My parents never signed me up for sports or activities outside the
house. This was because my dad said it was a waste of my mothers time
to have to ferry us back and forth. The one extra curricular I was
allowed was cub scout so I really loved going to den and pack
meetings because an adult had to pay attention to me for a couple of
hours. I took full advantage of their good will and generally pressed
the fun right out to the limit and often times right on past the
limit. My first scout leader lady was a sweet local mother whose sons were
all big into scouting and so she volunteered to be a den mother. She
had us learn to play 'I've Been Working on the Railroad' on homemade
kazoos constructed from a comb and a piece of wax paper. She taught
us how to make a tin-foil dinner and cook it. She taught us how to
make a 'buddy-burner' which is a huge candle used for cooking that is
made out of cardboard and paraffin wax. We used our buddy-burner to
cook food out in our fort so that was ultra-convenient. One time she
had each of us come to pack meeting with a game in mind that we could
teach all of the other kids to play. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby at
the time and on one of his albums he describes a game called
Buck-Buck. I think now with the wisdom of age that Buck-Buck was not
a real game but a pretend game used for comic effect. The game was
purportedly played kind of like 'Red Rover' but instead of running
though the enemy line you had one team all kneel down on all fours
and the other team send a guy one at a time to run and jump on the
backs of the other team and try and crush them to the ground. If they
hold up you loose the guy but if they break down you take one of the
broken players home to your side. In Mr. Cosby's account they are
loosing the game badly until they bring out their secret weapon Fat
Albert. When I explained my game at pack night some of the adults
were skeptical but they allowed it to start so I divided the boys
into two teams and the first team all knelt down to get ready to try
and hold up to the coming abuse. Contrary to the image I got of the
game being fairly evenly matched between holder-uppers and
breaker-downers the breakers had the distinct advantage and there
were several injuries in the first round and the game was called off
when a boy started crying because he had been jumped on by a 120
pound kid who delivered all of his weight onto the small of the smaller boy's back. My leaders had to learn the hard way that you do not ask
me for advice on how to do something or someone was going to be
severely injured. Ita was a good lesson to get out of the way before
they let me organize something life threatening.
