When I was a kid we couldn't afford to go to the Hamptons or some fancy vacation. I mean we would all jump in my uncles car and go out to Plum Beach out before you hit Long Island. It was on the Brooklyn/Queens border and right off the Belt Parkway. My Grandmother would have her chair and her umbrella and made us sandwiches with just tomato and olive oil and salt and oregano and lot's of love. And she would have a paper sack with an inexhaustable pile of peaches and plums and nectarines. But we only would go once in a while when my uncle was off because he worked on the docks. In those days when a ship came in it had to be off loaded right away. A ship full of banana's couldn't wait because the fruit would go bad so they worked 48 hours straight or however long it took to unload.
So I didn't get to the beach. What we used to do was turn on the fire hydrant like you see in the photo. One of the older guys would get a wrench and open it up and the water would spew out and he would take a tin can and put it on the opening and spew water out. They would always try to get it in the windows of passing cars. Some guys would roll up their windows and stop and get a quick car wash. We would run around and get soaked and cool off on the burning hot days until the cops came around and shut off the hydrant.
Then I would go up the corner to Toomey's bar and get a growler of beer for the old man to have while he watched the Mets. We couldn't afford air conditioning so we all sat in front of the fan while my mom grilled some burgers and franks on the little Hibachi we had on the fire escape. I remember we did that one night when Tom Seaver was pitching a no hitter into the ninth against the Cubs, I think Jimmy Quals broke it up with a single.
Life was simpler then.
16 comments:
Yeah, but what about Erin Andrews ?
Woof, inshallah you saw that before the goon squad had it removed.
I especially enjoyed the part where she was asking herself
is my ass getting fat?
I think the answer is yes
Life was simpler then...you nailed it on the head with that comment, Troop. One of the things that I've slowly realized over the decades is how complicated life becomes as I age. Maybe that's why old guys take up hobbies. It helps them bring the focus back to just a few things.
It is all we can do to simplify some things. So much more to worry about and just think about you know.
Nothing was better than coming home, having some hostess cupcakes and a Yoo Hoo and running out with your glove to play fistball for a couple of hours till it got late.
Or stoopball. Or Johnnie on the Pony, Ringolievio.
You were lucky to have an ocean nearby. I grew up near the Madison lakes, which have improved in quality since I was a kid in the '60s and '70's. The lakes in Madison are actually slow moving rivers and they catch a lot of fertilizer runoff from the surrounding county. The only time my dad would dive the lakes was in the dead of winter when the summer algae would die off. Of course we kids didn't care so much,especially when we were old enough to run off to the "beach" by ourselves.
Lots of times on weekends or even weekdays my Dad would pack up the gear and head for one of the surrounding (cleaner) swimming holes (usually an abandoned rock or gravel quarry that had backfilled in with water). These places usually came equipped with tire swings or even cliffs for jumping and diving. One of my favorite, an abandoned gravel quarry had some abandoned heavy machinery underwater.
chickenlittle,
I also grew up in Madison, near the east side. Our family went to Sandy Beach (now known as Olbrich- calling it Sandy Beach gives you Madison Native bona fides).
I think Lake Monona was cleaner back then and not as algae laden. I'll only swim in it now if I'm jumping off a boat in the middle of the lake.
My mom would pop huge quantities of popcorn, dump it in a brown paper grocery sack, and smother it with butter and off we'd go to the beach. I can still feel the sand in my bathing suit.
I am some what dismayed when I think of the things my children perceive as their God-given rights-air conditioning,having more than one car, eating out on a regular basis, having more than one bathroom in the house, etc.
But I'm sure my grandparents who bore the brunt of the Depression had a similar point of view towards my parents.
Perhaps my children will one day regale their children with tales of how they had to wait until their 11th birthday for their own Ipod.
I'm all for a simpler life - as long as I can keep my air conditioning.
Didn't mind the heat or cold when I was a kid - but now...
Hey Ice, it's a tiny world. I grew up in Middleton, so Lake Mendota access was primarily Marshall park, or as we called it in the day "The Lagoon."
Olbrich Park huh? One day, I don't remember what year but it must have been late '60's, my Dad had the great idea to go visit my mom's sister (who lived off Fair Oaks Ave) by boat! We had a 12 ft aluminum fishing boat. We set off across lake Mendota from Marshall Park and circumnavigated Picnic Point, then headed for the Tenney Park locks. Traversing the isthmus via the locks, we continued in Lake Monona to Olbrich Park (Sandy Beach) and headed "up creek" at Starkweather Creek. I will never forget that creek. It was covered in duckweed, inches thick it seemed; my brother and I thought it was green sludge. We made it almost all the way to Fair Oaks by boat and disembarked for a visit. The round trip must have been about 30-35 miles.
We had a swimming hole, where all the kids hung out. Two creeks came together, and it was deep enough to dive off the bridge into the water. Someone died one day, misjudging his dive. He was much older than we were, and it honestly didn't slow us down, since we never attempted the dive he did, which killed him. Our parent forbade us from swimming there ever again, which we ignored. Finally, the state dumped boulders into the place, and we couldn't jump off any more. Bureaucratic bastards.
One of my best moments as a dad was introducing my kids to YooHoo. Terrible, wonderful stuff.
It was simpler then but way harder than we have it today. Think about a working mother 40 years ago. She had to cook seven nights a week, had to go to the Acme 2-3 times week, no ATM, no cell phone, maybe she did not drive or have a car, tiny freezer in the fridge, very little pre-pkg food, clothes harder to wash and press. Women today complain but they have it easier.
For men, it's about the same but the worklife is more uncertain for men over the last 20 years or so.
Aww. Those are sweet memories.
My grandparents ran a small resort on Houghton Lake here in Michigan, so I was pretty lucky with lake access (and fishing!)
Still have it - but kind of forced to sell it along with my siblings now. A legacy gone soon.
And hey! What did you delete at Althouse yesterday, Trooper. Damn it, I missed it...and from the reactions I'll just bet it was good. Hee.
chickenlittle-
You do realize you were floating with the wieners when you went up the Starkweather, the creek in to which the Oscar Meyer factory was discharging waste at the time. My recollection is that they stopped doing that sometime in the 1970s.
Ice- so Starkweather Creek was Madison's own little Cuyahoga. That would explain the smell at the time.
Hey, rememember that nasty rumor about Oscars that Take Over started and ended up retracting?
Ice: Thinking about Oscars: I had an uncle (my godfather actually) who was a machinist there--really, really clever guy--died too young.
Remember those perfume dispensors that Oscar's had going, trying to mask the smell? They put out little pink clouds that smelled worse than the stuff they were trying to mask.
chickenlittle-No, don't remember the Take Over rumor. Sigh, only in Madison...
Everyone had a relative that went through that plant. My father's side were the engineers, etc. while my mother's side supplied the guys for the line.
How strange it is to live here- between the "Progressive" (or what ever it's being called these days) politics and not thinking twice when the Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile drives past. (The Wiener Mobile drove into a house last week...the jokes just write themselves.)
Ice: Takeover was the name of a free weekly newspaper in the early '70s in Madison. It was kind of forerunner to the Isthmus. They published an "investigative" story about an Oscar Meyer worker (names and photos too) who had been killed by a coworker and disposed of in a meatgrinder. OM management allegedly conspired with the cops to cover it up for obvious publicity reasons. The story was exposed as a hoax and I believe OM won some kind of injunction against the publisher of Takeover and effectively shut them done.
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