Skiing and Other Activities

Residents ski down a hill, located in front of the McIntyre four-room school house which looms in the background of this late-1940s photo.  Skis and sleds were often homemade. 

Other leisure activities and games that children played were jacks, hide and seek, hopscotch, jump-rope, marbles, and you're hot/your're cold. Homemade slingshots were popular with boys. One resident remembers the funerals that she and her friends staged for dead birds and mice.  

Other leisure time activities included: swimming, picnicking, dancing, camping, the circus,  and, in early years, minstrel shows. Italian men liked to play briscola, a card game, bocce, an outdoor version of bowling, and morra. The latter was a hand game of strategy played by two people. By far, the most popular form of entertainment was baseball. The Coal Company sponsored and supported baseball leagues composed of players from its various mining towns.  

Clarence D. Stephenson, Indiana County 175th Anniversary History, vol. 2 
(Indiana, Pennsylvania: Halldin Publishing Company, 1989), 543-544.

Photo: courtesy Ed Swan collection.