I’ve always felt a little boredom for kids is a good thing.
Back, lo those many years ago when I was a kid, boredom wasn’t something we complained about. Today’s parents are apparently terrified their kids will complain about being bored. Back in the day, I knew better than to tell my parents I was bored, because they would have found plenty for me to do, pretty much none of which I would have been excited about.
These days, though, parents apparently feel their kids need to be scheduled 24/7 doing all manner of things, not to mention running themselves ragged in the attempt to avoid the dreaded “Mommm, I’m bored.”
As noted above, admitting to boredom would have been a deadly mistake back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, so we made sure we always had something to do, or at least made it look like we had something to do. And without all of today’s frenetic scheduling, there was plenty of time for one of our all-time favorite pastimes—dawdling.
Not sure what my cousin Bob (right) and I did, but knowing the two of us, it probably involved dawdling followed by a stern lecture from our Aunt Evelyn.
In fact, I believe dawdling was one of the high points of my life as a child here in the Oswego area, although I admit my parents sometimes did not exactly share my love of the practice.
We dawdled on the way to school and on the way home from school, as well as when sent on any sort of mission by our parents.
But it was those before and after school times that seemed best.
When I went to Church School out in Wheatland Township, we did a lot of serious dawdling on the way home from classes. After we got television sets and had our first look at the original “Adventures of Superman” series starring George Reeves, my buddy Rob and I decided that episode where Superman turned coal into diamonds by using “super pressure” had all sorts of possibilities; Superman did it, after all, so why couldn’t we? Finding a piece of coal wasn’t difficult in those years, but applying the “super pressure” was. We approached the problem by piling the biggest rocks we could find on top of the coal. Each day as we dawdled past the rock pile on the way home from school, we’d check to see if the lump of coal had turned into a diamond. I suspect the coal is still buried there beside Heggs Road awaiting super pressure that never came.
After I moved to town, the areas in which to dawdle increased geometrically. In order to get to and from school, we had to cross Waubonsie Creek, which was—and from what I see these days still is—an irresistible magnet for dawdlers.
We considered the creek valley, from North Adams street to the Route 25 bridge as our own private preserve. There was always something to do there, no matter what season of the year it was.
About 1910, a bunch of kids engage in serious dawdling along the same stretch of Waubonsie Creek where we dawdled in the 1950s. In this shot, looks like there are more rocks than water in the creek. (Little White School Museum collections)
In the summertime, we’d build dams and try to catch the Red Horse that came upstream from the river. In the fall, we’d skip flat stones across the still waters behind the present Oswego Library. In the wintertime, we’d fool around on the ice, when it was thick enough, or pretend to be arctic explorers trudging through North Pole snowdrifts. In the spring, our fancy would tum to collecting fossils washing out of the bluegreen Maquoketa shale outcrop near the CB&Q railroad bridge.
One winter evening on the way home from school, my friend was standing with one foot on the creek shore and the other on an ice-covered rock a short distance from shore, vigorously shifting back and forth as he tried to dislodge the rock, which was stuck to the creek bottom. But then the rock suddenly gave way, shooting out from under his foot, which had all his weight on it. Physics being what they are, he was launched into the air, doing a complete airborne somersault before landing, sitting down, in the middle of the creek. Personally, I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever seen, although his view was somewhat different.
I never had my own paper route, but I was always friendly with our paperboys, and found them excellent dawdling companions, which is perhaps one reason I don’t get too terribly upset when our paper is late nowadays.
My buddy Rob and I tried to turn a lump of coal into a diamond for several months in 1953 while dawdling on the way home from school. Above, we consort with our dogs and a box of Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes (the TV sponsor for “Adventures of Superman”) for emergency nutrition.
It was his own fault, but one winter day our dawdling got the better of our then-current paperboy, one of my elementary school classmates. He had decided to do a monster walk across a large brush pile near the street. As he walked like Frankenstein’s monster, growling, over top of the brush pile, his feet suddenly broke through and he was up to his hips in brush. Unfortunately—for him—a broken stick in the pile was pointed upwards directly at a particularly sensitive area of his anatomy. I did my best as he screamed for me to rescue him. I really did. But it’s hard to move frozen, broken tree parts when you’re laughing so hard your stomach hurts.
My parents were largely understanding when it came to dawdling. As long as I was home for supper, no one seemed to care. In fact, I came to suspect that my father was a dawdler when he was a youngster. Unfortunately, it’s too late to find out about that now; like so many other things, I’d like to get his take on the subject.
Unfortunately, things have changed over the last 60 years when it comes to allowing children to have fun by doing nothing at all. Often for good reason, most parents fear to have their children wandering around loose these days. There are simply too many nuts around and too many other dangerous things for children to get involved in.
It’s a shame when innocent activities—like dawdling near a local creek—that are real learning experiences are all too often unavailable to modern kids because of fears for their safety, even if those fears are well founded. It is one of the prices we must pay as we continue to grow, I suppose, but it often seems as if it’s an awfully high one.
historyonthefox 