I was often called a bookworm as a youngster. I loved to read and it didn’t matter if the story had illustrations or not because I enjoyed imagining my own pictures to go along with the story. Long after I’d graduated to books without pictures, I had my own ideas about what characters and landscapes looked like and was usually disappointed in movies of stories I’d read. It seemed to me that my own mental pictures were better than what Hollywood came up with.
My dad once observed that television, while a good thing in many ways, was responsible for destroying the sense of wonder in children and for weakening their ability to imagine. My dad’s mother came from Germany, a culture that is known for valuing and producing wonderful toys, and a Norwegian father who was somewhat of an adventurer as well as a photographer and craftsman who made violins, jewelry boxes, Christmas ornaments, and toys such as dollhouse furniture for his daughter, and miniature boats and wagons for his sons.
Dad believed that a child’s business was to learn through play and that toys were necessary tools to that end. He provided me and my sisters with more than the usual supply of toys and encouraged us to use them imaginatively. For instance, he built me a dollhouse but did not fill it with true-to-life scale model furniture as we find in today’s toy stores, but encouraged me to furnish and decorate it myself.
I soon learned to improvise with found objects. Scraps of velvet from Mother’s rag bag became elegant carpets for bedrooms and living room. Small bottle lids made perfect flowerpots for tiny plants and flowers cut from seed catalogs. And Mother helped me make a sofa and overstuffed chair from corrugated cardboard padded with cotton and upholstered with scraps of dark blue wool. Handkerchiefs printed with flowers or edged with lace made lovely bedspreads and curtains when folded just so. Toothpicks and Popsicle sticks came in handy for any number of things.
Even though my childhood was definitely affected by the Depression, I never had a sense of having been deprived of anything. Our neighborhood consisted of families with lots of children and there was always someone to play with, someone to talk to, trade comic books with, splash with in a washtub of water on a hot day, and go sledding with after a snowstorm. We played Hide and Seek after supper on summer evenings, became Tarzan and Jane as we climbed trees to escape imaginary dangers, “hid out” in someone’s tree house to spy on the neighbors, turned kitchen chairs and blankets into caves and castles, pretended that pop bottle caps were pirate treasure, and organized parades down the middle of our street on summer afternoons. We were always busy and relied on our imaginations, not TV or structured adult-planned activities, to fill our days and stretch our minds. Kids still do similarly inventive things if given the chance.
I have to agree with my dad in some ways when it comes to television and the changing role of play, but there are advantages in today’s science and wildlife documentaries. Why imagine tigers hunting in a jungle when we can turn on the television and see a film of the real thing? Still, those real-life films are the products from the minds of photographers, editors, script writers and directors who show us only what they select as the important and typical aspects. Unfettered imagination is more creative than passively observing the results of someone else’s imaginings.
I’ve never been a fan of soap operas, though I do admit to listening to “One Man’s Family” on the radio as a young teenager, but what I saw as I listened originated in my own mind. Today, I catch an occasional glimpse of some of the daytime dramas while searching for something worth watching, and it strikes me that those overly emotional people seem to always be shouting, crying or accusing someone of some unspecified sin. And why are they always dressed to the nines? I think those script writers could learn something about imagination from watching children at play.