What was it like growing up in.....

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am curious about other Dopers’ childhood memories, especially related to where they lived. Did anyone grow up in Vegas? I would love to hear about that. How about New York City, I can’t even imagine that one. What was it like to be a kid in Aspen or Tahoe? Did you ski all the time? Anyone go to Beverly Hills HS?

I guess I’ll start. I grew up in Santa Cruz, CA. If you are familiar with the area, then try to imagine Soquel and Capitola as tiny towns with 4-way stop signs. Of course, it was cool to be able to ride my bike to the beach. We would just throw our bikes into the bushes across the street and they’d be there, waiting for us, when we were done. I used to go to the beach at 10 AM and stay until 5 PM, with nothing but a radio and some baby oil. I should probably start to think about scheduling myself for that full body skin transplant soon. In high school, parties were out in the country, with loud music and kegs. Once we got drivers’ licenses, it was a rush to drive over to Monterey or up to San Francisco (don’t miss the junction or you’ll end up in Oakland!). Wow, I almost forgot the Boardwalk. We went down there to eat candy apples and look cool in case we saw a cute guy - somehow the apples made us look less cool and more like red faced clowns. And my goodness, what about the lifeguards? So very cute in their red trunks. I close this possibly boring post with probably my fondest memory - drinking Heinekens and skateboarding all the from the top of the hill at UCSC to the bottom, where someone was waiting in a beat-up VW to pick us up and go do it again.

Now, it’s your turn.

2

It must have been cool to live so close to the beach and hang out there all day. I grew up in NJ and it was an hour ride to the beach on the NJ Parkway. On Sunday nights coming home there would always be traffic jams. I was always worth it though.
I live close to New York City, I could get to Midtown in 15 minutes. I used to take a bus and then the PATH train over to Greenwich Village which was always my favorite part of the City. It’s right by Washington Square Park. We’d go to the bookstores first (ES Wilentzs’, Brentanos, the Strand) and go have lunch, and hang in the park for awhile.
I’ve been in the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Bldg. and the World Trade Center. The Museums are great too, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. And I shopped in Macys.
Our town had a carnival every Memorial Day, me and my friends used to hang out there to check out the guys. I suppose my childhood memories aren’t that exciting, but I had fun.

3

Nothing as cool as California and New Jersey/New York City, but I had a great time. In a small town in Iowa in the 50’s, you played outside until it was dark. Not just in your own yard, but everywhere, even in winter, building snowmen, making forts, sledding.

It sounds like those good old days glurge letters, but most of that stuff is true. There was nothing on TV. No video games or VCR’s, no reason to stay indoors by yourself.

When you were 16 and got your license, and a car (or dad’s car), you explored nearby towns and checked out the guys. It felt almost incestuous to date someone you grew up with. Plus, they knew you when you had freckles and no chest, and remembered that you farted once in study hall.

You rented local halls for dances and parties and celebrated birthdays at the roller skating rink, where the skating stopped at 11 and then you could dance.

The high point of summer was the county fair and carnival, with exotic-looking guys managing the rides and flirting. You swam in the lake or in gravel pits; by then, the pool was for little kids. Somebody’s older brother might buy you some beer, and you’d drink it parked on a gravel road just outside town.

You earned money by babysitting, working on farms in the summer, waitressing or car-hopping. You didn’t work in a store or an office unless your daddy owned it. (It’s amazing, how many teenagers have “real” jobs nowadays.)

My kids grew up in Seattle – totally different childhoods. My oldest took a bus by himself downtown when he was 14 to see Dire Straits, and my daughter had been to more concerts by the time she was 16 than I’ve been to in my entire life. Museums, concerts, marathon movie weekends, pro sports games, parks, the Seattle Center, etc. – sometimes I’m very envious.

4

I had pretty much the same experience as AuntiePam, except mine was in the 80’s in The Thumb area in Michigan (nothing but small farming towns). One time a friend and I shoplifted some jeans from a (the only) store downtown, and thought we got away with it, but when I got home they had already called my mom.

One time, when my mom was 40, they called her mom to let her know that she (my mom) had overdue library books.

We left our keys in the car full-time, we once had to buy a house key to go on vacation because we didn’t have one, and girls that got pregnant in high school still mysteriously disappeared for a while.

What we did for fun was to cruise up and down the main street in one of the towns. My high school consisted of three towns, so it was like growing up in three small towns, instead of one. Lots of back roads and drinking. Lots of drinking. The beach was only 7 miles away, but we only hung out there in the summer. Good times.

5

I grew up in Lexington Kentucky in the 1970’s, and it’s true that you could go all over the neighborhood as long as you gave your parent some idea of where you’d be. In summers after dinner you could play all over the place until dark, when you had to be home. My mother limited our TV viewing–it had to be something kid friendly and we could only watch a few hours a day. In the summer we played spud or freeze tag or chased butterflies (I was a butterfly freak and taught the other kids in the neighborhood about them.)

In the winters when we had snow day my mother would tell us the car was frozen in the driveway and we were running out of food. She would hand us $20 and tell us to get the sled. We’d go on our “rescue mission” up the hill and across a busy street to the A&P where we’d round up the fixings for spaghetti. Since that cost less than $20 we’d also get ice cream and candy. Then we’d pay and load the sled (which we’d parked outside the door) and go home, proud of our heroism. Years later of course I realized my mother just sent us on these missions to get us out of her hair for a while.

That’s not to suggest that things were always idyllic–there was a weirdo in the neighborhood who flashed kids and this was also during the cold war, when we were sure WWIII would begin any minute now. (At my high school one “well informed” student told the rest of us that Lexington was #50 on a list of cities the Russians would nuke.) And there were tornadoes (think hiding in the basement while listening to the radio as storms destoyed small towns nearby) and floods on the creek behind the house (think muttering about what you’d like to do to storm insurance adjusters.)

6

I’m finding this interesting. This whole growing up in one place is a mystery to me.

I was a Navy brat. I was born in Patuxent River, Maryland, then grew up in Albany, New York; Jacksonville, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia; Olathe, Kansas; back to Norfolk; Alameda, Santa Clara, and Mountain View, California; Belpasso, Sicily, Italy; Brockton and Williamstown, Massachusetts; Leonardtown, Maryland. Then I left home and really started travelling.

I enjoyed it; it was nice to see so many different places, but I wonder what it’s like to grow up with the same people and places all your childhood.

7

I grew up in Oakland where I was 1 of the 6 Asian kids in an elementary school of 300. It wasn’t very safe to go outside afterschool (or so my parents told me) so I was walked to and from school everyday. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with kids afterschool or during the weekends because “it’s very dangerous out there”. So I spent most of my childhood in our cramped rented duplex with my brother. Because of this, my parents bought us educational things such as a dinosaur version of Leap Frog (is that right?) to play with. I think because of this, I scored the top score of the CTBS test in my elementary school.

Even though it was hard growing up in tough neighborhood, some of my fondest memories are of my dad coming home with fresh laundry from the laundromat in the morning. And the few weekends my parents were free were spent going out to dinner and a movie. Of course we drove outside of Oakland because my parents thought it was too dangerous to be in the city. I miss that innocence that came with being a child but it was fun while it lasted.

It was a very interesting childhood to say the least.

8

Ditto what Frank said – I was an Army brat and moved fairly regularly, so I can’t talk too specifically about what it was like to grow up in any one place. But I think Frank would agree that even with the changing places, the military provided a type of continuity – especially when you live on base. Military bases, I think, are among the last true “small towns” in America. They’re mostly completely self-sufficient and very centralized – at many of them, most people live within walking distance of the school, the PX, the commissary, the church, etc. You actually see people you know when you’re walking around a base, going about your daily business – something I have found is definitely NOT true in the civilian world.

Practically everyone’s dad worked for the same employer; most of the moms stayed at home and didn’t work. Every evening when they lowered the flag everything on base would come to a stand still – people would stop their cars in the middle of the street, get out, face the flag, and salute. Before the movies everyone stood while they played the national anthem. People were always coming and going – if you went to school on base, you didn’t know who would still be in your class next year – or even if you were still going to be in that class next year. There was far more racial integration and far less racism than I ever encountered in the civilian world. On Sundays we’d go to brunch at the officer’s club. There were decorative canons and tanks around. At one base in Germany where we lived, they found an unexploded bomb from WWII that they had to remove. Our doors were bullet-proof, and the base was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Sometimes there were protestors outside the fence.

And this is something weird, and something I think still kind of effects me: for significant periods of my childhood, especially when we were stationed overseas, I knew virtually no old people. There just weren’t any around, at least not on base. Almost everyone was young and healthy. The men in particular were physically fit, and they all had short hair and were clean-shaven and uniformed. I didn’t know any physically handicapped kids at school – which is not to say that soldiers can’t have handicapped kids; it just limits where they can be stationed, if they had to be near a big hospital. On the base schools I went to, there weren’t any really bad kids – if a kid acted up, his dad’s boss would be called, and if that didn’t work worse might happen. One day in high school in Germany, I walked into my science class and noticed three or four kids were missing. Turns out they had been suspected of being in a gang, and had been quickly shipped back to the States.

I could go on, but that’s probably the most distinct stuff that comes to mind…