Old time games for road trips

If you look in any modern gift catalog and see a heading similar to my headline, you will find opportunities to buy many types of handheld devices where children or adults can become immersed in a game or puzzle all by themselves. The scenery passes by quickly as the miles pass and there are no disruptive noises in the car to bother the driver. In fact, the driver may well have on earphones and be listening to his special station or tapes playing in the car.

It probably makes the trips go smoother, but it doesn't bring the family any closer together. No matter how smart Johnny is on his game, the rest of his family doesn't share it with him. If little Kathie is watching a cartoon on her device, when she laughs, no one else shares the joke.

As archaic as it may seem, our family of eight children had two long trips each year, with most of us in the one car. Sometimes our father couldn't share the trips (business, you know) and sometimes one of the children had outgrown the summers on the farm and had a job somewhere during the summer. But usually there were three, or maybe four, of us in the front seat, two children back to back on stools between the seats, and the rest seated in the back seat, usually with me on an older sibling's or Mama's lap. Can you believe that I enjoyed the trips?

I enjoyed the trips because we played games constantly as we drove. Of course we always watched for the Burma Shave signs, eager to be the first to read the following segment of the jingle. One of my favorites came in later years when I was no longer a lap sitter, but possibly one of the drivers. It is, "If you don't know/ whose signs these are/ you can't have travelled/ very far/ Burma Shave."

We also played cows and horses, counting the animals on our side of the road. A white horse doubled our score, passing a cemetery on our side of the road caused us to lose all our cows and horses. A cat in the window helped keep our attention going through towns because that added 100 points. Our highways were generally what we now call "blue roads" as they appear on the map. They were two-laned roads that ran through every town, often right down the main street. The players were divided down the middle of the car to look out the side they were nearest.

But a favorite game that tested our vocabulary and spelling, but was still fun, was called "Ghost." One player starts to spell a word by saying a letter. Going around the passengers in the car, counter-clockwise, each person added a letter. The object was to not be forced into finishing a word while still being able to supply the actual word you were spelling.

If you did add a letter that ended a word, you became a G. If you were forced to bluff because you couldn't think of a word that was spelled that way you could say a letter, but if someone challenged you and you were bluffing, you became a G, or possibly an H, or O, or S, depending on your earlier misses. Everyone had to be vigilant to catch the one who finally become a GHOST because if you talked to the GHOST, you became one also. The winner was the one who had continued a word without ending it until he was the last player left.

In the meantime all the others who had already become GHOSTS are asking you questions like, "What time is it?" and if you absentmindedly answer, you become a GHOST and don't win the game. Often, the game was lost by the best speller, who angrily told a sibling to stop bothering with those questions.

Years after the trips were not needed because our parents had retired to stay at the farm; I was taking my nephew and his younger sister up to Kansas City to meet their mother who had been attending a meeting in the city. I asked the new driver who had just turned 16 if he wanted to drive and he took over in spite of a sore foot from stepping on a nail on our raft.

We were playing GHOST as we drove up and I was impressed with both Sarah's and Sandy's quick minds, but Sandy finally pulled over on the Kansas City streets to ask me to drive because his foot was hurting. I can't remember for sure who won the game, but I won because I got to know these two young relatives so much better by playing this simple game.

I'm sure if the three of us played this game today, they would both beat me because I couldn't keep from talking and being made a GHOST or spell all the new words they now would know.