We didn’t have video games, computers, or other types of technology when I was growing up. The only phone we had was a rotary-dial telephone that was mounted on the wall in our hallway and rarely rang. Even when it did, it usually wasn’t for one of us kids.

At the top of the stairs leading to the second story of our house was a large room with a couch, a couple of chairs, a wall of built-in bookshelves, and a cart that held our little black and white TV. Cable didn’t exist in the 1960s and that little TV only picked up 3 channels on clear days and even fewer if the weather was bad. Weekend afternoons, the only shows on were golf, hunting, cooking, or news. On rainy days when we were looking for something to do besides playing one of our regular board games, we would get the big globe down from its shelf in our TV room and play “The Travel Game.” The four of us would take turns and close our eyes, spin the globe, and put our finger on a location. Wherever our finger landed was where we would “travel”. We would all talk about what it was like there and what we wanted to do when we got there.

I always knew my daddy was a very intelligent man, but in retrospect, I realize that he would have been AMAZING at homeschooling us because along with that big globe, he also kept the built-in bookshelves filled with Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedias; National Geographic Magazines; two other sets of Encyclopedias (one with a lot of pictures); different types of reference books; and fictional and nonfictional books for all ages (binoculars and a microscope too)! If we didn’t know anything about the place we landed on, guess what we did? We looked it up, of course, and we did it willingly because we were interested in knowing and had FUN doing it!! Thank you, Daddy, for always teaching us, as well as providing us with the tools we needed to educate ourselves (we call it “strewing”). Even though we didn’t realize it back then, I sure do see it clearly now…