yup, bought my first bike with gears there, W.A. stingray style five speed sometimes i think we kept them in business buying BB's alone... 8^)
Posted on 03/03/2013 8:02:30 AM PST by Doc Savage
Waking up to the news these days can not only ruin your day, it can make you irritable, frustrated, and sad. That's when I like to spend a few moments remembering the things that made America such a great place to grow up when I was boy. Here are just a few golden memories:
1. How excited I was when I put on my new Cub Scout uniform for the very first time and my mom was so proud of me.
2. How my friends and I would spend the long hot summers fishing down at the North Side Park lagoon with bamboo poles, safety pins for hooks, and bread dough for bait. Caught some good sized Carp in those days!
3. The great feeling of putting on my Little League uniform, and fixing my socks just like the Big Leaguers, and getting ready to play the big game. The uniforms were wool and weighed about 100 pounds but I didn't care. I was walking two feet off the ground every time I took the field.
4. The excitement of opening my Christmas present and finding a Daisy BB gun. Wow! It was incredible.
5. The first time I was old enough to sit at my grandmother's Thanksgiving table with the grownups. I was so excited I could hardly eat!
6. My parents bought me an English Racer bike for Christmas and I put multi-colored streamers on the handle grips. Talk about flash!
7. First time my mother took me down to the Loop in Chicago on the streetcar and we went to see Santa Claus at Carson Pirie Scott. I want to tell you I was a little nervous and could only tell him what my younger brother wanted for Christmas. If you were never in a large department store at Christmas time you really missed something. It was beautiful!
8. Playing baseball every day in the summer at the Little League field. Everyone pretended they were a famous baseball player. I was always Ernie Banks. I used to dream about someday buying a Wilson A2000 glove. I used to rub neatsfoot oil into my old glove and go to bed each night pounding the pocket so I'd be able to make a great catch! I think I wore my knuckles out on that old glove.
9. I remember when they made me a crossing guard in 6th grade and I got leave class a few minutes early and get to my corner station wearing my white safety belt. Pretty neat.
10. I remember that late in August every year Dad would take us down to the Wheaton Sports Shop where all the gym teachers in town worked during the summer, and we'd get a new pair of gym shoes. I can't even describe how excited I was when Chuck Taylor introduced not only Low-Cuts, BUT WHITE!! I felt like a million dollars wearing them that first day in gym class.
Anyway, after spending a minutes down memory lane, I always feel better. Yet also a little sad. America has lost so much of it's wonderfulness. But I'm so glad I had a chance to experience it before it vanished.
Perhaps you'd like to reminisce with some of your favorite boyhood or girlhood memories. Have at it!
I remember when I was like 7 I used to ride my bike 4mi out along a semi truck route to my great Grandparents farm.
(no shoulder, no helmet, no worries)
I would get out there and “Shorty” My Great Grandad, would give me a dime to get him a plug of beechnut chewy tobacco.
I would ride 4 mi back to Browns drug store. but the tobacco on the counter along with the dime, get like 3c back, no questions asked and ride back out to the farm, where lunch would be waiting.
yup, bought my first bike with gears there, W.A. stingray style five speed sometimes i think we kept them in business buying BB's alone... 8^)
Locally, we have Vinny Castilla Field. Made with money donated by the Colorado Rockies player. It’s a baseball diamond, but I doubt a baseball game was ever played there.
Same thing with the area schools.
I grew up in a baseball family, had a family member play for the Braves and the Reds. No, I won’t name him.
That’s great for your grandkids, I just hope they’re not playing on former baseball fields.
I wasn’t that great at baseball either.
oh yeah, bought the bike with my paper route money then wore the damn thing out delivering papers
Sitting on the side of stank canal using cane poles and kite string tied around bacon to catch crawdads.
Climbing all over barges hurricane Betsey washed up years earlier behind the levee of the Mississippi.
Swiping beers out of the parent’s coolers at Mardi Gras to put into coffee cans taped to cane poles to trade for doubloons from the guys on the floats.
Riding bikes with a pack of kids chasing the mosquito fogger truck like it was the pied piper.
Having a dog that walked me to the bus stop every morning and came back every afternoon to walk me home.
Leaving home at daybreak on Saturday morning and explore for miles before coming home for dinner.
Using kite string and pulleys rig a line between the houses so we could send messages back and forth when we were supposed to be in bed.
Becoming marksmen using slingshots made from coat hangers, masking tap and rubber bands.
Making homemade kites from dry cleaning plastic bags.
The fire and smoke of saltpeter and sugar.
Good times.
I forgot about stick ball. We used to play massive games of kick the can and one called four square.
shall not be forgotten... Amen
Fun times, wasn’t it. As kids we’d swim in rice canals and the “Bayou de View”. We called it “The Bi-Oh”. Not one kid ever drowned.
Remember this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8ZctfipzxQ
Here in Indiana, land isn’t much of a constraint. They just keep building on farm fields for expansion.
We seem to have all the different sports fields imaginable, school, playground, amateur, college, and pro.
I even helped fund (unwillingly via taxes) a $750 million stadium for the local football team.
Remember tying your own flies an making your own spinner lures?
And Oh yeah, I remember, making home made kites.
I swear we made one so big we used bailing twine to hold it down.
Well, that dang thing airlifted my little brother LOL!
Carried him like 25 feet LOL.
I remember committing my first felony.
“I remember committing my first felony”
Do tell...
I remember commiting my last. Just a few minutes ago when I drove past a middle school 1 mile from my house, with a loaded rifle in my trunk. I’ve always been “edgy” that way...
1st degree burglary. Kids being kids.
Ok. Here’s a good’en. I got “molested” at the age of 12 in 1973, by the most beautiful 14yo girl I’ve ever seen before or since. Don’t know how I’ve managed to make it all these years without therapy after that terrible ordeal. Would I have done anything differently today? Yea, I’d have asked her to marry me right there, on the spot. She lived near my Grandmothers house and her family moved away a couple of years later. I sometimes wonder what happened to her and where she is.
That, and riding my bike to school....
I, too recall the patty melts at Nixon's, which was so popular that the line of cars waiting for service would spill out onto Whittier Boulevard. In 1957, Nixon's became Whirly's, and we would continue to eat there regularly. Its location is now an abandoned car dealership that folded at the start of the current depression.
I also went to the Sundown Drive-in regularly, where I saw films such as Bell, Book & Candle, Huckleberry Finn and South Pacific. In addition to the Wardman, there was the Roxy on Philadelphia and the Whittier Theater, an old movie palace on Whittier Blvd. whose tower may have been the tallest structure in Whittier. Sam Cohen, the father of the enhanced radiation bomb, aka the "neutron bomb," often came over from his home in Boyle Heights to watch movies there when he was a kid.
The Roxy was demolished following a suspicious fire in 1971 and the Whittier Theater was razed in the 1990's, but the Wardman is still going.
Was justice done?
My Pop And his brothers used to swim in the creek in some eddy over by the railroad tracks.
One day a snake bit Uncle Bill.
He caught the snake and bit it back LOL
Good memories. I know the guy running the Neats oil facility in Philly.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.