Summer Days Are Over ~ Part 3

Well here is the final installment of my Summer Days series. If you haven't read Part's 1 & 2 you can do so by clicking the links below.

Summer Days Are Over ~ Part 1

Summer Days Are Over ~ Part 2

August 19th, 1983 (cont.)

………After playing ball for a few hours it was time to head home for dinner. My Mom would have gotten home from work around 5 or so. I always knew to be home for dinner by 6. Back then, I guess it was OK to leave your kids home alone as long as they were able to fend for themselves. From 10 years old on, I was in this situation, as were most of the kids I knew. I have to give my mom all the credit in the world, raising me on her own. She worked at Sam’s Pharmacy downtown which I’m assuming didn’t pay all that much. We didn’t have a car. We didn’t have a lot, but being a kid, I didn’t know any better. Every once in a while, we saved up and went out to dinner which was almost always Eat-N-Park down in McKees Rocks.

I walked in the door, threw my baseball stuff in the hallway, and headed straight for the kitchen for a drink. My mom would yell from the upstairs, “Ron is that you?” I always said some smart comeback like, “No, it’s a robber and I’m stealing all your Kool Aid.” I poured my drink and plopped onto the recliner in front of the TV. Ray Tannehill was doing the news. My mom came down and we started getting dinner together. Hamburger Helper was always my choice when asked. There were only a few flavors back then, but my favorite was Cheeseburger Macaroni. We ate in the living room on TV trays and continued watching the news.

Right around 7:00, I headed outside on the street and met up with a few of the neighborhood kids. We started coordinating a game of “release.” There ended up being about 16 of us so we split into 2 teams of 8. The two fastest kids were always picked as the captains, and then they picked everyone else based on their known release abilities. The “base” or “jail” was always in front of this one kid’s house on Wymore Street. It was the perfect place, because it was in the middle of the boundaries and everyone could sit on the wall next to each other when caught. Our boundaries were Harker, Wymore, and Herschel in between Steuben and Lorenz. We were pretty much allowed in and out of any yards within those streets, but not inside any houses. Most people didn’t care about us running through their property. Everyone knew us, and knew that we respected their private property. Some residents even sat on their porches and watched us play like they were watching a sporting event, even cheering us on sometimes. There was always that ONE lady who didn’t want anyone in her yard. The same cranky old lady that would keep your balls or Frisbees if they landed any where near her house. I wasn’t that fast, so I had to make up for it by hiding in great places. I may have had the best place of all. On the corner of Lorenz and Herschel was a house with a small yard in the back. I was able to climb their green chain link fence, stand on it and then climb into the tree adjacent to the fence. Granted, if anyone found me here, I wouldn’t be able to run away from them, but no one EVER found me there. I would laugh as people would walk by underneath listening to their conversations about how frustrated they were, and they were certain that I was either in someone’s house or outside the boundary lines. I would only come in when I heard the call of “Ollie Ollie in Come Free.”

We usually played this until 9 or 9:30. We would play games like this almost every single night in the summer. If we didn’t have enough people for a full game of release, we would play smaller games in front of the house. We played games like Three Little Pigs, Mother May I, It Tag, Freeze Tag, TV Tag, and a few other we made up as went along. We would always figure out who was “IT” by putting our feet in a circle and by taking turns, we would utter the popular sayings like “Occa Bocca Soda Crocca Occa Bocca Boo, In comes Uncle Sam out goes Y.O.U.” or my favorite “My mother and your mother were hanging up clothes, my mother punched your mother right in the nose, what color was the blood……” We must of have 50 of these sayings.

This was one of the typical days growing up in Elliott in the late 70’s and early 80’s. There were many other things we did. Wiffle Ball games, tag football in the street, etc. I wouldn’t have traded those games and the fun we had outside for the all video games in the world.