Rain Races/Trolley Car Races – Cincinnati, Ohio/ Northern Kentucky area

Just prior to a rain storm we would collect ice cream sticks, decorate them with a ball point pen or india ink to make them distinctive. A nickel would buy a Popscile and you could race your friend. I scrounged my mother’s friend’s bar for nickels, sometimes washing all the glasses if necessary just to get the cash to keep up my habit of a popscile a day. We would stash our cache of popscile sticks until that rainy day.

When there was sufficient rain and it would be flowing down 12th Street’s trolley tracks (they were concave tracks) we would place our racers into the left or right track and let them go down the track the first racer to get to 13th street “won” and would take the other track and the person who had the most “wins” that day was declared “King Neptune Of 12th Street”. Hey give us a break, we only raced until we were about 10-11 and then we went to “work” collecting old newspapers, scrap metal, bottles or whatever to buy 10 cent balls to play “Strike Out” with.

Racers were sometimes decorated and “shaped” by rubbing the ice cream stick on the pavement which usually had a sandpaper effect. The better races had flat tails to catch as much surface area as possible so the water would push them down the trolley track faster and the faster racers had very pointy noses to cut through the water better.

Usually there was a safety lookout, who would yell “cars” or “trolley.” On some days there were enough kids available to use the east and west tracks (a two way street)and we’d call it a regatta (I had no idea what it meant until I was 9) Some of us little kids parent’s would let us play in the rain in our underwear and forgo a bath that night. Oh how I prayed for rain!

Fun times on 12th Street. Today I can’t even imagine kids 5-6 years old playing in the street or even enjoying a rainy day splashing in the puddles. That was in 1950-1958, the tracks are gone, torn-up and recycled, traffic has increased by at least 50 times and children are watching South Park.

But life is still wonderful in our memories and if God takes me tomorrow, I can say it was FUN!