As a kid I had a lot of good old-fashioned fun. Lucky for me, my Dad has always been a creative guy and back when we were little, he worked hard at including us in all manner of interesting projects, not all of them fully meeting the definition of "fun".

During the spring we did yard clean up together, in the winter it was firewood gathering, but in the summer we built floats for the White Center Jubilee Days Parade.

If you aren't familiar with what a parade float is, it begins usually with a theme and a few volunteers. If one of us kids happened to be walking by when inspiration struck Dad, we involuntarily became volunteers.

Dad would corral us at breakfast on Saturday to outline the plan. With a pencil and paper in front of him, we all offered our suggestions for neat float ideas and Dad dutifully jotted them down.

With each passing year, our designs became more sophisticated as the whine of circular saws and banging of hammers in our carport drew the attention of talented neighbors.

Dad's only criteria were that the float be timely and localized, and so whatever was in the news that month became fodder.

Seattle was voting on the new stadium the first year and together we fashioned a plywood box mounted over a wooden go-cart and painted it up to look like a coliseum complete with flags.

The next year, Namu the Killer Whale was big news and that became a float, with a couple of brothers towing a cute little tugboat, which in turn towed a black and white painted plywood cutout of an Orca.

The following year was the year that Boeing began lobbying for support for the sleek, futuristic jet, the SST (Supersonic Transport), and of course this had to become a parade float.

The kids piled up old bicycle parts, go-cart wheels and tools, and Dad procured some aluminum printing press plates for skin. After some hasty sketches we came up with a blueprint that Bill Boeing might have swooned over. Except, Bill was no longer alive and this was probably a fortunate thing for all of us.

Much banging and sawing commenced and in a while we had an interesting looking ... thing, with a lot of metal plating on it. Because Dad underestimated the support strength of long pieces of wood, the 20 plus-foot jet replica had a decided sag right in the middle.

"No problem," Dad said, "We'll call it the 'Super SAGGING Transport'"!

Sure enough, parade day arrived and we trucked the behemoth in two pieces up to 16th Avenue South and reassembled it in the Fieldhouse ball field parking lot. Because the cockpit turned out a bit undersized, and I only weighed about 90 pounds, I was chosen as the pilot.

My brother and my best friend became the motors and they had to squeeze under the sagging underbelly to stand up inside and push against the inner bulkhead. Inside the belly of the beast, the "engines" couldn't see a thing, so in order to move around, I had to shout "go" or "stop" as the conditions warranted.

This turned out to be more difficult than we imagined since the goofy, grounded airplane was so long it couldn't negotiate turns. We had to back up and go forward a few times at tight corners, disrupting the floats behind us, which at least provided some comic relief for the crowd.

The next project was even spacier. My brother and I loved flying saucer stories and we convinced Dad to help us build one. I had a gas-powered go-cart by this time, and we constructed a tube frame around it and added circular plywood decking, which we covered with silver colored cardboard, under hung with crepe paper skirting to hide the wheels.

Dad procured a Plexiglas bubble from a grocery store food display and that became the top. Neighbor kids were recruited to become Martians and my mom snapped bathing caps on their heads and smeared their faces with cold cream mixed with green food coloring.

On parade day, we unloaded the float, made last minute adjustments and got in line for the start. It didn't take long for me as the driver to realize that the advent of the gas-powered cart was not a good idea.

It was not vented properly and all the fumes were building up inside the bubble on top. Worse than this, the small hole they cut for me to look out of was too small and I had to sit on the seat back and peer out of the bubble to see. This was not too bad, except I couldn't reach both the gas and brake pedals at the same time - forcing me to hop back and forth to each one as needed.

I was a game kid, however and didn't want to complain lest I lose my driving post to a brother. So we idled along at walking pace, me lurching the cart back and forth in an attempt to create some ventilation and because I couldn't see where I was going.

After the second right turn, somehow I lost track of the float in front of me and could see nothing but open road ahead. Way off in the distance, there were things that looked like parade floats, but I couldn't be sure from the growing brain fog, so ... I hit the gas.

This was nice for me, since the fresh air was truly a life saver, but for parade watchers along the route, it must have been disconcerting to see this ground-based UFO whizzing past them at 30 miles an hour as I tried to catch up and to maintain control.

I was nearly at the front of the parade contingent when I realized I'd made a wrong turn. I whipped the contraption around and saw my Martians running down Ambaum toward me, cold cream dripping and signs asunder. I don't remember much after that, but I don't think we won any awards.

Dad didn't offer to help us with any more floats after this, and didn't say why. Maybe it was because the following year, I had my real life driver's permit.