(This story by a contributing author brings me back to the days of spending the night with my cousins in the country. What great times?)

MEMORIES

by

Bob Doherty

When I was a young boy growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi during World War 2, I was very lucky. There were six houses on one block that were filled with my aunts and uncles and cousins. On the weekends all of the cousins, and there were many, would gather behind one of the houses in the early evening and we would put on skits. Some would sing, some would dance and some played music; mostly on the kazoo or the Jew’s harp.

My most memorable skit, however, involved the game of baseball. It consisted of three people, a clothesline, a sheet and a flashlight. The sheet would be hung on the clothesline and a cousin would get at each end of the sheet.

The third cousin would get behind the sheet with the flashlight. The person at one end of the sheet would pretend that he was a pitcher throwing the baseball. As the imaginary ball left his hand, the individual behind the sheet would shine the light on the back of the sheet making it curve and twist and finally go into the imaginary glove of the catcher at the other end of the sheet. From the front the audience would see a baseball doing all sorts of movements before it was caught by the catcher. The game was limited only by the imagination of the person behind the sheet.

We were living in a time when families lived, worked and played together and our games were only limited by our young mind’s imagination.

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Check out genealogy, history books and novels by Donna R. Causey