Summertime, Summertime, Sum-Sum-Summertime!

One of the great pleasures of growing up during the fifties and sixties was the general simplicity of stuff.

Most of us had only one telephone in the house for the entire family. We shared ours with three other households. I have no idea why it was called a “party-line”. We had no parties on it. No E-mail or Twitter et al. We left notes on the refrigerator. “Baseball game - 6P Tuesday.” We wrote letters from camp, even though they usually weren’t delivered until after we got back home. We did stuff together, hand in hand, face to face. Simplicity!

The “social network” of the day was hanging out with our friends at the pool… at the park…at the drug store...on porches and in back yards around the neighborhood. Remember getting together to play records and listen to the radio hoping to hear a song dedicated to you. The telephone operators must have really loved being on duty during those radio request-line shows.

In the evenings, we took walks or rode our bikes around the neighborhood stopping now and then to “chat” with our friends who were sitting out on their porches. One of my fondest memories was sitting on our porch with my Aunt Ann listening to the Pirates’ baseball games. It didn’t take long before we had four or five kids on our porch listening to the game with us. My Mom always had ice cream, cookies, and Cokes ready for such occasions. An equally popular activity was stopping by the Quinn house for deep conversations while listening to folk music and swatting flies on their front porch. “Heavy!”

But of all the summer fun we had, I think one my most favorite things that we used to do on a warm August night was to sneak on the Country Club golf course, lay out blankets in the sand traps, and look at the shooting stars while the songs of the cicadas filled the night air. We would contemplate things only teenagers would or could contemplate. (Yes, necking was usually involved.) But, for the most part, we just watched the stars and enjoyed being together with our best friends. It didn’t get much better than that.

I am very lucky to have grown up in Wheeling. In our hectic, rush-rush lifestyle of today, I often wish I were back home so I could sneak on to the golf course for a bit of star-gazing and……whatever.