WAR GAMES: It seems many residents had found a variety of ways to spend the summer hours before playing with electronics became the new American pastime.
Today we’re offering another recollection from an area resident of his childhood summers.
Bill Robertson, a member of the Bradford High School Class of 1968, said that while he resided at 459 Bolivar Drive when growing up in the 1960s, he “spent most of my time in Kenmar Acres during the summer playing war with my buddies.”
He described the game, which used the Kenmar Acres woodland as a setting for the battles, along with simple toys and a whole lot of imagination as the props.
“One ‘army’ would go hide in a dense pine grove on the hill above Holzworth’s farm,” Robertson wrote. “Then, the other soldiers would go look for it in a ‘seek and destroy mission.’ The cover provided endless places of ambush and an unpredictable outcome. The invading force had to use all its hunting skills to stand a chance of winning. There was plenty of suspense and even a little fear when bushwhacked by those in hiding.”
The soldiers made their own weapons, too, from what resources were available.
Robertson related, “Each of us was armed with a rubber band gun that we built from scraps of wood and slices of inner tube. Most kids carried pistols, but I had a semi-automatic rifle that fired 5 rubber bands. A sack of rotten apples made good hand grenades. Crab apples on the end of a whippy stick became a rocket launcher.”
Additionally, the armies had developed a set of rules to determine the outcome of the shots fired. As Robertson pointed out, the casualties were all in good fun.
“Those hit by a rubber band or an apple were KIA. Kids out of ammo and surrounded were prisoners of war. We celebrated our victories with whoops that would have made Marines proud. And none of us grew up to be homicidal maniacs or mass murderers, either. Our aggressions were vented in the game and left behind on the pine grove battlefield.”
Picturing Robertson’s “war” made us laugh out loud, particularly the image of the crab apple/whippy stick “rocket launchers.”
