Summer Days Are Over~Part 1

Well it’s back to school this week for a few local schools. Propel-Montour and the Pittsburgh Accelerated academies started back Monday the 18th. Most schools start back next Monday the 25th. It wasn’t that long ago, that all schools didn’t start back until after the labor day holiday. I really feel bad for kids today, getting jipped out of and extra week or two of summer break. I will use this opportunity to try and paint a picture of my typical day of summer growing up in Elliott.

AUGUST 19, 1983

I woke up around 8:00 am from the sun and heat coming through my bedroom window. We didn’t have air conditioners back then. We had one neighbor on the street that had a window unit, but we all assumed they were rich. Us regular folk just used the old window fan complemented by an oscillating fan. It worked fine for us. I walked downstairs and grabbed the box of Fruity Pebbles off the top of the fridge and poured my bowl of pure tastiness. Sitting at the dining room table, I flipped on the radio and changed the station to B94 and the Quinn and Banana morning show, which was playing “Down Under” from Men at Work. My mom always listened to Jimmy and Steve on DVE, but since I was only 11, Quinn and Banana were more my style of humor.

Once I was finished with breakfast, I walked next door to my best friend’s house. I didn’t have to knock. The door was always open and I was always seen as part of family. We grabbed our bikes and off we went having absolutely no plans for the day. We decided we wanted to go get some candy down at Fingers, but didn’t have any money. We did what any kid did back then that needed money, we grabbed a few bags and took off on our search to find returnable pop bottles. Hey, they were 10 cents a piece, so getting a few of those meant we had some serious cash to spend. We decided to head to Herschel first as that was usually the place we always hit the jackpot. As we were pedaling our way there, we were always on the lookout for that lone bottle glistening in the sun, laying on the side of the road that some older kid threw out the window of his Trans Am. We stopped up at the Little Field first and checked all around Dot’s Candy Stand. Nothing. We rode our bikes down the path that connected the parking lot to the basketball courts and raced over to the yellow and orange wooden benches. There they were, sitting in the cement drain/gutter, 3 bottles. In the bags they went. We cruised the length of the gutter along side the Tennis Courts all the way to the back corner. There was nothing there but a few cases worth of beer cans. I couldn’t understand why people would go back there to dump their cans. When I got older, I found out where the cans came from, and left a few there myself.

We rode back the way we came, through the basketball courts and down the ramp to the playground, out the park and down the street to the parking lot of the Big Field. We checked the 2 green garbage cans behind the backstop. THERE THEY WERE! We hit the big one. We fought off the bees and pulled 11 bottles out of those cans. In the bags they went. We pulled a few iced tea cartons out just so we could pop them and then we threw them away again. We found two more bottles on the cement bleachers. There must have been a softball game the previous night. Possibly between the Ubets and the Trio Bar.

We decided that 16 bottles were enough to carry and we didn’t even hit West End Park yet. We each tied 2 bags with 4 bottles each to our handlebars and cruised down Herschel to Walbridge. We had to ride on the sidewalks because back then, Herschel was still red brick and Walbridge was cobblestone. We couldn’t have the bottles clinging together and break. Losing a bottle is the same as losing a box of Lemonheads or Boston Baked Beans. We made a left onto Harker traveled up to Neidel made a right to get to Steuben, left on Amherst, cut through the Thaddeus Stevens parking lot and playground, through the alley and right to Fingers. We turned our bottles in and got a cool $1.60. We decided to get 30 cents each worth of penny candy. We stood there picking it out through the glass window. “I’ll have 5 sour patch kids, 5 fish, 5 licorice nickels, 5 flying saucer wafers, 5 pixie stix, and five sixlets.” My friend picked his out then we headed across the street to Murray’s Pizza where we decided to spend the dollar that’s left on the 8 Ball Deluxe pinball machine. We could get 5 balls for a quarter so that’s 2 games a piece. All this and it’s only 11:30. Now we are starting to get hungry for lunch.

........to be continued.