Those were the days!

I am originally from Oak Harbor, Ohio. I've also lived in Upper Sandusky, Columbus (twice) and Shawnee Township (twice). All in Ohio  

Growing up my clothes came mostly from Sears and Montgomery Wards.  When my "jeans" got holes in them, mom patched them up with iron on cloth patches. Each summer, the patched jeans were cut off, hemmed and made into shorts to be worn for playing in. 

For nine months out of the year we played outside. If it was raining hard or there was lightning and thunder, we played in the basement. Maybe we played porch ball, at least until we got caught and scolded for having been doing so.  On rare occasions we might be allowed to "play" in our bedrooms - that privilege usually being reserved for when we traded baseball (basketball, football, hockey) cards with friends. We were all future general managers. Some of us more adept than others. 

Our zip code was 5 numbers long and we really didn't worry about area codes. For most of my childhood mine was 419 which served all of northwest Ohio. While in Columbus it was 614 which served all of central Ohio.  

We could call 228-8463 (TIME) to hear the time and temperature, if our parents allowed us to. You see, the phone company charged for each phone call made. Quite a few of us were on party lines and if the line was in use you had to wait your turn. Yes, we did listen in on other peoples conversations when they were too engrossed not to hear us pick up the line or didn't notice we never hung up. Maybe not cool, but we could learn a lot by eavesdropping.

I was maybe in 5th grade living in Columbus the first time I had fast food.  White Castle sliders. So cool because they were small and I could eat 3 of them!  The first McDonald's I had was a cheeseburger while in 6th grade living in Lima.  A Kewpee became a favorite treat as our world changed and fast food became more common.

Going out to eat was a big deal as a kid. I really do not recall doing it very often at all.  York's Steakhouse in Columbus made a huge impression on me. Dad was an executive with Nationwide Insurance and I guess we were moving up in the world. We dressed up as if it were a 5 star restaurant. Our Sunday clothes.  The hamburger I ordered seemed to fill the entire dinner plate and the fries overflowed.  We got to have a (soda) pop!   

Truth be told, if we went out in public, we dressed up.  Saturday was groceries day.  We primarily went to Big Bear or IGA.  It was a family event. Dad in his suit and tie. Mom in a dress and low heels. Us kids, in our second best clothes because the next day was Sunday and we saved our best for church. Dad would moan and groan about the cost of groceries.. I remember one  particular Saturday he was beside himself and scolding mother for them having spent over $100.00 on groceries. Never mind that we had purchased 3 full overflowing carts worth of groceries that day.  Dad made a concession on meats. We shopped at Hasselbach's and Carfagna's regularly.  Each fall dad bought a side of beef and a hog to get us through the winter.

We entertained ourselves.  We played all the sports in backyards, driveways and streets. Whatever season it was, that was the sport we played. We also played games like Kick-the-Can, Hide-n-Seek, Pickle, Freeze Tag, Hopscotch and 4 Square for hours on end. We formed a wifle ball league and used fenced in back yards as our parks. We learned our home run trots. Rode our bikes everywhere.  To school, to the convenience store for baseball cards, candy bars and gum, to friends houses in the next neighborhood.  Hell, sometimes we just grabbed a canteen and rode not having a destination in mind. We'd be gone for hours. And we chased police cars, ambulances and firetrucks on our bikes to see what all the commotion was about.

We collected pop bottles to turn in for refunds. If we got real desperate for money we might sweep someone's sidewalk or porch. Shoveled snow in the winter.  The more ambitious of us got paper routes or worked as a subcontractor for a friend who had a paperwork. As we got older mowing lawns became a thing.

Summertime saw us lunching together in someone's garage or on a porch. Whoever was hosting usually fed us toasted (grilled) cheese, or pb&j or bologna sandwiches and Kool-aid. Sometimes we had ground meat sandwiches made from bologna or someone's leftover roast to stretch it. One summer a Schwan's truck came around and the mother's all purchased a juice concentrate - it wasn't as good as Kool-aid, but we endured through it until the last drop throughout the entire neighborhood was gone.  Water was another popular option and it often came straight from the garden hose. 

We all had curfews.  We knew that lunch was at 12:00 noon sharp. The fire siren went off at noon everyday and you best be present.  We had wrist watches we wore. A friend or two had pocket watches. 5:30 pm was dinner and again, you were on time for the prayer or there were consequences. We knew better than to complain about what mom had worked hard all day to prepare for us. We just ate it whether we liked it or not. Thankfully my mother was a wonderful cook. We ate then cleared our plates from the table and headed back outside to resume playing. 

When the sun set, it was time to be home for the evening.  Sometimes you were called home earlier.  Some fathers would simply yell for their kids to head home, others had a distinctive whistle, my dad found an old dinner bell somewhere that he used for a time. We each knew the others call to come home and looked out for one another. What was known as the "grapevine" seemed to work at warp speed at such times.

Summer rains were glorious!  We swam in the streets in Columbus because the storm water sewers were not adequate in the new developments and the roads flooded.  In Shawnee we played in the crick that ran through the neighborhood.  Someone got the bright idea of putting a plastic kiddie pool in the rain swollen crick and taking it from one bridge to another bridge at the other end of the neighborhood.

Sprinklers weren't for watering yards as much as they were for cooling off us kids with. Running through the sprinklers was an event and if you got permission to do it at your house? Well. you were the king or queen of the neighborhood for the day. Simple water pistol fights were big. None of these mega soakers  that hold 2 liters of water. We were lucky to get 20 short squirts from our gun and then had to run to safe base ( a bucket of water) to plunge our gun in and refill it.  Sometimes the garden hose came into play, but all in fun. Some days we just needed more water sprayed on us than a squirt gun could provide so someone grabbed the hose. It soon turned into running through the hose like we would a sprinkler.  And yes, once in Columbus we ran through the water spraying our of a fire hydrant. The firefighters actually turned it on for us!  

We built forts and had dirt clod fights. We all had BB guns and several of us had bows and arrows. We were generally smart enough not to go to war against each other with those. I did get shot in the back with an arrow one time. Came through the wall of a fort we built. It bruised me but didn't penetrate. 

We built ramps to jump our bikes and later on our mini-bikes. We built go-karts and drove them up and down the road. We built lighter fluid cannons out of tennis ball cans and sent flaming tennis balls at passing cars - we lived on a dead end road. LOL.  A couple of friends dug a tunnel one summer and it collapsed on them. Everyone survived, but we learned how to support a tunnel with wood beams after that.

That phone I mentioned earlier?  We had one phone and it hung on the kitchen wall.  Next to it hung the "Board of Education" my father made.  The belt was used at times for discipline, but when Dad went for the board of education you knew you messed up big time and were about to be reminded never to do that again.  I think we understood discipline was something done for us, not something done to us.  And everyone in the neighborhood looked out for everyone else.  As kids we had a lot of freedom. Adults seemed to understand that kids were going to be kids and get up to no good sometimes. If we did not endanger ourselves or anyone else it usually wasn't a big deal.  Respect other people and their property and we could do pretty much anything we wanted to do. But if we were out of line, whoever the closest adult to the situation was would set us straight and had the full support of the other parents in the neighborhood in doing so. THEN, we went home and were disciplined again.  Point made.

After the spankings, if further punishment was deemed necessary we were grounded. There were two levels of grounding. The first was you had to stay in your own yard. Basically mom didn't want to deal with you inside but you were not trusted to leave the yard. So, your friends came to your house and played. The other level of grounding was being restricted to staying inside the house.  "You better find something to do or I'll find you something to do" became a feared threat. No one wanted their mother to find them something to do.

I learned to love to read one summer when I seemed to be grounded a good deal. A great uncle had given me a complete collection of Mark Twain books and I spent hours, okay, probably days upon days, reading about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

It seemed we always had home made baked goods for snacks. And in the summer we had homemade Kool-aid popsicles.  Graham crackers with frosting between them were a big thing way before we knew what a Smore was.  Water. We drank lots of water. And milk.  The milk was delivered to our house each morning and later on a couple three times a week. Pop was a rare treat. The adults had beer or homemade wine.

The first time I was drunk was the summer between 4th and 5th grade. We found dad's stash of vodka grabbed a plastic pitcher with a lid. Poured vodka in and then filled the pitcher with water from the garden hose.  Two of us. We were polluted in no time at all.  Acting silly walking up and down the road. Singing.  I remember singing.  I remember mom waiting for us on the front porch her rubber soled shoe in her hand.  Women's rubber soled shoes were the answer to a man's belt.  Mom wasn't a very good aim. I don't think her heart was usually into spanking us, but she'd get in a lick or two and then utter the most feared sentence known to kids. "wait 'til your father gets home!"   Oh no.  This meant we had disrespected the love of our fathers life and were going to face his wrath.  If you were stupid enough to have committed this infraction early in the day you spent many hours conjuring up all the types of hell that would be visited upon you at 5:05 pm that afternoon.  We didn't know the word “trepidation”, but we understood the feeling. 

Summers were also for tending gardens (weeding and watering) and harvesting.  There's nothing like a strawberry straight of the vine and even better if it is a wild strawberry. Raspberries and blackberries made wonderful jellies and jams. We looked forward to picking because we knew the rewards were going to be delicious.

Saturday night was bath night.  We had to be in early.  Bath time commenced at 7:00 pm.  The smaller kids laid on the kitchen counter with their heads over the sink.  Hair was washed and rinsed. Then you sat up onto a towel and put your feet in the sink. The rest of you got washed.  That was it until you ate breakfast the next morning and got prepared for church. You better not have a speck of dust anywhere on you Sunday morning. 

Sunday mornings were for church. We went as a family. There was Sunday school where everyone gathered for a short worship service before the kids were dismissed to their classes. We would sing another song or two in preparation for future singing performances of the children’s choir during church services. We would then have our lesson and occasionally a craft time.  Then a short break (us kids thought of it as recess) before the church service proper began. An hour and a half easy, every Sunday. Pomp and Circumstance befitting of the surroundings and importance of the rituals. Children's sermon followed by the message and then offering.  The first Sunday of every month was reserved for Communion. That added another 30-45 minutes to the proceedings.  Kids knew to behave in church for your sweet kind loving father sitting right beside you was penting up the inner fire and brimstone of God Himself in anticipation of having to release it at some point that week upon his wayward children. 

Then the Benediction and we were out of church for the week!  If we were lucky church had ran a bit over as it often did and mother would be worried about the meat she had left cooking in the oven so we'd depart quickly. We would miss out on the social hour after the service. Sometimes these were planned events with coffee and a snack. Punch for us kids. Other times it was just folks catching up with one another. Several generations and branches of families often congregated after church and exchanged news. No social media back then. Limited use of phones.

And we were raised Lutheran which meant on a minimum a potluck or carry-in dinner at least onace a quarter and usually more like once a month. it seemed like any occasion called for a potluck dinner. Meetings, fundraisers or simply just because. These were pretty extravagant affairs. Everyone dressed in their best clothing, the women had all prepared their best recipes and as I recall on more than one occasion the men gathering to make gallons of homemade ice cream. It was a mix of church business and extended social hour.

The school year began after Labor Day and ran until Memorial Day. We walked or rode our bikes to school. Teachers were an extension of the neighborhood and families - you showed them respect and answered with "yes ma'am" and "no sir."  If you got out of line they had full authority to discipline you and God forbid you were sent to the principals office for that meant a paddling, a phone call to your parents and then the real discipline once your dad got you back home.  

We all packed our lunches and traded items among ourselves. Milk was purchased and it was a big deal to be the milk monitor for the day.  We learned to crunch up our potato chips and add them to our peanut butter sandwiches. Apples were common as we didn't have plastic fruit cups. Whatever dessert your mom, sister or grandmother had made was what you got in your lunch. Cookies were good, but homemade brownies from scratch were the best! Frosted or with powdered sugar on them, it didn't matter.

When we got home we were allowed to play outside. Mom always considered it a second recess ... and it kept us out of the house and out of her way while she prepared supper. Not dinner.  We ate breakfast in the morning, dinner was lunch and the evening meal was supper. We arrived home from school, changed into play clothes and then raced out the door for whatever neighborhood adventure awaited us that day.  We came home for supper and then it was time for homework.

Television?  Rarely did we watch TV. 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm was family hour. Things like Andy Griffith, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hogan's Heroes, Bonanza, My Three Sons and the more risque Red Skeleton Show or Dean Martin Show. And Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom was must see TV! Saturday mornings were for cartoons - Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, Roadrunner, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Mr Magog. Sunday evening at 7:00 pm was reserved for the Wonderful World of Disney. 

I did not like school.  It bored me. I did not apply myself. We had two older nuns that lived next door to us and Dad thought it would be a good idea if they tutored me.  Oh man.  Those two ladies did not take any crap. They were task masters and I soon learned organization and prioritizing. I also learned if I did not want to spend 2-3 hours every evening doing and redoing school work I had to do it and do it better in school or on my own when I got home.  Thanks Dad and thank you to the nuns.

Looking back, ... Good Times.   We had our rough patches, but we didn't seem to take things personally. We messed up, we knew it. We were held accountable and took responsibility for the mistake. Then it was over and done with.   We had bullies and learned to avoid confrontations with them until the issue was forced. Then either individually or collectiveLy we found a way to resolve the issue with the bullies. We didn't all like one another, but we got along.  We fought and forgave and repeated the cycle. We learned to settle our disputes among ourselves and almost always cooler heads prevailed. We learned organizational skills through the games we played. We used our imaginations to make up variations of games and change the rules to fit the circumstance and environment. Parked cars were fair game to be bases as were trees or bushes.  Power lines might be in play or do overs.  Broken windows didn't mean run and hide but knock and apologize.  We knew running would have far greater consequences than owning up to the accident.  We learned conflicting resolution and negotiation ing through practical experience with one another.  We were little shits ... actually mom's term of endearment for us was "dumb shits" and we knew she said it with love.  We grew up making mistakes and learning life's ways.

Good times.