By FULLER ROYAL
Staff Writer

No one has a shed anymore.

New houses don’t have sheds.

The new owners of older homes have torn down their sheds.

And if there is a shed, it seldom has more than a rake and a lawnmower in it.

What’s so great about a shed, you ask? Sheds used to keep kids from being bored. They used to inspire imagination and creativity.

They used to help develop problem-solving skills.

I grew up with a shed in the back yard. Our house on Madison Street, where my parents still live, was built more than 100 years ago by the Sears family.

My great grandfather, L.K. Fuller, moved his family into that home in 1910 and ran his mule and wagon business on the opposite side of the street.

Sometime after 1910, a shed was constructed behind the house for – well - stuff.

That shed was magical. My younger brother Sam and I spent many hours there inventing, building, tearing down and starting again.

It was full of scrap wood, pipes, rope, nails and tools – you name it. It was a kid’s paradise.

Two-by-fours became space ships. Pipes became towers.

Using the scraps, we built catapults (bicycle inner tubes provided the power), bridges, dams and water systems.

We built windmills and pulley systems. We made clay bricks and dug canals and built tree houses.

We built vehicles similar to the “Our Gang” models with crude axles and bike wheels attached to a two-by-ten plank.

Our riding lawnmower was transformed into a fire truck.

The list goes on.

What made our shed so valuable was that it fed our imaginations and made us use math and physics before we knew what math and physics were.

We would dream up something and then have to make it happen.

We learned to use hammers, saws, screwdrivers, levels, squares and drills – all by age 10. And we still have all our fingers.

Kids today are missing out. Their imaginations are dead muscles. Their problem-solving abilities are nil.

Today, everything has a battery in it. Everything makes noise or music. It all has to beep or flash to be interesting.

I recall a comment made by one of my favorite professors at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington – Dr. Terry Rogers, who taught the film courses in 1980.

He said that there was so much on screen on television and in theaters that nothing was left to the imagination and that we were wiping out youngsters’ imaginations.

I disagreed with him then, but it turns out he knew what he was talking about. And that was before the Internet, iPods, cell phones, DVDs, CDs et al.

Kids are flooded with so much information and material that they have no way to discern what’s treasure and what’s trash.

Kids are so awash in amazing special effects and gadgets in their homes that a simple two-by-four has lost all of is meaning and it potential.

After watching “Independence Day” or “Star Wars,” how can Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon compare? It’s no longer relevant to kids today.

We used to try and balance old spinning hubcaps on a steel rod, like those glass spinners on the old Ed Sullivan show.

We used to see how big a wind chime we could make with pieces of pipe.

We would experiment to see what worked and what didn’t.

We had a natural curiosity that our parents cultivated.

Curiosity today is limited to the forward arrow on a remote control.

That’ a real shame.

In school, kids learn to choose the best answer A, B, C or D. Teachers are teaching the test.

The sheds are gone and nothing has replaced them. Natural curiosity pretty much dies during the early school years and with it goes imagination and problem-solving.

With too many children, we have killed curiosity. We have stymied imagination. We have all but removed the problem-solving process from our curriculums.

So long, sheds.