There's more than one way to jump!

Saturday, we took the grandsons up an indoor Jumping place. In our town a inflatable play area was set up in an old aircraft hanger. It is a great place for kids (except no air!, yikes).  I have attached a couple of photos.  But the main things is the kids can run and jump.

It reminded me of my youth, before inflatable things were available.  When I was 9 and wanted to jump during the summer, I just had to wait for cotton. You see in the 50's around my hometown of Haskell, cotton was king.  Cotton fields surrounded the town and their were as many as 4 cotton gins in the community.  The largest was Goodman's Gin and it happened to be one block from my house. It was the greatest amusement park that I ever attended.  The Goodman's had a son who played with my brother and me and therefore we also played at the gin.  During the winter we would slip into the large machine building which was two stories tall and catwalks to all the machines.  We played hide and seek, chase and such things among the machines (Designed to separate cotton from the hulls and be made into large bales of cotton.

The jumping came when the cotton came.  The trailers of cotton would line up to be literally sucked by large vacuum tubes into the system.  The hulls would fall into giant piles behind the building and the ginned cotton would flow into four holding rooms, each having a ceiling about three stories high.

Although it was frowned upon, we went into these rooms and climbed two story high piles of fresh cotton and jumped, flipped, and fell.  It was a blast,

When the gin closed for the day, we would go to the "hulls" and do the same except the hulls had sharp corners at times and were filthy with dirt.

Other times we would climb up on the cotton bales that were being collected for transport by train (nearby). The bales were 6 feet high, 4 feet wide and three deep.  They would sometimes stand 20 to a row and 6 or 8 rows deep. We would jump row to row and also create games of tag to play.

It was a great time.

Note: OSHSA did not exist then!

Besides the cotton gin, we had a railroad yard and a grain elevator nearby as well.  

There's more than one way to jump.

Note: the gin photos are from BING, I'll try to find some actual ones