Fun Times in Skokie

As a kid we would often go to visit my Mom’s parents in Skokie. It was about an hour drive and my brother and I would entertain ourselves in the backseat. In these days before televisions were in cars, we spent most of the ride hitting each other, singing, reading and sleeping- usually all within the hour.

My Mom’s parents (Nana and Papa) lived in a small ranch house that wasn’t exactly equipped to entertain the average kid. Among many of our favorite games to play at Nana and Papa’s house was to crawl through a giant, jersey knit tube of fabric and play “caterpillar”.





Another classic game was to take the baby powder near the pool table in the basement and squeeze the bottle so that the “genie” would come out. One particular day we got carried away with the genie game and ended up covering the entire basement in baby powder.





Another game was to take out a folding play-pen and sit in it while we watched TV. My brother and I justified this as playing RugRats.





Playing in Nana and Papa’s house was at times a dangerous game. Whenever we would enter the front room (Pronounced frunchroom) we had to be especially careful of the Lladros- an invaluable collection of ceramic statuettes waiting to be broken.

Other than that, the house was always a warm and pleasant environment.
On summer days we would go to the tiny backyard and fill up an industrial giant brown garbage can with water to create a makeshift pool.





We did this for a few years until someone finally invested in a kiddie pool. That was a real treat.
In the colder months we spent much of our time at Nana and Papa’s in the basement. Near the pool table there was a support beam that Eric and I would grab onto and spin around until the point of exhaustion. There is a memorable Christmas video where we had taped cotton balls to our faces as makeshift Santa Claus beards and spent a good four minutes spinning around the pole in our Santa costumes. In reality it was probably longer, but there are about four minutes at least on film.






There are no Christmas trees in Skokie, so we spent that Christmas decorating one of those fake, plastic birch trees in the front room.


There was a bar in the basement as well, and we would play “Drunk” which usually ended up with us spinning ourselves around the support beam. A shopping cart was used to catch laundry out of the chute, and when we weren’t spinning around a pole I was busy pushing Eric at lightening speed in the cart around the basement.


In the basement there was also fun to be had playing in the “Cedar Closet”. One holiday my brother, cousin Ryan and I dressed up in Nana’s finest minks and heels, then paraded them in front of the family. Needless to say, an old house with no toys is an ideal place to fuel the imagination. We had fun.