Page 89 - WhyAsInY

GaMes PeoPle PlayeD
the Texaco Star Theatre, Milton Berle’s show, and I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball, which I was privileged to “stay up for” when I became old enough and had spent a day, a whole day, without getting into trouble.
But play we did, and constantly, both indoors and, more enjoyably, out of doors.
Over the years, there were indoor games aplenty, most of which involved a board of some sort: Monopoly, Clue, Sorry!, Chinese Check- ers (involving marbles), and Hi-Q (involving pegs)—all of which are still available and eminently Googleable—come to mind. As we got older, we might play checkers and, ultimately, chess (which my father taught me to play).
Plus, word games came to the fore. The most popular and best of those games was Scrabble, which was invented in the late 1930s but pop- ularized in the 1950s. I played it with my parents and with friends, and, I assume, I thereby improved my vocabulary, at least somewhat. How else would I have learned that the word quixotic, which, given a position where there is a T already resting on the sixth square of an otherwise empty top row can yield 356 points—if you just happen to have a Q, U, X, O, C, and two I’s on your tray?
Close behind Scrabble in popularity was Jotto, which is also still available. One of the most effective practical jokes that I ever played on my parents involved secretly supplying the same key word, yacht, to each of them on an evening when I knew that they intended to play Jotto with each other. (See Appendix B for the gory details.)
We also played card games: casino, which my grandmother taught me; canasta, which my mother played with friends and sometimes had me join in; gin rummy, courtesy of Larry Itkin; poker, which I played for pennies and learned in junior high; and the game that really stuck with me, bridge, which I taught to my parents when I was in high school, and which I still play.
In addition to the games, there were, of course, the toys, far fewer than the middle-class children of today have. I recall having a trunk for toys that was kept in the pantry, but I have no recollection of its con- tents, which were undoubtedly a mess. The most memorable ones, all of
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