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The Flat Place
Posted By: Howard, on host 209.86.38.16
Date: Thursday, June 15, 2000, at 18:30:15

I've enjoyed all the stories about how people entertained themselves in their younger days without just watching TV all the time. Very interesting.

Back then I lived in Hazard, Kentucky, a town in the mountains of Perry County. The streets in town were mostly hills and curves and very few yards had any level ground. But Our neighborhood has something special. The Flat Place. Sometime back in the 30's, someone had leveled a place to build a house. It was about 30 feet wide and almost a hundred feet long, but the house was never built. So we played on The Flat Place. We played cowboy, built forts and shacks and walked around on homemade stilts. After Christmas each year, we collected cast-off Christman trees and piled them up on The Flat Place. At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, we touched a match to it and watched flames shoot 50 feet into the air. That was our New Years celebration.
I remember another time when flames shot into the air. We used scrap lumber to build a shack on The Flat Place. It was about six feet by eight feet and about six feet tall. We covered the outside with cardboard. All that took one full day and we promised ourselves we would come back the next day and put a roof on it. It was not to be. One of the neighbors thought it was ugly and burned it down. We had our revenge. We spent hours harvesting morning glory seeds and sewed them all over his corn patch.
I went by The Flat Place a few years ago. Somebody has built a brick house there. They probably chose brick so nobody could burn it down.
Howard