My whole childhood (I was born in 1943, so the 1950s) was playing games - everything with my father, my mother, my brothers, and my friends was a competition. Who could get the answer first? Who could go around the block the fastest (running, biking, flexying)? Who could eat everything on their plate first (the winner usually got the leftovers)? Who could hit the whiffle ball into the street first? Who had the most and/or best baseball cards? Who could win at ping-pong, or basketball, or whiffle ball, or whatever game we made up to play in the house, on the patio, on the street, at school, or at the park? There were epic games! Every day!
My mother would just watch, or referee, and hope that we didn't get hurt, or kill somebody. My father wanted his sons to be competitive and play baseball, football, and basketball competitively like he did, so he could coach and teach us. Well, two of them did. I tried, but was too small and had bad eyes and was left-handed.
My advantage with my brothers was that I was the oldest son, but my brother Stanley, 3 years younger, was always my size. And all of my friends were bigger and stronger than me. So I had to be smarter and outthink or outwit the others.
The game that I excelled at was a word game, GHOST (check it out at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(game)). We (my family of four) played GHOST almost every night after dinner at the dinner table for several years when I was aged 10 to 15 (and my brother Stan was aged 7 to 12, brother Scott was 12 years younger than me). Our version was:
You went around the table spelling English words one letter at a time, with a minimum of four letters. The words had to be in the dictionary (I think we had the 1909 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary). If you spelled a complete valid word, then you got penalized a point. The winner of the game was the one with the fewest points at the end of the game (which was usually when my father wanted to stop to do some work at his desk). A player could challenge the spelling of the previous player, who had to pronounce and spell the complete word s/he was thinking of. If they could, then the challenger got the point. If they couldn’t, then the one challenged got the point. A player who ended a valid word got a point (in GHOST?) and if they got five points, they had to drop out of the game.
This was a great game to help us boys with spelling and vocabulary because it got us reading the dictionary for hours searching for interesting words. It also gave us some family time in the mid-to-late 1950s before we all were addicted to the evening television shows.
My strategy in GHOST was to find unique words in the dictionary that I could “hang” on one of the other family members. for instance, if someone started a new word with “b” and it was my turn, then I would say “d” and the family had to spell “bdellium” - it was the only word in the dictionary starting with “bd.” If they started with “m” then I would say “n” and the word had to be “mnemonic.” If someone started a new word with “g” then I would say “h” and the family had to spell “ghost” or “ghoul.” Eventually, we got around to finding and spelling “antidisestablishmentarianism,” “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” (I remembered the first parts, but had to look that one up!) and other long words, but we had to be careful not to spell a complete word within the longer word - like “antidisestablishment.” I had a list of words that I could use. We experimented in later years with being able to add two letters in order to avoid spelling a valid word.
I loved to try to get my father to spell the valid word, and he would usually try to bluff his way through. I tried to avoid getting my mother, but didn’t mind getting my brother. Challenging had a strategy too - if I knew I was going to get hung with a word ending, I would try to bluff everyone by confidently saying a letter and hoping that I wouldn’t be challenged. Of course, this usually broke down into arguments satisfied only by the one challenged looking the word up in the dictionary and either bragging or getting a letter!
This must be where my love for word games originated. I do Wordle every morning now!
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NOTE: Some of my Monday Memories are from earlier blog posts and/or my MyHeritage MyStories book, edited and/or embellished. <G>
NOTE: Some of my Monday Memories are from earlier blog posts and/or my MyHeritage MyStories book, edited and/or embellished. <G>
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