Entertainment

Growing up on a share croppers cotton farm you had to make your own entertainment.

I will never forget this TV sitcom "Gunsmoke". We would watch each episode as they came out. We teased Mama in later years because she would cry when Matt Dillon got shot. This is about the only time we watched television that I can remember other than maybe the "Ed Sullivan Show." All nine of us crowded around this little TV set (including my parents). 

Sometimes we would jump the cotton rows to try and catch each other. You had to be very careful not to step on the rows.

I remember a time when one of my sisters and I took a coloring book and set what few crayons we had out on the table.  Tedri took 
one side of the book and I the other. We would look at the page we were suppose to color trying to remember where everything was on the page, then we would shut the lights off and try and color the page from memory. When we were done we would turn the lights back on and judge whose picture was the best. 

Another form of entertainment was making mud pies. We would take an old discarded skillet, sift dirt through a piece of old screen wire until it was like powder, add a little water to it and form patties that we thought we were cooking in the skillet.

I can remember as we got older (by this time we had moved into the house my youngest brother now has that I posted in an earlier blog) we would ride our bicycles out the long drive to the highway and wait for a certain color car to pass before we could ride back to the house,  sometimes stopping at posts we had made into places in our minds to visit, such as the grocery store, the doctors, church and etc. We would then carry on conversations with each other. For example: "Why hello there, I haven't seen you in a very long time."etc...

This all may sound crazy to most of you but it was very
entertaining to us. It wasn't all fun though, picking cotton was not easy.