Things I miss about Summer!

                                Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
                                Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
                                Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
                                Youll wish that summer could always be here

                                Just fill your basket full of sandwiches and weenies
                                Then lock the house up, now youre all set
                                And on the beach youll see the girls in their bikinis
                                As cute as ever but they never get em wet

                                Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
                                Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
                                Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
                                You’ll wish that summer could always be here

I'm sure that no matter where you're at, it's HOT!  It climbed near one hundred degrees here today.  The lyrics above, taken from a hit by Nat King Cole describes my feelings about summer.  I love it!  At least I love the memories of it.

This time of year is called is called the "Dog Days of Summer!"  Supposedly, it's when dogs prefer to lay around in the shade and do nothing.  That was probably true years ago but today's dog prefers to lay around in air conditioning....beginning in May.  Dog Days is just an expression now.

In the evenings, when the temperature dips to the low to mid eighties, I like to sit in the swing and think about times past.   The years when we got to play outside after dark, catching "lightning bugs" and stuffing them in a mason jar that has holes punched in the top for air.  I miss taking that jar in the house for a "night light" and then letting them all go the following morning, only to re-catch some of them that night.

I miss spending entire days at the City Swimming Pool or Devil's lake (you could swim nekkid there) when the biggest responsibility I had was to be sure and get the yard mowed once a week and maybe pick a few weeds from Dad's garden.

I miss hopping on my Murray 26" Bike with the baseball cards attached to the fender braces with clothes pins so it would sound like a "Harley" and going down to Buck's Grocery and spending a quarter for a Mr. Cola, a bag of peanuts, one of those "kool-aids" in a sealed straw (where you bit the end out of it and ate the contents) and a Moon Pie.  I miss riding out to Green River to the "bluff" and eating these treats and maybe slipping into the river for a dip (you couldn't swim nekkid there....too many people around).  I remember it seemed "all downhill" going out there and "all uphill" coming back.

I miss fishin' with a worm in the canal by devil's lake and sometimes bringing a catfish home for Dad to clean. 

I miss playing baseball at the city park where everyone got to play, no matter how good or how lousy you were, there were no coaches or sponsors, no schedule, no parents, and sometimes up to twenty-five players (twelve on one team, thirteen on the other) and you got to create your team by tossing a bat, and stacking "hands" to select your team mates.  I miss catchin' "Crawdads" in the creek that ran by the park and feeding the squirrels over by the "Scouthouse."

I surely miss being able to ride my bicycle wide open from the top of the hill by the Scouthouse and being able to make the turn at the bottom of the hill without applying your brakes (try that sometime in only swimming trunks).  I miss getting up in the morning and after breakfast, meeting with my friends and spending the day in the woods behind our houses, wandering secret pathways through honeysuckle clear up to the water tank on Reservoir Ave. 

Who wouldn't miss taking turns turning the crank on a home made ice cream maker for nearly an hour and eating it's contents in about ten minutes.  I miss going with Dad down to the old "Ice House" and buying crushed ice in a brown paper bag held together at the top with a wire tie and going on an all day picnic.  I miss getting to go inside where the blocks of ice were stored and it was below freezing and returning to the ninety degree heat.  I miss our annual trip to Evansville to visit my "city cousins" and going to the zoo and how different their accents were from ours although they only lived across the Ohio River.  I miss crossing the Green River on a Ferry at Ranger's Landing.  I miss Dad taking my brother and I to one of the stripper pit ponds with our .22 rifles and target shooting cans and pop bottles and sinking them to the bottom. 

I miss taking some old wheels from a couple of discarded tricycles and some scrap lumber and building a soap box racer and riding it down Park Street hill with a couple of buddies on board before wrecking it in the "big ditch" at the bottom of the hill.  I miss gathering with friends at the top of Third Street or Reynolds Street hill and burning a tire and sledding until midnight and sometimes one of the parents would even bring some hot chocolate made from real cocoa up to us.

I miss riding in a "Uke" inner tube with about seven or eight friends from the bluff to South Carollton and then having to walk the two miles back along the river bank.  I miss my BB gun.  I miss the scores of dogs we've adopted and took along on all of these adventures.  Some of them were bigger than I was.  I even miss going to Dr. Davis for a shot, not because I liked getting shots but I knew I would be rewarded with a milk shake made in a metal can and poured into a Coke glass at Robinson's or Miller's drug store. 

I miss Mighty Mouse and Superman and Little Lulu comic books which I would read for hours on end.  I miss buying bubble gum with two baseball cards inside for a penny and even more I miss the shoe box full of baseball cards I had (and wonder what the heck ever happened to them....they'd be worth thousands today).  I miss Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese broadcasting the game of the week on Saturday afternoons.

I miss Clarabelle, and Howdy Doody and Winky Dink and the endless Saturday morning cartoons or when I got a little older the "cartoon carnivals" at the State Theater.  I miss the weekly adventures of "Captain Marvel" when he would say "Shazam" and become a super hero that could fly (and I'll bet some of you thought Gomer Pyle coined the phrase "Shazam!"). 

I miss phones that had no dial wheel and you called your friend by giving a combination of numbers and letters to a live operator.  I don't miss "party lines" because every time I wanted to call my buddy "Bucky," I had to wait for Mrs. Craig next door to finish "gossiping" to Mrs. Perkins (across the street).

I miss watching the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights followed by a trip to Miller's Drug Store and Dad buying four pints of  Ice Cream, one for each of us in the family.  I miss the "Jolly Roger" that was a virtual mobile Dairy Queen with everything in it to make soft-serve cones to banana splits to butterscotch shakes right in front of your house.  I miss drives at dusk and listening to the frogs and crickets chirping in the ditches along the road.  I miss family badminton in the back yard.

I miss swipin' a couple of unfiltered Camel cigarettes from my parents and sneaking to our "secret hideout" in the woods behind our house (where Spark's Nursing Center is now) and trying to act "grown up" and smoke them even though they actually made me nauseated. 

I miss visiting my Aunt Ruby at the Health Department when it was in the City Building and her taking me across the hall where Chief Hardwick would let me slide down the pole to the basement. 

I miss Mr. and Mrs.(R. P.) Harris, who lived across the street and would let us spend countless hours with them as surrogate grandparents since my real grandparents died either before I was born or while I was little.  I miss Mr. Harris's wisdom (he's the one who showed me how to get a goldfish pond prepared for winter where the fish don't freeze...you cut a two-by-four about three feet long for a 5' pond and float it along the surface...the fish will be fine in the spring). 

I appreciate Nat Basham for letting me become a Messenger-Inquirer "paperboy" at the ripe old age of eleven, my introduction into business. 

I miss going camping at Kentucky Dam and Rocky Creek (now Lake Malone) with Troop 41 and sleeping in a tent on the ground and keeping our pop cold by sinking them in cold creek water.  I learned to start a fire with "flint" and pine needles, something I haven't needed to do again, but still handy information to have in case the need arises.

I miss the annual school trip to Beech Bend Park every spring even though I can't think of a time that we didn't "break down" in the First Christian Church bus driven by Bro. Joe Johnson.  I remember getting my first lesson in "birth control devices" in a rest room at a gas station in Morgantown.

I miss the old County Fair when it was at the original fairgrounds and miss the sideshows, some of which I've referred to in earlier blogs.

I miss Mr. (Delmas) Gish, and because I attended St. Joseph School for my first six school years, I didn't know he was the principal at CCHS.  I only knew him up to that point as the guy who ran the swimming pool and I never saw him in a suit until I started at CCHS in the seventh grade.

I miss "mustard sandwiches," (but not too much -  that's right...they were two pieces of white bread with nothing but mustard in the center). 

I miss going with Dad on Saturday mornings to Gus Benton's Service Station and watching him and Gus bet on whose Coke bottle came from the farthest distance.  Gus had one of those coke machines that opened from the top and had several rows of soft drinks and you picked out the one you wanted by sliding it down the row to a flat section and when you deposited a nickel, you could remove the bottle.  My favorite was the "chocolate" drink in a glass bottle.  They were the coldest I've ever tasted.

I miss riding in the back of a pickup truck on the highway. I miss my pocket transistor radio and listening to WMTA on it after school and at night sneaking it into my bedroom, plugging in the earpiece and listening to Dick Biondi on WLS all night. 

I miss "Highway Patrol" starring Broderick Crawford who was about as good an actor as I am a rocket scientist.  He only had one role to my knowledge, that of Chief Dan Matthews of the California Highway Patrol.  He was sort of like Jack Lord who played "McGarrett" in Hawaii Five-O....he was so entrenched in the character that it was impossible for him to get other roles.  (incidentally I miss that show too).

Well, those are a few of the things that come to mind that I miss about Summer.  I'm sure there are plenty more when you drift into your sub-conscience but I don't want to overwork the old brain.  I'd like to hear from you.  Send me some of your fond memories and I'll store them and write a future blog about them.   Who knows?  Your memory might become a book someday!