When Childhood Was a Hobby

Before Every Free Minute Came With a Screen

Part of The American Time Capsule — preserving the people, places, products, traditions, and everyday moments that shaped growing up in America before the digital age. This article explores the games, adventures, traditions, music, rites of passage, and neighborhood experiences that defined American childhood.

Walk past a group of kids today and there’s a good chance you’ll see at least a few of them doing something that didn’t exist when I was growing up.

Heads down.

Eyes fixed on a screen.

Thumbs moving at lightning speed.

TikTok. YouTube. Texting. Video games.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

It’s simply a very different childhood from the one I remember.

When someone asked us, “What are you doing today?”

The answer often involved a hobby.

Not because our parents assigned us one.

Because we couldn’t wait to get started.

And most of those hobbies required us to do something.

Our free time wasn’t organized for us—we collected, built, traded, competed, and invented our own entertainment, much like the neighborhood adventures I remember in The Games That Raised a Generation.

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Even Then Baseball Cards Were Serious Business

Long before kids collected digital skins or online achievements…

We collected baseball cards.

Topps cards came in little wax packs with a flat stick of bubble gum that somehow managed to survive summer heat better than the cards themselves.

Opening a new pack was an event.

The smell of fresh cardboard and bubble gum powder was almost as exciting as the cards themselves.

Maybe this one would have Mickey Mantle.

Maybe Stan Musial.

Maybe Willie Mays.

Then came the trading.

Flipping games.

Matching games.

Hours spent arguing over whether one card was worth two others.

We didn’t need an app.

The neighborhood was our marketplace.

One of my greatest treasures was an autographed Stan Musial baseball card.

My uncle, Jack Rice, was a sportswriter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and around 1959 I accompanied him on an interview with Stan the Man himself.

The Day I Met Stan the Man

One day my uncle Jack casually asked me a question no kid growing up around St. Louis could possibly have been prepared for.

“Richard, would you like to meet Stan Musial?”

Had I been older, I might have responded with something along the lines of, “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

But I was still a kid.

All I could do was nod my head, look over at my mother’s beaming face, and give her an expression that probably said:

Is he kidding me?

Stan Musial wasn’t merely another baseball player to me.

Stan the Man was my hero.

I had already seen him do something extraordinary at Sportsman’s Park. Sitting in the stands with my grandmother—Uncle Jack’s mother—I watched Stan hit four home runs in a doubleheader.

To a baseball-loving kid in St. Louis, Stan Musial was about as close to royalty as you could get.

And now Uncle Jack was telling me I was going to meet him.

The appointed day seemed to take forever to arrive.

We finally met Stan at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel for lunch, after which Uncle Jack would interview him in one of the hotel suites.

I don’t remember eating much.

I mostly remember staring at Stan with the kind of undisguised adoration only a kid can get away with.

My palms were sweating.

My mind was racing.

The other kids are never going to believe this.

Looking back, that’s one childhood moment when I really wish smartphones had existed. I would give a lot today to have a photograph—or better yet, a little video—of that lunch.

Stan apparently noticed how nervous I was.

He looked at me and said:

“Take it easy, Richard. I don’t bite!”

That helped.

A little.

After lunch, we went upstairs to the suite. Uncle Jack and Stan sat together on a couch for the interview while I found a place toward the back of the room where I could listen without getting in the way.

I sat quietly and watched my uncle interview Stan Musial.

For a kid who loved baseball, I couldn’t imagine life getting much better than that.

When the interview was over, Stan did something that made the day even more unforgettable.

I had brought along four of my Stan Musial baseball cards.

He signed every one of them.

On one, he even wrote a personal message to me.

That card immediately became the crown jewel of my baseball-card collection.

I treasured it.

What I couldn’t possibly have imagined as that kid sitting quietly in the back of a hotel suite was that my connection to Stan Musial wasn’t quite finished.

Some thirty-five years later, I would find myself teeing it up with Stan the Man for a round of golf I would never forget.

To a young baseball fan, it didn’t get much bigger than that.

While I was serving in Vietnam, my brother—who was struggling badly with drugs at the time—sold my baseball card collection.

He also sold the model cars I’d spent countless hours building.

Including that autographed Stan Musial card.

I never really knew what he was thinking.

Maybe he needed the money.

Maybe he assumed I wasn’t coming home.

Either way, when I did come home, the collection I’d spent much of my childhood building was gone.

The cards disappeared.

The memories didn’t.

Meet Me Under the Oak Tree

One of the highlights of my 50th high school reunion in 2017 was visiting Central School in Ferguson.

The building was still there.

So was the old oak tree.

My friend Terry Fox and I walked over to it without saying a word.

That was where we’d spent countless recesses as five- and six-year-old boys.

Shooting marbles.

Steelies.

Cat’s-eyes.

Bozos.

Every marble had a name.

Every game had rules.

Every win felt important.

Standing beneath that same tree more than half a century later…

It was easy to see two little boys kneeling in the dirt again.

Marbles were another serious childhood business.

At Central School, there was a giant oak tree in the schoolyard where my friend Terry Fox and I spent countless hours shooting marbles in the dirt beneath its branches.

Steelies.

Cat’s-eyes.

Shooters.

Every kid had his favorites.

And when you were playing for keeps, those little glass marbles suddenly became very valuable possessions.

I carried all my favorite marbles in a leather pouch.

Whenever I lost one I could usually win it back another day.

We rarely argued, it was impossible to cheat.

You either had a good thumb shot or you didn’t.

More than half a century later, Terry and I returned to Ferguson for our 50th high school reunion.

During a side trip, we wandered over to the old Central School playground.

And there it was.

The oak tree.

After all those years, it was still standing.

Funny thing about childhood memories: everything seems enormous when you’re a kid.

The school looked smaller.

The playground looked smaller.

And even that giant oak tree wasn’t nearly as big as we remembered it.

But it was still our tree.

We walked over and stood beneath it.

Looking down at the ground around its base, it wasn’t difficult to imagine two little boys crouched there again, carefully lining up their shots and trying to knock each other’s prized marbles out of the dirt.

For a moment, more than fifty years seemed to disappear.

We had our pictures taken beneath the tree.

And to this day, Terry and I still kid each other about who won the most marbles back then.

The funny part is…

Terry remembers me as the champion marble shooter.

According to him, I was the kid with the coolest cat’s-eyes and steelies.

There’s only one problem with his version of history.

I remember Terry exactly the same way.

Maybe one of us really was the neighborhood marble champion.

Maybe neither of us was.

After more than half a century, I’m not sure it matters.

What matters is that two old friends could stand beneath the same tree where they’d played as boys and still argue about a marble game that ended more than fifty years earlier.

The marbles were long gone.

The friendship wasn’t.

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The Model Car Wasn’t the Point

We built them.

Revell model kits were works of art waiting to happen.

My best friend Greg and I regularly stopped at the Ben Franklin Five and Dime in downtown Ferguson to inspect the Revell kits. We didn’t necessarily have enough money to buy one. That didn’t stop us from studying the boxes and deciding which car we’d build next.

There were other kits but Revell was the best.

Hours were spent carefully removing tiny plastic parts from their frames.

Glue on the fingers was almost guaranteed.

If you managed to avoid gluing your fingers together, you considered it a successful afternoon.

Then came the paint.

Metallic blues.

Candy-apple reds.

Chrome details.

Long before any of us could afford the real thing, those Revell kits let us build the cars we dreamed of someday driving—a fascination that eventually became part of the story I tell in Everybody Remembers Their First Car.

We customized them.

Displayed them.

Admired each other’s work.

Every model was a little different because every builder left his own signature on it.

The finished model wasn’t the reward.

Building it was.

Looking back, the hobbies themselves were only half the fun.

The other half was sharing them with other kids.

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A Different Kind of Childhood

We rarely complained about being bored.

There was always another project waiting.

One hobby naturally led to another. We never needed someone to entertain us—we simply found the next thing that looked interesting.

Negotiation.

Persistence.

Sometimes without us even realizing it.

Every generation grows up differently.

Today’s kids are comfortable with technology in ways my generation never imagined, and those skills will undoubtedly serve many of them well.

The difference isn’t that one generation knew how to have fun and another doesn’t; it’s that technology fundamentally changed how childhood time is spent, something I explore more fully in Life Before Smartphones.

But I sometimes wonder what gets lost when fewer hobbies involve the physical world.

Holding a baseball card.

Rolling a marble across packed dirt.

Painting the customized body on a model car you’d spent days assembling.

Those hobbies quietly taught us patience, creativity, negotiation and persistence.

Sometimes our childhood adventures even taught us a little about earning money, although we certainly didn’t call it entrepreneurship at the time, as I remember in Golf Ball Hunting: The Original Side Hustle.

Nobody told us we were learning anything.

We thought we were playing.

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What We Really Collected

Looking back…

I don’t miss the marbles.

I don’t miss the baseball cards.

I don’t even miss the model cars.

Although I certainly wish they hadn’t disappeared while I was overseas.

What I miss…

Is the time we spent together.

The conversations under that old oak tree.

Trading baseball cards with neighborhood friends.

Helping someone glue a crooked fender back onto a model car.

Those hobbies gave us something far more valuable than collections.

They gave us memories.

And unlike baseball cards…

Those can never be sold.

Or lost.

Or taken away.

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💬 Your Turn

What hobby completely consumed your childhood?

Baseball cards?

Model cars?

Marbles?

Coin collecting?

Stamp collecting?

Building forts?

Tell us what you couldn’t wait to do after school or during summer vacation.

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Bunker Rule

The best childhood hobbies didn’t merely occupy our time. They taught us how to create, compete, negotiate, and connect.

Bunker Notice

This article reflects one boy’s memories of growing up in America during the 1950s and 1960s. Childhood interests have always changed with technology, and today’s young people possess skills earlier generations never imagined. The purpose is not to condemn modern childhood, but to remember what hands-on hobbies once contributed to imagination, patience, friendship, and independence.