Summers in Colorado

My father went to school out in Fort Collins, Colorado at Colorado State University, to finish his Bachelor's degree and to get his Master's degree starting when I was 12 years old.  Most years we went along and lived there for the summer. Although not all of my brothers and sisters went along, because two were married, five of us lived there with our parents.  Because of having a large family and because we didn't have a lot of money, we rented several fraternity houses to live in. The first thing we did was clean the house.  We each got to pick our own room as long as we cleaned it.  It was the only time I ever had my own room.  The first summer we lived in Theta Chi.  There was no television in the house, which meant we had to come up with ways to entertain ourselves. One of the things we did was play multiple person Solitaire.  We would sit at one of the large tables in the dining room and each of us would deal out a game of Solitaire.  Then all hell would break out as we were looking at everyone else's game to try to play one of our cards on theirs.  The first person to go out would win.  At times you would see a chance to play a card and you had to get up and run around the table to the place you could play the card. Sometimes more than one person would see the same chance to play a card and would race to be there first.  Only time in my life I got bruises from playing Solitaire.