Ahhh the banana seat bike! My mom & dad both worked so my siblings & I were unattended (the older ones were supposedly watching the younger ones - which I was one). My brother & I did circus tricks in the street on that bike switching places from sitting to stepping over the other to standing while riding down the street. We never wore shoes & later realized we looked like white trash running around the neighborhood. One of our sisters (the lazy one) would give us money to buy 2 cans of pop & bbq Fritos if we rode to the Clark gas station to get her cigarettes. We rode through the woods & were never questioned about our age (9 & 10) by the clerk!
I knew a twelve-year-old girl when I was a little kid who could ride down the street on her balloon-tire bike (this was before banana-seat bikes) and stand up on the seat like a circus performer. It's astonishing, to me, to realize that she's seventy-seven years old now, wherever she is!
My younger brother got a Schwinn Stingray banana-seat bike and we would take turns to see who could do the longest wheelies in the street in front of our house. That bike was perfect for wheelies, unlike the "newsboy" type bikes all the older kids like me had grown up on.
I doubt your neighbors thought you were white trash for going barefoot. Everywhere I lived, all the kids went barefoot all summer. I swear there were years I didn't have on socks and shoes from mid-June to mid-September. My feet would get so tough I could walk on asphalt on a 100-degree afternoon and not notice the heat.
The worst tragedies were my brother putting his fist through the front glass door, a cut on the head from goofing around on a diving board or wiping out on your bike. It’s amazing to me that my 7 sibs & I managed to stay alive with all that freedom.
Yeah, there were injuries, but it was worth it for the freedom we had. To have spent my entire childhood inside the house or in the back yard with my mom continuously watching me would have been a nightmare I can hardly imagine. I don't know how kids today don't go insane.
One of my three, count 'em three, side gigs is performing music at Renaissance faires. When my youngest daughter was a tween she begged to be allowed to join me, so I took her to an audition for the cast of the Virginia faire, where she was immediately accepted. She's 30 now and those shenanigans are a decade in the past, and people *still* talk about her character -- the village "monster hunter." Her schtick was to carry around a leather-bound sketchbook and pencils and approach youngster patrons asking them to come tell her if they spotted a 'monster' on the grounds and show them sketches of possibilities. Some of the kids would immediately commit to the bit and start telling her about monsters they had *already* seen at which point she'd go into police sketch artist mode and draw what they described.
You might object that this was too parent-supervised to count, but once I hit the faire site I am running from stage to stage until closing meeting -- she was on her own in a crowd of hundreds of strangers and a complete mistress of her surroundings.
I love this story. My 4 year old is currently fixated on monsters and witches (I think she was born to be a bit of a Halloween kid) so I am going to have to try this at home with her. Of course, she will probably want to try and draw some of her own monsters.
I love Ernestine!! Those really were golden years in spite of all the bad things that happened in childhood. Maybe other generations would say the same about their childhoods, but I firmly believe there was something uniquely magical about the 80s and those first few years of the 90s. One of my "happy thoughts" (since you referenced Peter Pan) when I get really overwhelmed with bad memories is that, in spite of everything, I got to be an American 80's kid. It came with so much fun and optimism that I would never have experienced had I been born in a different (arguably even "better") time. And it wasn't necessarily because of a prosperity boom although the commercials and the Sears catalogs were great. My parents had almost no money (as in sometimes I don't think we had more than about a day's groceries), but for some reason that doesn't taint the memories of just being a kid with the freedom to do fun, random kid things without the whole world looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck. Or trying to establish an "identity" for you.
I am eternally grateful that I grew up pre-internet. I detest cell phones as well and only carry a flip phone for emergencies. I have two daughters, now 27 and 29, and I hated the stupid "play date" thing. I think I would have loved being a mom in the '80s, where the kids made up their own fun and games -- as it should be -- without parents arranging play dates and scheduling the actual activities. Good lord! And we wonder why young people are so infantile.
Same. I would love not to be as dependent on my phone as I am. I agree. I have very small children so we are still in the "play date" phase, but I do find myself looking forward to the days when they learn to ride a bike and skate and I can just send them outside on their own.
lol, ya would'a fit in poifectly with the motley "bande of thes-bean outsiders" I hung'round with... Ya woint the only bewigged waif channelin' Ernestine -- bein' from DayTwat (or the equally sarcomanonymous "MO"-town! lol) 'fore movin' ta NYShitty (my off-fish-all home, all-bee-it former once forced inta unemploymint durin' the plandemic...) there were quite a few've us (male, female, a few undecided! no not rilly but mebbe...) shakin' the "Lily" (ha!) who, as ye know, also started out in the dirty mitten of DayTwat as did Elaine Stritch who also wuz ripe fer parrot-y. I guess ya peddled yer funny bone coast ta coast endin' up as the local... JESTER Wickwire ;-) Startin' at age 7 me mateys & I would make "phony phone calls" off'in (orphan?) after skool such as dialin' up many a bowlin' alley an' askin' 'em if they had "five pound balls" an' when they replied in the affirmative we'd rhetorically inquire..."then, how do ya walk?" 'fore hangin' up. By age 12 we'd order pizzas fer the fams of kids that bullied us! (back then nobuddy'd ask fer a credit card over the "amici") Would'a like ta have been a fly on the wall fer yer hoot-wurthy hijinks tho!
I grew up at the entrance of a popular county park. My best friend and I would put on performative displays for folks driving into the park . We created a fat suit out of a pair of xxxl bright orange Dr Dentons, several pillows and a fuzzy lavendar robe . I'd walk around the yard with a pretend cigarette and exaggerated waddle or bend over and scratch my "backside" which consisted of 2 giant couch cushions stuffed under the robe. Families would slow down to laugh at the sight. So much fun.
I was also into the cemetery, funeral play acting. Not sure how growing up in a cluster b home makes us so inclined to the morbid, but it seems to be a theme.
I laughed so hard at your Captain Hook ad-lib when the cardboard ship keeled over, I got tea in my nose. Is that you in the Hook photo between Ernestine and the Church Lady?
The more I see of 21st century childhood, the more I cherish the fact that you and I were kids (me quite a while before you) who were free to roam, play, climb, get dirty, skin our knees, and have all sorts of adventures without continuous adult surveillance and control.
If you ever publish a memoir, I'll buy a copy the first day it's out.
Is this Mr. J as in Josh, Josh Slocum? Snort! You and my brother would have been the best of friends. He used to entertain me for hours with Ernestine. You remind me of him - flamboyant and fabulous!
I was the daring type starting as a kid. At age 12 I'd take my bike on a Saturday and do a 50+ mile round trip. Parents had no clue to where I was. I had no way to contact them and they had no way to contact me. I didn't care. I just got on the bike and headed in a certain direction.
This just killed me. I can't remember the last time I laughed this hard -- almost knocked my shoulder out of joint.
My own 80's childhood was different, but the same. Unsupervised, running around the neighborhood. One day, a buddy and I wanted to find out if 4th of July fireworks could blow up a mailbox. So we gathered all our allowance money, rode our bikes about 5 miles to the firework stand. Bought as many cheap fireworks as we could (mostly flowers and tanks), then we rode back and stuffed as many as we could fit into our neighbors' mailboxes and lit the fuses. No mailboxes blew up, sadly, but it made a hell of a lot of noise.
A favorite activity was moving the trampoline to the driveway. That way we could jump off the roof of the house, bounce on the tramp, and dunk the basketball. Only a few arms were broken over the years.
We also loved to play Cops and Robbers on our bikes. You'd win if you could stick a branch into the other kids' bike wheels and make them crash. Bonus points for doing it at full speed.
And then there was the exploring. We lived by a creek and woods, and we'd tromp around day after day. We loved finding snakes, picking them up, and throwing them at each other.
"Only a few arms were broken over the years." Spoken like a true '80s kid, I love it. Today, parents would be signing petitions to get trampolines banned.
In the movie My Old Ass, there is a poignant scene that will stay with me until I die. A character talks about how we never know when we do something for the last time, that it is the last time. He said, one day, you are out riding bikes all day with your friends, you come home, put your bike in the garage, and that's it. You don't do it again. So very bittersweet.
It breaks my heart that my 8 year old son will never experience that kind of childhood- he aches for that independence of roaming freely all day with his friends. But I just can’t let him do it. Our neighborhood is pretty safe, but the people aren’t in their houses (or if they are, they are glued to screens) and I don’t know who else is out there.
Sometimes I let him get a small taste of freedom if he is with another (older) friend and on bikes, but it ages me by years while I sit at home wondering if I’m a good or a terrible mother for letting him go.
My favorite part was bringing the fisher price microphone with fresh batteries I stole from the kitchen. You became my personal hero that day, the day I knew we were all just WAITING for the fun to begin when we were nowhere near our harridan!
Ahhh the banana seat bike! My mom & dad both worked so my siblings & I were unattended (the older ones were supposedly watching the younger ones - which I was one). My brother & I did circus tricks in the street on that bike switching places from sitting to stepping over the other to standing while riding down the street. We never wore shoes & later realized we looked like white trash running around the neighborhood. One of our sisters (the lazy one) would give us money to buy 2 cans of pop & bbq Fritos if we rode to the Clark gas station to get her cigarettes. We rode through the woods & were never questioned about our age (9 & 10) by the clerk!
I knew a twelve-year-old girl when I was a little kid who could ride down the street on her balloon-tire bike (this was before banana-seat bikes) and stand up on the seat like a circus performer. It's astonishing, to me, to realize that she's seventy-seven years old now, wherever she is!
My younger brother got a Schwinn Stingray banana-seat bike and we would take turns to see who could do the longest wheelies in the street in front of our house. That bike was perfect for wheelies, unlike the "newsboy" type bikes all the older kids like me had grown up on.
I doubt your neighbors thought you were white trash for going barefoot. Everywhere I lived, all the kids went barefoot all summer. I swear there were years I didn't have on socks and shoes from mid-June to mid-September. My feet would get so tough I could walk on asphalt on a 100-degree afternoon and not notice the heat.
The worst tragedies were my brother putting his fist through the front glass door, a cut on the head from goofing around on a diving board or wiping out on your bike. It’s amazing to me that my 7 sibs & I managed to stay alive with all that freedom.
Yeah, there were injuries, but it was worth it for the freedom we had. To have spent my entire childhood inside the house or in the back yard with my mom continuously watching me would have been a nightmare I can hardly imagine. I don't know how kids today don't go insane.
One of my three, count 'em three, side gigs is performing music at Renaissance faires. When my youngest daughter was a tween she begged to be allowed to join me, so I took her to an audition for the cast of the Virginia faire, where she was immediately accepted. She's 30 now and those shenanigans are a decade in the past, and people *still* talk about her character -- the village "monster hunter." Her schtick was to carry around a leather-bound sketchbook and pencils and approach youngster patrons asking them to come tell her if they spotted a 'monster' on the grounds and show them sketches of possibilities. Some of the kids would immediately commit to the bit and start telling her about monsters they had *already* seen at which point she'd go into police sketch artist mode and draw what they described.
You might object that this was too parent-supervised to count, but once I hit the faire site I am running from stage to stage until closing meeting -- she was on her own in a crowd of hundreds of strangers and a complete mistress of her surroundings.
I love this story. My 4 year old is currently fixated on monsters and witches (I think she was born to be a bit of a Halloween kid) so I am going to have to try this at home with her. Of course, she will probably want to try and draw some of her own monsters.
Hilarious
I love Ernestine!! Those really were golden years in spite of all the bad things that happened in childhood. Maybe other generations would say the same about their childhoods, but I firmly believe there was something uniquely magical about the 80s and those first few years of the 90s. One of my "happy thoughts" (since you referenced Peter Pan) when I get really overwhelmed with bad memories is that, in spite of everything, I got to be an American 80's kid. It came with so much fun and optimism that I would never have experienced had I been born in a different (arguably even "better") time. And it wasn't necessarily because of a prosperity boom although the commercials and the Sears catalogs were great. My parents had almost no money (as in sometimes I don't think we had more than about a day's groceries), but for some reason that doesn't taint the memories of just being a kid with the freedom to do fun, random kid things without the whole world looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck. Or trying to establish an "identity" for you.
I am eternally grateful that I grew up pre-internet. I detest cell phones as well and only carry a flip phone for emergencies. I have two daughters, now 27 and 29, and I hated the stupid "play date" thing. I think I would have loved being a mom in the '80s, where the kids made up their own fun and games -- as it should be -- without parents arranging play dates and scheduling the actual activities. Good lord! And we wonder why young people are so infantile.
Same. I would love not to be as dependent on my phone as I am. I agree. I have very small children so we are still in the "play date" phase, but I do find myself looking forward to the days when they learn to ride a bike and skate and I can just send them outside on their own.
lol, ya would'a fit in poifectly with the motley "bande of thes-bean outsiders" I hung'round with... Ya woint the only bewigged waif channelin' Ernestine -- bein' from DayTwat (or the equally sarcomanonymous "MO"-town! lol) 'fore movin' ta NYShitty (my off-fish-all home, all-bee-it former once forced inta unemploymint durin' the plandemic...) there were quite a few've us (male, female, a few undecided! no not rilly but mebbe...) shakin' the "Lily" (ha!) who, as ye know, also started out in the dirty mitten of DayTwat as did Elaine Stritch who also wuz ripe fer parrot-y. I guess ya peddled yer funny bone coast ta coast endin' up as the local... JESTER Wickwire ;-) Startin' at age 7 me mateys & I would make "phony phone calls" off'in (orphan?) after skool such as dialin' up many a bowlin' alley an' askin' 'em if they had "five pound balls" an' when they replied in the affirmative we'd rhetorically inquire..."then, how do ya walk?" 'fore hangin' up. By age 12 we'd order pizzas fer the fams of kids that bullied us! (back then nobuddy'd ask fer a credit card over the "amici") Would'a like ta have been a fly on the wall fer yer hoot-wurthy hijinks tho!
Brilliant and fearless. Scenes of childhoods past! And, I hope, in the future.
Not a chance with the internet and cell phones.
I grew up at the entrance of a popular county park. My best friend and I would put on performative displays for folks driving into the park . We created a fat suit out of a pair of xxxl bright orange Dr Dentons, several pillows and a fuzzy lavendar robe . I'd walk around the yard with a pretend cigarette and exaggerated waddle or bend over and scratch my "backside" which consisted of 2 giant couch cushions stuffed under the robe. Families would slow down to laugh at the sight. So much fun.
YOUR BACKSIDE
We were totally the same kid.
Oh fo sho!
I was also into the cemetery, funeral play acting. Not sure how growing up in a cluster b home makes us so inclined to the morbid, but it seems to be a theme.
I laughed so hard at your Captain Hook ad-lib when the cardboard ship keeled over, I got tea in my nose. Is that you in the Hook photo between Ernestine and the Church Lady?
The more I see of 21st century childhood, the more I cherish the fact that you and I were kids (me quite a while before you) who were free to roam, play, climb, get dirty, skin our knees, and have all sorts of adventures without continuous adult surveillance and control.
If you ever publish a memoir, I'll buy a copy the first day it's out.
OMG.... YESSSS!
Is this Mr. J as in Josh, Josh Slocum? Snort! You and my brother would have been the best of friends. He used to entertain me for hours with Ernestine. You remind me of him - flamboyant and fabulous!
HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!
You just made me SCREAM with laughter.
"Is this miss J as in Joan, Joan Crawford?"
I was the daring type starting as a kid. At age 12 I'd take my bike on a Saturday and do a 50+ mile round trip. Parents had no clue to where I was. I had no way to contact them and they had no way to contact me. I didn't care. I just got on the bike and headed in a certain direction.
This just killed me. I can't remember the last time I laughed this hard -- almost knocked my shoulder out of joint.
My own 80's childhood was different, but the same. Unsupervised, running around the neighborhood. One day, a buddy and I wanted to find out if 4th of July fireworks could blow up a mailbox. So we gathered all our allowance money, rode our bikes about 5 miles to the firework stand. Bought as many cheap fireworks as we could (mostly flowers and tanks), then we rode back and stuffed as many as we could fit into our neighbors' mailboxes and lit the fuses. No mailboxes blew up, sadly, but it made a hell of a lot of noise.
A favorite activity was moving the trampoline to the driveway. That way we could jump off the roof of the house, bounce on the tramp, and dunk the basketball. Only a few arms were broken over the years.
We also loved to play Cops and Robbers on our bikes. You'd win if you could stick a branch into the other kids' bike wheels and make them crash. Bonus points for doing it at full speed.
And then there was the exploring. We lived by a creek and woods, and we'd tromp around day after day. We loved finding snakes, picking them up, and throwing them at each other.
80's childhood was amazing.
"Only a few arms were broken over the years." Spoken like a true '80s kid, I love it. Today, parents would be signing petitions to get trampolines banned.
Oh my Lord. I can barely see my screen for laughing so hard. :) :) :o
In the movie My Old Ass, there is a poignant scene that will stay with me until I die. A character talks about how we never know when we do something for the last time, that it is the last time. He said, one day, you are out riding bikes all day with your friends, you come home, put your bike in the garage, and that's it. You don't do it again. So very bittersweet.
It breaks my heart that my 8 year old son will never experience that kind of childhood- he aches for that independence of roaming freely all day with his friends. But I just can’t let him do it. Our neighborhood is pretty safe, but the people aren’t in their houses (or if they are, they are glued to screens) and I don’t know who else is out there.
Sometimes I let him get a small taste of freedom if he is with another (older) friend and on bikes, but it ages me by years while I sit at home wondering if I’m a good or a terrible mother for letting him go.
Priceless
My favorite part was bringing the fisher price microphone with fresh batteries I stole from the kitchen. You became my personal hero that day, the day I knew we were all just WAITING for the fun to begin when we were nowhere near our harridan!
Best church brother ever.
I don't remember that--I'm glad you do! Thanks for being a co-conspiratoress.