It looked so inviting.

Whenever we drove past the trampoline center on East Lehman Street, I saw all those trampolines just waiting to be jumped on.

I remembered watching circus shows on TV with acrobats doing amazing things on trampolines and making it look so easy and so much fun, so I was hankering to get on one of those trampolines myself.

And now a trampoline center had opened right here Lebanon, which wasn’t all that far from Richland. I mean, we used to go to Lebanon probably at least once a week. And very often we’d drive past the trampoline center on Lehman Street.

This would have been in about 1961 when I was about 12 years old.

Finally, one time my mother and our neighbor JoAnn Weiant (my mother’s long time friend) decided to take JoAnn’s two girls, Ellen and Kathleen, and me to the trampoline center.

I don’t recall how Ellen and Kathleen did, but for me it was a bust.

All those graceful athletes that I had seen on TV that made it look so easy—well it weren’t so dagblamed easy.

As I discovered as soon as I stepped onto the blasted trampoline canvas. It was all I could do to jump up and down without pitching over and breaking my fool neck, let alone doing anything fancy.

Oh, I got used to it and figured out how to maintain my balance, and soon I was jumping up and down with the best of them. I even did a few flops on my behind. But that was about the extent of it. It was fun. Sort of. But not nearly as much fun as I thought it would be. 

And that was it. We never had a return engagement. Once was enough.

BTW, what was the first thing that popped into your mind when you saw “Corky’s Tramp-O-Leap”?