Its summer time and I have been thinking about some of the things I did as a kid…and I realize how many of them no longer exist and how different children have it today. I know when I was around nine or ten the highlight of my day was hearing the clanging of the bell on the Dickie Dee bike. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it Dickie Dee was a franchised ice cream delivery service, they used kids as workers and they pedaled a Frankenstein’s monster of a bike. The back was a normal one speed bike and the front was a two wheeled apparatus that had a cooler built on the front of it, that was stuffed with all the products they sold, popsicles, creamsicles, fudgesicles and drumsticks. They also had some bells wired on a bar between the handlebars and they jangled and rang them to announce the presence of the cart. It was like the pied piper, kids would come out of the woodwork quarter in hand and they would get their ice cream and vanish again…when I was young I thought that would be the coolest job ever. I had a friend who had a route and I did get to pedal it for a while, it was very hard to move a bike with about 80 pounds extra on the front when you only weighed around fifty pounds yourself. Sadly that was as close to doing the job as I ever came, the franchise vanished shortly after the seven eleven came to town.
Another thing I was thinking about was pickup baseball, we used to play ball for hours every day in the summer at a couple of locations. You didn’t need a glove to participate, you would swap gloves when it was your turn to bat,and if their weren’t enough players you would stay at bat till you went out and that person would take over for you. I haven’t seen kids playing ball for fun in years, now they just want to stay inside and play video games.
Other things I miss were reading comic books and playing with baseball cards. We would even take them and put them in the spokes of our bikes so we could pretend we were driving a motorcycle. Now kids buy the cards and comics and hermetically seal them before they even look at them. Where is the joy in that?
When we were young we would leave the house and our bikes unlocked, now you wouldn’t dream of doing it because they would be stolen. Hanging around was innocent and now there seems to be an edge to it.
I don’t know…it seems that the world has made progress, but is it any better? I am not sure of that. I know I probably lived in a rose coloured world,but these are some of the memories I treasure from my childhood. Yours may be different but I would love to hear them. Sometimes I wish I was twelve again, it was such a good time before the concerns of adulthood impinged themselves on me.
I’m a bit younger than you, Odie, but I remember a lot of the same types of things.
Summers were great. Both of my parents are teachers, so we’d take short trips here and there. One favorite was to my aunt and uncle’s cabin in New Hampshire. We’d play outside in the woods, and go do all the touristy things like Old Man in the Mountain and Clark’s Trained Bears, and the Alpine Slides. That’s also where I learned to swear, from a local boy who’s family had a trailer near the cabin. Got my mouth washed out with soap for that.
We used to play baseball in the street too… hours long games where no one really kept score, and the game would only end when the streetlights came on and our moms called us in for dinner. Sometimes, we’d even pick up where we left off after dinner. Marathon games.
My next door neighbors growing up were an older couple who’s kids were grown. They’d have their grandchildren and children over every Sunday afternoon for cookouts, and my brother and I were always welcome. We’d roast marshmallows and have ice cream and pick straberries right from their garden… it was like a birthday party once a week. I was like one of their family. When Mr. Gagne died, it was like losing my own grandfather. I miss those times the most.
The overgrown fields where my friends and I would play war, pirates, African safari, desert island and other made-up games are now all housing developments with manicures lawns and ‘tot lots’. No huge trees, no weeds, no butterflies, just cars lawn mowers and fertilizer.
The bike path and nature trail I used to ride on turned out to be an great escape route for burglars and rapists (all of whom lived at the other end of the trail and who wreaked havoc in my neighborhood). Now it’s shut down.
The small grocery store near my parent’s house is closed down now. The original owners got too old to run it, sold it to someone else, and their son embezzled from them for his crack habit. End result? A 20-mile drive to the nearest grocery store.
I remember the Dickie Dee ice-cream kids too, and their row of bells.
We also played ball in the park. If we didn’t have enough players, we’d play a game called “Workups,” where we’d rotate one position around the field each time a batter struck out. Each position moved you up, until you were the batter. There were two batters, so you had to get a good hit to get on base and to get the other one home.
We spent a lot of time on our bikes too. They were nothing fancy (one-speeds with coaster brakes), but we’d use them for everything from being our basic transportation to imitating Evel Knievel.
Every now and then, we’d go down into the local ravine and try to dam the creek using whatever junk we could find. The ravine was once a garbage dump that they were trying to reclaim as parkland, so there were always old tires and other items that could be used in dam construction popping up. We were never successful, but we tried.
Of course, no summer would be complete without innumerable trips to the local store for comic books (we actually read them instead of sealing them), gum (there was always the one kid who would try to stuff an entire Ton-O-Gum in his mouth), and other assorted kinds of candy that probably wreaked havoc on our teeth. (Well, mine anyway.)
Thinking about it, we really didn’t spend much time indoors at all. There were no video games or home computers, and unless you wanted to watch game shows and soap operas on all of six channels, there was nothing on TV. But in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, my memories of those summer days spent outdoors with my friends are pretty happy.