In my early teen age days, the sports I was interested in were hiking and wrestling which I got mostly with the Boy Scouts.  I really loved hiking and camping out.  Hunting was another one.  I got my 22 Winchester pretty early.  Must have been about 1912.  I used to hunt jack rabbets in the fields and meadows and so forth and I hunted squirrels out on the northwest part of town in the area where the Country Club is now.  In was the most wooded area around there at that time.  Monty Sturtevant & I went duck hunting at an island in the Cimarron River near Ames.  To get there it was necessary to take a freight train and ride in the caboose.  This was on the Santa Fe or Frisco.  They made a stop at the river at a water tank where we got off.  We took our bed rolls with us and roughed it.  We stayed all night and slept on the ground on our bed rolls.  We got up early in the morning to shoot at the ducks flying overhead.  We didn't hurt any of them.  Ha! Ha!  But it was a lot of fun & one thing I remember clearly ws that it was cold.  We left our shoes on the ground & in the morning they were all frosted over inside and out.  So we had to put on some frosty shoes.  I forgot to mention that where we got off, we could walk over the railroad bridge out to that island.  To get back home we had to walk 5 miles from the river back to the town of Drummond where we could catch the train back to Enid.

 

Speaking of hunting, I remember one time Kenneth and I went hunting with Will Turner, Virgie's sister's Mabel's husband.  He took us possum hunting at night.  From what I heard afterwards, I guess he thought he was going to wear us out.  But we probably wore him out.  We didn't get any possums either.  It was quite an experience hunting at night.

 

When I was in the 8th grade, I went to an inter grade school meet at the high school and ran a 100 Yd dash.  I didn't own any sport shoes, I just ran in my bare feet.  My favorite sport though was wrestling.  I took a wrestling course from Farmer Burns who was a top wrestler in the old days.  It was a correspondence course and I did pretty well at it.  I could take care of myself wrestling.