Nope - we either knocked on the door or called them on the rotary dial telephone.
I’d forgotten about yelling for kids to come out. One family had four guys we’d play with, so we’d yell MarkAlanTwinkBohhhhh-bby!
I remember we gave one kid a nickname because his name ended with a schwa then an n, and you couldn’t yell it loud enough. He lived a block off our route, and we didn’t want to walk that far. He became “Tree”, and we’d yell that in unison from 100 meters away…
Huh, I guess we were those loud kids, the kind that annoy me now. Guess I should remind myself what a blast we were having when we were disturbing the peace.
Huh. We knocked, or used the doorbell. Always the back door. The front door was for adult parties. This was in eastern MA.
Wow, this thread is now almost older than the general age of a kid who would call out their friends to get them to come outside.
I would not do this with friends; I would knock on the door and ask “can Jimmy come out and play?”
However, I did do something similar with a girl I had my first real crush on at 11. That summer I would ride my bike past her house and around the block several times, seeing if she was outside. I would not dare knock on her door because one, I was painfully shy, and two, her dad was big and scary-looking to me, with longish shaggy hair and a beard. He looked like bigfoot.
If she was outside and saw me, she’d call out to me, yelling ‘solost’ and I would ride up and say, “hey, you called?” and she would say “I wasn’t trying to get you to stop, I just wondered if that was you, so I called your name to see if you’d turn your head”. But she did want me to stop; it was just this act we both did because she was shy, too. Then we’d hang out in her yard for awhile, and I’d hope her dad didn’t come outside while we were hanging.
“Friends and family, back door. If someone rings the front doorbell, they’re trying to sell you something.”
A family from The Big City (Jo’burg) moved in next door, and still can’t get used to everyone coming to their back door.
Not really. More if they were already outside, just catch up with them. Or vice versa.
Yeah, I supposed it were possible to knock on the front door, but that was for if we knew someone’s parents were out working and such.
Preferred a well regulated system of howls and screeches…worked pretty well back then, and I suppose it does to this day.