Don Farmer: Straight arrows and Semper Fi

Our kids are too fat, yet some “educators” are banning dodge ball, which is 75 percent exercise and 25 percent fear, a pretty good recipe for shedding the pounds.

It’s time to fight back against the handwringers who are trying to make sissies out of our children.

Some schools up North have banned dodge ball as too aggressive. Elsewhere, rope-climbing at recess is ruled out as too dangerous. One school prohibited playground tag. Another allowed touch football but not touching. Some have rescinded recess.

We’re softening our species, so afraid our kids will be exposed to conflict and competition between pre-K and college that we’re stealing a chunk of their childhood.

Girls, too, need some rough-and-tumble to temper their tendency to watch so much “American Idol” that they become idle Americans. (I borrowed that “American Idol-Idle American” phrase from the Bob and Tom radio show.)

Kids need to keep score. They must learn to be good winners as well as good losers and to prefer the former.

As kids 50 years ago, we admittedly overdid it now and then.

Example: I was 6, the youngest kid in a bow-and-arrow contest in Louie Christian’s backyard, three doors from my family’s house in St. Louis.

The older kids wouldn’t let me empty my quiver until they had their shots at a bull’s-eye target 60 feet away.

After each of those bowstring bullies took a turn, I had to trudge to the target, pull out the arrows and rush back to those amateur archers and deliver their arrows for the next round.

When the last shooter before me had embarrassed himself with arrows as far from the bull’s-eye as they could be and still stay in Louie’s yard, I ran to fetch his arrows, yanked them from the target and turned to rush back for my turn, at last.

Just then Louie inexplicably took a quick shot. His wooden-tipped arrow hit me right between the eyes.

Louie, age 9, sputtered a couple of un-Christian-like words my 6-year-old ears had never heard. We didn’t have MTV then, just “Howdy Doody.”

The other boys ran to where I had crumpled, bleeding, cross-eyed by trying to focus on the intrusive projectile half an inch from both eyes.

One kid removed the arrow — it was only embedded maybe an eighth of an inch — and I stumbled home, scared more than hurt, bleeding the way a boxer’s facial cut bleeds, more abundantly than my wound justified.

When my mother came to, my uncle, a Marine just home after the war in the Pacific, created a butterfly-like bandage between my eyes, something he learned in the corps. It squeezed the skin to close the hole where Louie Christian’s apparently slo-mo arrow had come to rest.

We went to the family doctor (remember those?) who admired Uncle Bill’s butterfly bandage. He said I’d have a scar for life. I was OK with that.

Mother said I wouldn’t need a bow and arrow anymore either.

I learned three lessons that day:

-- Louie Christian wasn’t very bright.

-- Never go near a target when such a person is in the same ZIP code.

-- Uncle Bill gave new meaning to “Semper Fi.”

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Don Farmer is a former ABC News correspondent and CNN anchor. E-mail: don@donfarmer.com.