Being a kid in my day was largely boring. There was nothing on TV when you got home from school but soaps. I'd take the dog and go walk in the woods behind out house and occasionally dam up the creek for fun. There was a small field that had old abandoned cars in it and I would take the gauges out of old cars and use it to build a "space simulator" using a large box that had a large TV in it that I found and got home somehow. It had a motorized "hatch" and I used some wax paper and moving flashlight bulbs to make a radar screen kind of thing. One summer I read the World Book Encyclopedia, except for the biography parts, seriously, the whole thing. My Mom sold them door to door for a while and we got a nice set "free".
There was a circle in front of our house that had filled up with dirt eroded from construction up the street. One day I started scraping the dirt into a drainage culvert. It would have taken me all summer and then some to do it all, the dirt was half a foot thick in places. Oddly enough, neighbors started coming over to help out and in a couple days we had all the dirt removed.
So, the idea of keeping detailed records about some sport is pretty appealing in a world with no TV and no Internet and no computer games.
And my own dad's childhood was vastly different from mine.
