My mother was a big fan of fresh air, and she believed children should be outside in it.

I don't know if she believed more in the positive health benefits of us breathing fresh air or the fact that with us outside, she could finally enjoy a little peace and quiet. But there we were, out in the front yard, left to our own devices.

This, of course, was in the days before kids could bake their brains playing video games for hours on end on PlayStations and Wiis, back when we had to use your imagination when we played.

We'd hop on our bicycles and ride all over the neighborhood, our bikes becoming fire trucks or Army tanks or spaceships.

Somewhere along the line, I learned there was much fun to be had by simply calling Red Knighton, who lived next door to us.

Mr. Red, as all the kids called him, owned the Early Furniture Co. on Main Street. If you called Mr. Red, he'd load an empty refrigerator box on the back of his truck and bring it to you when he came home from work.

Mr. Red must have brought us a hundred of those boxes over the years. Looking back, I'm a little surprised that there were that many new refrigerators being bought in a small town like Blakely, but every time we called, Mr. Red delivered. Literally.

To a little boy in those days, there were few things as much fun as a refrigerator box. Crawl inside one of those cavernous boxes and it could become anything. Sometimes it would be a battleship. Other times it might be a lunar lander, making us the first 6-year-olds on the moon.

Once, after the local fast-food joint gave kids a toy periscope with their hamburgers, our refrigerator box became a submarine.

Many times, though, my friends and I would pretend we were cowboys and the refrigerator box was a fort in the Old West. We'd use colored chalk or magic markets to make the outside of the box look like a fort. Sometimes, if we promised to be extra careful, my mother would let us use a knife to cut windows in the fort.

To this day, I'm still proud of the fact that no Indians successfully invaded our front yard while we stood guard in our fort.

After several days, we'd get tired of the box. Rather than just put it beside the road for the garbage men to pick up, we decided to get every ounce of fun possible out of it.

We'd do that by climbing into the box and rolling inside of it down the hill in our backyard, which sloped down to a lake. When we reached the bottom, we'd drag it back to the top of the hill and repeat the process until the box was completely destroyed.

Frankly, it's a minor miracle we never slammed ourselves into a pine tree on these blind rolls down the backyard. Frankly, it's a minor miracle our mother didn't kill us for doing it.

In a few days, we'd call Mr. Red and he'd bring us another box.

I remember the last time I saw Mr. Red. It was about a year or so ago, and he and I started talking about all those refrigerator boxes. I was happy to have a chance to tell him what a great part of my childhood those boxes were, and how much it meant to me that he'd bring one everytime I called.

I've been thinking about Mr. Red a lot lately. If the Ringling Bros. Congress and their fellow Bozos on Wall Street don't figure out a fix to this economic crisis, we may all be living in refrigerator boxes.

Unfortunately, Mr. Red died in February. So I've got to find myself another supplier.

Mitch Clarke is executive editor of The Times. His column appears Sundays in The Times and on gainesvilletimes.com. Originally published Sept. 28, 2008.