Our major event for the year has come and gone, Sawmill Day and the car show. We had a good crowd this year, if you have never got around to making it to Sawmill Day you should try to make it one year. We have all day music with arts and crafts along with historical displays. The car show is always a great thing to see if you like older and classic cars. Sawmill Day is held on the first Saturday in May. It looked like for a few days before hand the weather might be a problem as rain was in the picture for that day, but as it turned out the weather was really good that day.
Another local event usually held the weekend before Sawmill Day is the Blackcat Reunion, this is usually held the last Saturday of April at Lake Stone. This is for all classes, no invitations are sent out so mark your calendars for next year. Most people usually bring a covered dish to go with the main course.
Well, with the reunion also behind us for this year it makes me think of how old I'm getting. I have been thinking about how we entertained ourselves back when we were teenagers and even earlier. When I was young we had to make our entertainment or invent it. Let me say right now some of what we did back then that was pretty safe, would be very dangerous today.
For example, Akron, Ohio had the Soapbox Derby, while Century had the Hudson Hill Derby for a few years. During this time highway 29 was a two lane road, that didn't have much traffic at the time, probably more cars pass through Century on highway 29 now in a couple of hours than passed all day during those years.
Several of us got into this, we built our own wooden cars, with what we could find and would start at the top of the hill on Hudson Hill road and race to highway 29, rolling right on out into highway 29 several times. Sometimes there would only be two racers and sometimes there might be a half a dozen or so. As with most racing, the more cars the more accidents, and for most of us more fun.
Ball games was another thing we did, depending on the time of year it was mostly baseball or football. We had a couple of different places to play, one place was our front yard, through not very large we managed to play several games there each year.
One obstacle was a oak tree right near where second base was during baseball games and right at midfield for football. Even though the tree wasn't that big at the time, about twenty feet high and maybe six inches in diameter, it was still bigger than you and didn't give much if you looked the other way and ran into it.
During the summer the small creek that runs north of Hudson Hill road gave us many days of good fishing, good for a bunch of teenagers. Most of the fish we caught were smaller than our hands, but for young boys out doing it all on their own from digging worms to rigging up fishing poles and deciding where to fish it was all good, because back then I was to young to need a fishing license, and now I'm old enough that I don't need one.
Now days with modern capabilities we all have the ability to carry our entertainment around in our pockets. Like most everything this has it's good points and it's bad points as well. I'm sure if we had had this capability when we were young we would have taken full advantage of it.
Things have come a long way since I was young. I was just reading where some teens tried to carjack a vehicle but couldn't because it was a manual transmission and they didn't know how to drive it. The vehicle that I learned to drive to get my license was a manual transmission, and I suspect a lot of people my age learned with a similar vehicle. After most of us got our license we had to go somewhere, didn't matter where as long as we were going.
I remember driving a old three speed truck, a early sixties model, and when we came to a hill, we would put it in neutral and coast down the hill to save that twenty five cent a gallon gas that was hard to come by. That price seems really cheap now, but back then a 6.5 ounce bottle of Coca Cola was five cents and you could go to one of the new hamburger business's and get a hamburger, fries and a drink for about one dollar.
We had fun coming up back then, but honestly, I wouldn't want to go back to those days, with all the modern conveniences we have today, no I'll take today. The Alger Sullivan Historical Society meets the third Tuesday of the month at the Leach House Museum at 610 4th street in Century, join us.
