From the archives

 

 Me in the back yard in Seal Beach with my pet rat Jimmy on my head.

 

Me, squeezing out through the door of my fort with brother David poking his head up out the gun turret of his fort in the background.

 

Back then, a lot of stuff came in wooden crates.  I remember what good scooter fronts wooden apple crates made when we nailed them onto 2x4s and sacrificed a roller skate by separating the two halves and screwing them to the bottom of the 2x4.  A couple stubs of 1x2s mounted diagonally on the top for handles and we were good to go.  I remember going to a tennis court to ride our scooters.  It makes me squirm in discomfort now just thinking about rolling our metal wheeled skates on a tennis court surface, but come to think of it, it wasn’t a sophisticated surface then, it was just cement troweled a little smoother than sidewalk cement.

 

And rabbit hutches in the background.  I guess that wheeled thing is a large tricycle.