a small town are the street games, and a neighborhood games. One was street hockey, I didn't do a lot of it, but you'd flatten a tin can, grab sticks and divide up into teams and play hockey, another was baseball, pickup basketball, Annie-Annie over, cow kick the bucket, and hide and seek where at the end we'd shout, "Alle, alle auch sind frei!" German for, All in, all in free! How I remember it was Olly, olly, oxen free, our English corruption of what we thought we heard, a homemade transliteration. Once, riding home from Sunday school, I repeat what I thought I heard in class, "Jesus loves me this 'sino,'..." a corruption of the words, "...this I know." After Mom corrected me, I replied, "I thought it was a Hebrew word. She laughed. As Art Linkletter stated, "Kids say the darnedest things."