Retro Summer

Photo Copyright © by Michael Casher. All rights reserved.

Celebrating Summer

Way back in the 1950s and early 1960s, before my foot ever touched a car's accelerator, one of the best things about summer vacation was going to a carnival or a festival. To a kid like me, they meant games, rides and things to eat that you couldn't get at home.

The best carnival in the world was, of course, the Fourth of July carnival in your own hometown. Especially if you could walk to it. High on my priority list was being scared out of my wits by a carnival ride that constantly spun you around and/or lifted you up and dropped you down as your lunch and the loose change in your pocket battled with gravity. Then the games of skill where you threw a ball at wooden milk bottles or tossed rings at bottles filled with colored water, and so on, in order to win a cheap, insignificant prize like a fake Hawaiian lei or a wooden stick with a handle that passed for a cane and other trinkets that were the trophies of a kid's summer. Lastly, I went to the carnival for some stuff that might pass for food and lots of stuff that never would, not in a million years. I'm talking pizza, hotdogs and hamburgers for food and cotton candy, candy apples, snow cones, funnel cakes and sugar waffles just for fun. If you made it home with a few coins in your pocket and no ride tickets left, you were enjoying the gusto.

Festivals, on the other hand, were smaller and run by churches or groups of people in order to raise money for something or to celebrate something, like strawberries or blueberries or lumbering. There may or may not be any rides at a festival and few games of skill but there were a lot of "games of chance" and lots and lots of food. Even real food that came from mothers' and grandmothers' kitchens. Who cared if there was no Ferris Wheel or Merry Mixer or Octopus? Sometimes you got to win money or a prize that wasn't worthless, like a clock or a wrist watch. And, of course, you got to eat.

But the biggest deal of all when it came to outdoor celebrations was the county fair. I wasn't a little kid by the time I went to a county fair and remembered going. I was a grown man by that time. A county fair had everything a carnival had, only five or ten times as much. I enjoyed watching kids shoot a BB-machine gun at a playing card or hit a stuffed animal with a club whenever it peeked out of its hole. They could shoot baskets, roll balls, throw darts, blow up a balloon with a squirt gun and all kinds of stuff. And, if they didn't win, so what? They had fun. Then they could go eat again or join the other grownups, like me, who seemed to enjoy looking at new John Deere tractors and Holland combines and baby animals and jars of homemade canned goods and the latest thing in manufactured housing as much as we liked being scared out of our wits on a ride when we were kids.

I never made it to a state fair when I was a kid but before the 20th Century gave up its wonderful, historic and unforgettable spirit, I got to experience a state fair as a grown man. It had everything a county fair had only three or four times as much. It even had real helicopter rides. I decided to stop while I was ahead after my one and only state fair experience. After going to the "King of Fairs", I couldn't imagine anything bigger. But biggest isn't always the best. From time to time I still enjoy the hometown carnivals as a grown man. But, instead of playing games and getting sick on wicked rides, I just eat carnival food and watch all the kids have their fun.

The Old Swimming Hole

Back in the 20th Century every rural community had a natural place for people to swim. They were called "swimming holes". Why a pool of water was ever called a "hole" was something I never understood but then I don't have to understand something in order to enjoy it.

Some swimming holes were dammed-up creeks where the water would be just over a grownup's head. Others were nothing more than a deep pool of water, often at a curve in a stream where the water flowed slowly in the summertime. Often there was a large tree shading the pool. Some of the "neatest" swimming holes were beaver dams. If you could swim with beavers and get past the smell, you were on your way to having a lot of fun.

Then there were the big community swimming holes where townspeople would get together and build a big earthen dam with bulldozers and divert a natural creek into it. A week later the dam would be full of water, sometimes ten feet deep or more at the breast of the dam. Big pipes let water in and out so that the water would never become a stagnant home for mosquitoes. The dammed-up water would usually be muddy until the following year. Then boardwalks and diving boards would be erected and sand brought in from elsewhere. A lot of people brought picnic lunches and families would spend entire afternoons at the old swimming hole.

Then along came the environmental do-gooders in the 1960s and the American swimming hole tradition went down the pipe. We were convinced by people with college degrees and new ideas about fun and health and the environment that we were stupid hicks who needed to be shown. These folks also had the elected or appointed authority to enforce the laws that other do-gooders with even more power had signed into law. Nobody could legally swim in a stream, creek or river anymore because of so-called concerns for the public health and the environment.

As a mere boy in the 1960s, I don't recall anyone being harmed by a swimming hole or a single fish being injured or killed because of a kid or a mom or a dad or even an uncle swimming in the water alongside it. But then I never understood why these same do-gooder types tore up all the rural railroad tracks in the 1960s and built concrete highways to replace them. Concrete super highways that were built at the cost of millions of acres of natural woodland and fields. Wild places that used to be homes for countless animals living in their rightful and natural environment. So much for the environmental issue there.

We were convinced by the people in power that swimming in a chlorinated concrete pool would be a lot safer for us. Herding us into big community concrete pools became mainly a public health issue when these goody-goodies realized that we weren't buying the "good for the environment" lie. At least nobody in my state gave a damn about the environment back in the 1960s. That was obvious after the interstates were built. But what they did care about was money. The bottom line.

Before the environmental and health officials let the water out of our swimming holes, we all swam for nothing. Now we all pay for the privilege of walking on blazing-hot surfaces and swimming in fake-blue water that smells like toothpaste and tastes like medicine. This is a sad but true American saga where the winners were the cash registers and the losers were everyone else.

The Kool-Aid Stand

After the second world war a new type of business sprang up all over America. The Kool-Aid stand. This was a seasonal business run by kids trying to earn their own bubble gum money as soon as school let out for the summer.

I ran a Kool-Aid stand in front of my own house one summer before I even entered school. Mom let me make the cherry Kool-Aid all by myself. After an hour or so with no customers, I spotted a man going down into a manhole on the corner and I hastened toward him with a paper cup of the refreshing summer kid’s beverage. But I was too late. He had disappeared into the subterranean world of public utilities. But that was fine with me. I’d simply wait until the unknown man came up for air and then I’d give him my best sales pitch.

My patience paid off. About five minutes later a man stuck his head out of the manhole. It was my grandfather, working for the highway department. Undeterred, I quickly explained to him the beneficial cooling effects of cherry Kool-Aid and, after he laughed, he produced a nickel. We made the exchange and he slugged down the red drink like a prospector in the desert, dying of thirst. Afterward, he made a face and told me it had “hit the spot”. Then his head was swallowed up again by the dark hole and I went back to my Kool-Aid stand.

After that, I was pretty hot myself, so I pilfered a small drink from my own stock and tasted it. I had forgotten to add the sugar. But, according to my one and only customer that day, my very first business had been an undisputed success.

Little League Life

In 1939 Little League was founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania with only three teams. By the time I was playing Little League baseball in the late 1950s it was all over the country and now Little League is being sponsored all over the world. It’s a great way to foster a healthy, competitive spirit between children ages five through eighteen and in several arenas, based on age.

But back in 1959 through 1962 my Little League experience was a wonderful, exciting and rewarding competitive camaraderie between a bunch of boys. And a time for them to learn how to play baseball together and learn pitching, fielding and hitting skills from grown men who enjoyed showing boys how to play baseball and how to compete with a sense of sportsmanship.

The very notion of boys enjoying team sports under the direction of men who lent their time and effort to help boys become better youths became a topic of heated debate and contention by the time I was all grown up. It seemed that the new America, which had sprung from the bosom of the American Feminist Movement, somehow believed that boys having fun playing an organized sport were somehow depriving girls of the same age of the opportunity to play baseball.

No one ever thought to form a separate Little League for girls. Instead, the new America decided to instill in the boys entrusted to its care an undeserved guilt about playing sports with just boys, making them and the men who managed their Little League teams feel that what they were doing was somehow wrong, shameful and sexist. How in the hell a ten-year-old boy back in 1960 could be guilty of sexism just by swinging a baseball bat at a ball pitched by another boy is still totally beyond my comprehension.

What was really shameful and sexist was the false sense of righteousness in an America that allowed such an ill-conceived national movement to become Little League policy. Any arbitrary decision by adults which forces boys to play with girls (and vice-versa) and to forsake children's natural tendency to enjoy the company of other children of their own gender only masquerades as an equal opportunity of any kind for anybody.