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A great favorite was hide-and-seek but to play it indoors required a large house or very tolerant parents or both. One excellent sport for this game as the Halsted attic. Their house was large and although their third floor had two or three servant bedrooms, a full bathroom, and a large playroom, there was room left over for a huge attic area besides which was quite well filled with old furniture, trunks, mattresses, bedsprings and other big items which, when stacked up around the attic, afforded some great hiding places. One feature of the attic construction was that the finished rooms had flat ceilings and therefore it was possible to gain access to the areas over these rooms for hiding by negotiating the ceiling [[strikethrough]] xxx [[/strikethrough]] rafters carefully. This was a rather daring business but no trouble occurred until one day when I was "it" and while proceeding cautiously into the attic from the hall, I suddenly heard a splitting crash somewhere behind me. I rushed back into the hall to find Ruth Halsted, the tomboy, hanging by her hands from rafters which had been exposed by a large hole in the ceiling plaster created when she fell through the ceiling. Her feet weren't more than three or four feet from the floor and she dropped down apparently no worse than badly "shook up" by the accident. However, as I recall, Mrs. Halsted ruled these above ceiling areas off limits from then on. The big playroom in the Halsted attic had been devoted mostly to the girls, since Jimmie was the sole boy in the flock, and this room consequently was full of dolls and doll houses and miniature housekeeping materials and wasn't too much of an attraction to Jimmie and me. Also, it was usually in a vastly confused state with toys strewn all over the place something like the basement playroom on Tilbury Road. A more desirable playroom for us was the Krumbaars', also attic located, but largely filled with an extensive and elaborate model railroad system. I carry with me to this day, a memento of my playtimes in the Halsted attic, however, an inch-long scar on my right wrist which I acquired while playing hide-and-seek, tearing my wrist when raking it across some rough woodwork while running. Many times over the years when I've been asked for an identifying mark on my body, I've used this scar. The Halsted attic was served not only by stairs but also by the dumbwaiter which ran from cellar to garret, and one exploit of great daring for us kids was to take a ride on the dumbwaiter, which was hand operated by ropes. My one and only trip on it was to the attic and I remember letting my hand run up along the wall of the shaft and getting a huge splinter driven up under my fingernail in the process, a painful experience and one which unsold me completely on the dumbwaiter as a means of transportation in the Halsted house.

As I look back, it seems to me that we kids of my generation did a lot more for ourselves in the way of creating toys and entertainment than todays kids. I'd like to enumerate some examples of what I mean:

Transcription Notes:
The numbers at the top of the page are not "preprinted". These are personal memoirs, not company letterhead.