Each day I waited anxiously for the mailman to arrive. Each day I was disappointed when I opened the mailbox and there was no package. I felt like Charlie Brown waiting for a valentine to appear in his mailbox, but it was always empty. The ad said to allow 3-4 weeks for delivery, but that seemed like an eternity when I was young. I probably started checking the mailbox after one week.
One day as we were hoeing tobacco in the big field alongside our road, I saw a cloud of dust to the west. It was 9:00 and that meant it was our rural mail carrier, Howard Crume. Unless there was bad weather, like a raging blizzard, you could set your watch by his arrival. In those days, very few cars used our road, now known as Sherpe Road. When I was young the road didn’t have a name. It was simply a gravel county road halfway between Tri-State Breeders and Smith School.
As Howard came alongside the tobacco field, he saw us hoeing and honked his horn to greet us. Then he held up a package so we could see it. He knew we’d been waiting for it to arrive for close to a month. It was only 9:00 but there was no way we could wait until noon to retrieve the package from the mailbox. The weeds in the tobacco would have to wait, even if Dad got mad at us for abandoning our hoes in the field. He was busy cutting hay in the back forty. Maybe he wouldn’t notice that we were AWOL from our post before we returned.
I pulled open the lid of the mailbox and there it was, a brown, paper package addressed to me. Standing in the middle of the road I tore open the package and there they were. A clear plastic bag containing 50 plastic army men. 25 were green and 25 were gray. They were 2-inch figures, molded out of hard plastic and came in several different poses. Those little plastic figures were relatively cheap compared to the action figures that were available in later years. They cost about a penny each. That pack of 50 was around 50 cents plus postage. There were riflemen standing, kneeling, crawling, and prone, throwing grenades, shooting machine guns, with bayonets, a radioman, and one with a pistol to lead them. We now had an army.
World War II and the Korean War had been a part of my world during my early years and army men were my heroes. Now we could stage those battles that we had seen pictures of in newspapers and magazines. But first there was tobacco to be hoed and staging battles would have to wait. Work always came before play. That was the way of life for farm kids.
That little package of army men provided us many hours of fun. We played with them in the dirt and staged battles inside when it rained and we couldn’t work or play outside. When we had access to firecrackers around the 4th of July we were able to add explosions to our battles, as we bombed the gray-colored German troops. Unfortunately, we found out that a direct hit on an army man could also damage them. You also learned not to leave them lying around outside when not playing with them. Dogs liked chewing on them and left them full of holes and mangled. Those figures became casualties in our battles after that, since they were already severely wounded.
Later, plastic army trucks, jeeps, and tanks also became available through the mail and at the dime store in Viroqua. We were able to add some men and vehicles to our army with money we earned mowing the lawn. Dad paid David and me 25 cents each week. It was a large lawn and we used a push mower and took turns. That was the only money we earned doing work around the farm, except for tobacco harvest when he paid us 50 cents an hour when we got older. That was big money for us. The men and women he hired got $1.00 an hour. Would anyone do that kind of back-breaking work for a dollar an hour today?
I was reminded of our army men days when I received a message from my friend John in the Madison area. My story about playing in the water reminded him of his days doing the same thing. He wondered if I also sailed boats down those rivers. They used sticks and pretended they were ships navigating the mighty river. They even lashed sticks together to make a small raft and had hours of fun and always ended up soaked to the bone.
Yes, we also had boats during those spring thaws. We used pieces of busted tobacco laths as boats. It seems everything we did was connected to tobacco in one way or another. For extra excitement, we put our army men on the lath boats and suddenly they were troops heading into battle. When the boats wedged against the side of the ditch the men would storm ashore from their landing crafts.
Those simple army men provided us many hours of fun in all kinds of weather. Little did John, David, and I know that years later we would all become army men for real.
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