I made a small cottage industry out of inventing commercials for random household objects. Like spoons or a piano bench. I subjected my family to this for a few years straight, but sadly no record survives.

The other thing I did turned out to be the best game I ever, ever played. We had a swing set and a jungle gym and that sort of stuff out back, and I had this whole fantasy that the swing was a time-and-world-traveling swing, controlled by pressing its chain links that I used mainly to pop into certain worlds and battle Vikings. I think I tried to re-create this one time but never got the magic back. It’s still about the most fun I ever had.

In the late ’40s and early ’50s black synthetic rubber was used for car tire inner tubes and had replaced the natural red rubber tubes. The black rubber would stretch just a little bit while the natural red rubber would continue to stretch to twice its original size. This made the red rubber especially desirable for the boys in my neighborhood to play with but it was also very hard to find.

We found several ways of entertaining ourselves with the red rubber including making rubber guns that could be made by cutting out a gun shape with a jigsaw and a piece of wood and using a clothespin on the butt end of the gun to hold the stretched rubber.  Squeezing the clothespin trigger would fire the weapon with stinging results.

Spear guns made out of a welding rod, a piece of bamboo, and a red rubber sling fitted with a leather pouch cut from a shoe tongue were very effective for shooting crawdads and fish in the water storage lakes that were within hiking distance if I packed some food and water.

Beany shooters made from bands of rubber tied to a forked stick were always in my arsenal of weapons. I still have a large scar on my hand from the saw that slipped while cutting a Beany Shooter.  As a navy airman on survival training I was able to put my boyhood Beany Shooter experience and marksmanship to use by making a man-sized shooter and killing wild game for food.

I made things out of junk I collected, mostly furniture for my dollhouse. I made a cradle out of a bobby sock stiffened with lots of white paint. I made dish sets out of the plastic inserts from soda bottles that I also painted. I made matchstick cupboards and a miniature owl out of the insides of a calculator. A lampshade from an eggshell. I also excavated a trash heap in the woods behind a neighbor’s house where I found a ton of broken china (and chicken bones) that I had a lot of plans for but I think that project was eventually nixed from above.