Posted on 07/24/2014 7:52:50 PM PDT by Kaslin
I long for the sounds of summer I knew as a kid.
In the '60s and '70s, you see, most of our neighbors kept their windows open day and night, allowing the outside sounds to come in and the inside sounds to go out.
I woke every morning to the birds chirping outside my window screen, a dewy chill in the air. I'd smell my father's pipe, which he smoked while he read the paper downstairs. I'd go down to greet him. Sometimes he'd make scrambled eggs and toast covered with butter, and we'd eat while the birds kept on singing.
The evening sounds were equally powerful: a dog barking; a motorcycle downshifting on some faraway hill; people out on their porches listening to the Pirates play on the radio; a baby crying; a couple talking; children laughing; a window fan humming.
Sounds carry far in the summer air. One family on the hill - they had three adult kids still living at home - entertained the whole neighborhood with their cussing and bickering:
"You're an idiot!" one would shout.
"No, you're an idiot!" said another.
"Shut up the both of youse!" the old man would yell. He told our next-door neighbor once he couldn't understand why his kids were so rude to each other, the lousy idiots.
The sounds I miss the most, though, were the shouts and chants and bells that families relied on to call their kids home for supper.
In those days, kids didn't participate in one adult-run activity after another. We didn't sit inside air-conditioned homes playing video games. No, we were out in the hills roaming and exploring and creating all day long.
We collected scrap wood and built shacks. We damned up the creek and caught minnows and crayfish. One summer, we built a motorized go-cart with some scrap items from a junked riding mower and a couple of two-by-fours. It was one of the great engineering feats in my neighborhood's history.
Occasionally, we'd fib to our mothers and ride our bikes 20 miles farther than we said we would. Or we'd pluck some baby pears off a tree by Horning road and whip them at cars. Every now and then, a car would screech to a stop, and we'd sprint through a creek aqueduct that ran 200 feet beneath the neighborhood.
There was only one major rule a kid had to abide by: you'd better be home in time for supper.
Every kid had a unique sound to call him home. My father went with a deep, booming, "Tom, dinner! Tom, dinner!" I could hear him a mile away or more.
When moms did the calling, they always used full names. They always sang, too, as my Aunt Jane did: "Miiiiiikkkeeelllll, Keeeeevvvviiiiiinnnnn, suuuuuppppppeeerrrr!"
The Givens boys, up on the hill across the railroad tracks, were called in by a large bell. The clanging sounded off at 6 every night, giving us the sense that a river boat was making its way up the Mississippi or a chow wagon was calling in the cow hands for some grub.
One family used a riot horn. The piercing "hrmmpppphhhhhh!" could be heard for miles. There was no way that kid, attempting to explain why he was late for supper, could claim he didn't hear it.
These mystical summer sounds have been gone a long time now. How wonderful it would be to bring them back.
At least one month every summer, why don't we cease every structured activity for our children, cancel every tournament, and end every adult-run event.
Let's turn off the television and computer. Let's shut down the air conditioner and un-shutter the windows and doors.
Let's allow our kids to go out into the hills to roam and play and discover all day long. That will require us to call them home at dinner.
And our shouts and chants and bells will breathe some much needed music into the sweet summer air.
——the sounds of summer——
I hear them all the time....... summer, spring, fall, winter.
It’s one of the benefits or possibly curses of getting old. You hear the insect sounds all the time.
The greatest book ever on the subject of summer and childhood is Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”.
“For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!”
>>nosy busybodies who might snoop around trying to accuse me of not supervising my child.<<
That right there is a HUGE reason why this all has changed.
The 1960s and the 1970s were two different eras, although the late 60s could be said to have lasted into the early pre-Ford, 70s.
In big city Houston before forced integration took hold and mass immigration kicked in, and the mental institutes were emptied, we really did live leaving our keys in our cars, windows down, and I never owned a key to my mother’s home that I grew up in, coming home from school to an empty house with an unlocked front door.
The large house windows were left up except when it rained, we didn’t have bicycle locks and left our bikes out, kids lived and played all day, outside, on their own and unwatched, going where they wanted.
I was a kid during that time frame too. I lived in paradise - a dairy farm with creeks and woods, and I had the run of them. It was not unusual to tent camp overnight in the woods, walk 50 feet to the creek, and catch trout for breakfast. The trout would be supplemented with wild blackberries, apples, and the sweetest black cherries I have ever eaten, picked off a tree by the road.
My brother and I were usually within earshot, but if we didn’t come after first call, the conch trumpet always got our attention. I had read about the Polynesians using a conch shell for a horn. We pestered Mom to buy us one until she finally relented (I can remember they had large boxes full of them in the local grocery store). I knocked the end off of it with a lucky hammer blow, and danged if it didn’t work! Sounded like a diesel horn.
I feel sorry for my grandkids - they have no idea what they have missed.
Bingo on both your posts.
I would add to your list the advent of video games.
The noises I miss are:
The whirring buzz of cicadas during a hot Texas day. I used to track the little devils down by their sound and shoot them out of a tree with my BB gun.
Folks didn’t just call in their kids for dinner. We all went out after dinner to play hide and seek in the dark or to catch ‘lightning bugs”. You’d here the kids calling the winner to “come in” after everyone else had been tagged and caught or had made it safe to base. And each family had someone call into the dark for the kids to come in and go to bed.
Whatever happened to lightning bugs? They used to be all over our neighborhood in Dallas, but now I see nary a one in Plano at night.
My parents always encourage me to play in traffic......
Still? :)
Much of mid-America well into the 1970s hadn’t really succumbed to the stark big-city/crime/dope cultural chaos that the nightly media presented. I’m guessing a lot of people who grew up in the urban coastal regions had different, more soured experiences of the era.
I didn’t venture much in Houston proper during that era, but I do have nice memories of week-long summer visits with my grandparents at their home in the rural outskirts of Baytown. Feeding goats, chickens, and manipulating the tv-antennae to pick up “Highway Patrol” reruns on channel-26 as late as 1974.
Forced integration by the government turned my simple neighborhood with no locks and keys left in the cars when I went into the Army, into a place of 6 foot fences and Dobermans by the time I returned.
Mass immigration was only starting to show badly in the early 1970s, but has destroyed much of our cities and towns and communities today.
...and being on welfare was the height of shame.
As it should be
I can still remember the summer of 1969. We had an endless game of army going on in the neighborhood. The older brothers were the Marines and all the younger brothers were the viet cong (VC). All summer long shouts of bang bang your dead while we ran through all the front yards and back yards while adult neighbors sons did the real fighting overseas. My father was a Korean War combat vet and former Marine Gunnery Sergeant. One day we found one of his old GP tents in the garage with all the wood tent poles. Turns out it was a massive 16 x 32 foot command post tent. We set it up in the front yard and my Dad laughed when he got home that night and even slept with us outside a few nights. We kept it up for at least a month that summer until mom got tired of it. One night we had at least 15 neighbor kids sleep over and the army game went on nearly 24 hours. We even broke into some of the old man’s stored “C” rations and ate them and survived. When those ran out it was tuna and crackers. It was war day and night until the neighbor had Lon Simmons or Vin Sculley on the radio blasting and we stopped to listen to the ball game
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