I grew up during the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when kids spent virtually all their time out-of-doors when they weren't at school or doing homework. For if you ventured into the house in those days, your mother would stick a broom in your hand and put you to work around the house - and none of us wanted any of that!
So we stayed outside constantly. Mothers would hand peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of Kool-Aid out the windows to us so we didn't have to track our dirt through their houses. On rainy days, we'd go to somebody's basement to watch wrestling or cartoons on TV but otherwise, we'd be out of doors.
We all had bicycles in those days and nobody wore helmets. If one of us had a dollar or two, we'd go to the corner store and get large bags of penny candy and we would gorge on licorice sticks, flying saucers, giant gumballs, Swedish fish, caramel creams and all kinds of other candies - almost pure sugar.
Kids had paper routes in those days and many of us (including myself) would spend an hour or so tossing papers up on front porches and go around the neighborhood once a week to collect the money to pay the newspaper man (keeping the rest for ourselves).
Mostly we'd sit around at picnic tables listening to Top 40 music on the portable "transistor" radio and play board games like Monopoly and Risk for hours on end. We would even break out a deck of playing cards now and then until somebody's mother came around to make us stop, lest we grow up and become "degenerate gamblers."
Stickball, touch football, basketball (with just a hoop and no net), and baseball when the bigger kids didn't kick us off the field. Boys and girls played together. So the girls would join us for stickball and dodgeball and occasionally us boys would play hopscotch and house with them with no fear of being called sissies because we were all in this childhood together.
When the streetlights started coming on, we would start hearing our fathers whistle for us (each father had a distinct whistle) and we'd gradually start heading home. Except in mid-summer on those hot humid nights when we had no school and we'd hang out on our doorsteps close to midnight (nobody had AC in those days) while we'd go looking for fireflies, listen to the crickets, light some firecrackers and bottlerockets, and our fathers would let us have a sip or two of their beers as we waited for it to cool off enough to go to our beds.
I forgot about stick ball. We used to play massive games of kick the can and one called four square.