The year my family moved from the city to the country, us siblings experienced many new activities. Tinker toys and baseball cards were what we started out with in the country, not to mention that big old oak tree in the backyard that soon held a tire swing. We were also treated with a nearby baseball field, where besides playing baseball, we flew kites and balsa wood airplanes.

One of my first endeavors at this new house (not really brand new) was to install a copper line with two glass insulators for my crystal radio aerial outside my upstairs window frame and to connect the other end to a treetop in our neighbor's side yard. This neighbor, an old fellow I called Jed, didn't seem to mind the wire in his space; neither did my father, since he was the one who gave me those insulators in the first place. They had been left over from an electric project that my father did with me when I was about six years old. Although I only picked up two radio stations due to the mountainous terrain nearby, it was still, in my opinion, the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, when there was a freezing rain event in the winter months, the ice would accumulate on this copper line, but somehow it never broke. It didn't occur to me or anyone else that if lightning ever struck that line we'd all probably be fried to a crisp. It did have a ground wire that clipped to the iron radiator, but that probably would never have sufficed in the case of lightning. It did complete the circuit though to make the diode work. I surely enjoyed that radio, as I still enjoy tuning into distant a.m. radio signals at night.

I don't quite remember where the small amount of money came from, but I, along with one of my brothers, used to go to the local milk store and buy packs of baseball cards. That gum sure was good. We were not at all interested in the stats on the players or teams, but the faces seemed to us very amusing. I would then proceed to give the particular player a name, perhaps according to what he looked like he was saying or according to the way he looked to me on the card. Occasionally we had the liberty to buy a twenty-five cent kite or a balsa wood glider plane. They always got broken somehow. Sometimes we waited days on end for a windy day for the kite. That was in New Jersey.