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with children belonged to the Sedgwick Farm Club where they flooded the tennis courts in the winter and where we'd go to skate and play hockey. I get a bit peeved today at kids throwing snowballs indiscriminately and hitting windows and street lights, but I recall the time I was coming home from school and at the corner of DeWitt and James Street, I threw a snowball at a passing auto on James. By a stroke of pure luck, I hit the driver who was infuriated and pulled over to the curb, got out and came after me and a couple of other boys with me. Fortunately, James Street was covered with the usual snow and the man couldn't stop abruptly for fear of skidding. So while he was stopping, we walked away from the scene of the crime, proceeding along DeWitt and away from James. By the time the man caught up with us, we were half way down the block. I remember very vividly his saying excitedly, "Did you see who threw that snowball at me?" My heart was in my mouth but I managed to say convincingly, "No, we didn't." Amazingly, this seemed to satisfy the man and he returned to his car. But it cured me of throwing snowballs at strange targets. Another lesson it taught me was to walk nonchalantly way from the scene of a crime and not run. I don't think I did any skiing at this time; it was to come later. One variation of sledding I failed to mention was going down the hill sitting in a chopping bowl. Of course, in sledding the ultimate was to own a big Flexible Flyer that you could steer.

There were many indoor activities in the winter. One of the earliest diversions was "playing house" which may sound a bit girlish but didn't mean dolls house but rather erecting a house by arranging various large chairs on the floor on their sides and covering the assembly with blankets. By this technique, it was possible to attain some rather impressive dens or caverns through which one could crawl and with a little imagination, pretend a lot of things. I remember that Joe Sanford's house had a particularly well adapted group of large chairs which we used for this purpose. Another diversion was playing store and this required considerable preparation to be successful. At the time, it was popular for food companies in particular to send free samples on request, having ordering-coupons as part of their magazine and newspaper advertising. By working at it, you could accumulate quite a supply of miniature boxes of processed foods to use in playing store. These could be supplemented by pictures of products cut out of magazine ads, not nearly as good but with the use of a little imagination, passable. Cardboard coins were available to pay for transactions. It may sound implausible but it was possible to have a lot of fun at this sort of thing where today, the toys must be extremely fancy and realistic to satisfy -- and usually expensive. Playing store could be carried on with almost no financial outlay and yet give a wonderful feeling of almost unlimited horizons in store keeping.