From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

For fifty cents I could cruise Main Street in Dad’s little white Falcon with my pals  and enjoy an A&W root beer at the drive-in up on the hill. I didn’t have to have a wad of bills to have a good time in the sixties. What a deal! Life was almost free, as long as I lived at home with my folks.

When I was a kid, we didn’t go to day cares or preschool classes. We did have kindergarten, where we took naps on mats, but public education was free at the tall brick building on the hill. There was a playground with teeter-totters, hand-over-hand bars, a merry-go-round, swings and slippery slides that burned my bottom when the sun heat up the metal slide. Though I wasn’t as good as Martha, I loved to shoot marbles. We girls would jump rope, even try to do cartwheels on the asphalt playground.

The city park down by the lake offered free activities for kids in the summer. We wove bracelets and painted pottery at the picnic tables set up near the tennis courts. We could learn to play tennis on the cracked asphalt courts. We walked or rode our bikes everywhere.

Several girls had roller skates with metal gripping clamps that held our Buster Brown shoes tight as we bumped along the broken cement blocks of sidewalk down Green Street. We played pick-up sticks and jacks with the little red ball. I just bought these old games for my five year granddaughters. It was fun for us to play Hangman and ante-ante-over, cops and robbers, stage imaginary weddings with costumes and roll down the big grassy hill at the jail house where I lived. There were no electronic games or computers back then. We used our imaginations to have fun…didn’t cost a penny!

We had kid energy and enthusiasm. We’d get up games without any direction from parents or teachers…we created plays with costumes of hand me downs from neighbors of wedding veils and prom gowns  in the back yards of our houses. I remember using Mom’s dish towels to create a white wedding dress. We camped in the yard under the clothesline by hanging Dad’s army blankets shaped like tents with clothespins from Mom’s laundry basket.

I remember punch-out paper dolls and cutting out the models from the Sears Wish Book catalogue to add to my collection of paper dolls. I could buy comic books at Potters’ Dime Store downtown for a few cents. Veronica and Betty were my comic book teenage idols along with Archie and Jughead. The four friends would ride in a red convertible with the top down checking out where other kids were hanging out.

About the only thing that cost money was movies at the theatre downtown. Saturday westerns were favorites with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, his wife. We loved the Lone Ranger with his handsome face covered with a black mask. His sidekick was an Indian named Tonto. In the Wild West all the cowboys rode beautiful Palamino horses and wore tan or white hats. You’d know the bad guys because they wore black hats.

As I got older I began to prefer the musicals where everyone danced and romanced. Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly were favorites of mine. I’d dance all the way home after viewing one of their movies. Girls adored watching kids dance on Dick Clarks’ TV program “American Bandstand” where we learned the latest dances and fashionable outfits of Annette and Frankie.

Back then most of our families didn’t have much money. We didn’t need it. We created our own fun with our energy and imaginations. What a great deal we had as kids! Life on the lake and in the woods was idylic. What a great way to grow up when life was so free…we had little if any supervision. We knew the rules of right and wrong and didn’t often test the rules our parents set.

That changed a bit when we became teenagers.

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.