Barb Hammond
In the past couple of years, a group of friends and I have been getting hooked on table games.
There is a backstory: Marilyn Tompkins Bellert and I were Camp Fire Girls. We stayed active all the way through high school which led us to great fun during the summers in high school and college. We were counselors at a Camp Fire Girls camp that was south of Ark City, almost on the Oklahoma border. In the photo below, I’m on the left (white headband). Next to me is another East ’60 classmate, D’Anne Harris (long dark hair); skip one person in front (Kay Weber, Southeast ’61), and over to the red head on the right – that’s Marilyn.
Camp Ko-Ha-Me Counselors, 1963
Another of our classmates, Sharon Adams, also worked with us. She was at the top of the stairway in this same photo.
To make a short story long, 10 years ago at a Camp Ko-Ha-Me reunion here in Wichita, I got reacquainted with some women who were a few years younger than Marilyn and me. When we knew them, they were our high school-aged campers – regularly rowdy, yet very responsible individuals. Most of them participated in a Counselor-in-Training program that we led and eventually became counselors themselves. We now get together frequently for lunch, hikes, games, or whatever. Unfortunately, Marilyn doesn’t live close enough to Wichita to join us.
Last week, several women brought some new games to my dining room table. We laughed, we argued, we tried to read each other’s minds, and laughed some more. Maybe it was the Irish beer, who knows? I have to say that I haven’t had that much hilarity in a long time. In case you want to give yourselves a boost of endorphins, try some of these: Blots, Magnetize, Taboo, and Telestrations. None of them require any brain strain and are good for all ages.
