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Mission Statement: to do very little, for very few, for not very long. Disappointing the easily pleased since 1819. Not as good as it used to be from Day One. History is Bunk - PT Barnum. Artificially Intelligent before it was fashionable. Fat camp for the mind! Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. The Shock of the Old! Often bettered, never imitated.
Sunday, April 10, 2022
Never Better Than This Dept. - 1967
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Okay, youse bums - it's always summer in Siam, but it may not have hit you yet. What good stuff do you associate with childhood summers?
ReplyDeleteMe - beach holidays. Rock pools, paddling the shiny wet sand, hot vinyl car seats. Yeah.
Cider ice lollies from the Gallones ice cream van. All day rambles over the fields behind our house. Days at the unheated open air municipal swimming pool.
DeleteBeach vacations are my favorite, too.
DeleteMost summers we went to my father's hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine. In the late 50s to early 60s, my older brother and I were put on a Greyhound bus in downtown Brooklyn, and picked up by our grandparents in Maine. I loved those bus rides!
In the mid to late 60s while in college, my future husband taught me to surf on Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles, CA.
Groovin' is one of my favorite Pop songs.
I don't suppose you have any photos of yourself as a surf bunny? Asking for a friend. Hey! You should write screed about Hermosa Beach.
DeleteSummer beach Holidays in New Hampshire or Maine, no air-conditioning in Mom & Dad's automobile, & my older siblings playing this great record at home quite often. One of Marc Almond's more recent solo Lps features a fine version of "How can I be sure "...
ReplyDeleteBlessed, albeit brief, freedom from government schools!
ReplyDeleteAre they the same as *cough* government college?
DeleteDrive in movie theatre,girls in bikinis,going to sleepovers,constant erections
ReplyDeletechanging from Rocker to Mod,Pirate radio,Ship from England to Australia and reverse.Getting belted by teachers.
I always loved hanging out with the other kids, & playing some kid games in the local neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteMaybe occasionally climbing up in a giant billboard bowl of soup. lol
The local neighborhood pool where, on Saturday nights, the local "teen combos" would play. Also, seersucker pjs. Just sayin'.
ReplyDelete--Muzak McMusics
I grew up in Scotland and cannot remember us ever having something you could point at and call 'the summer". Moving to England aged 10 I became aware of this blue stuff over my head and a circular thing in amongst the blue that generally emitted some warmth - this led to hours of endless footie, "Olympics", "exploring" and being a kid. On the dull days it would be the cricket test match - a whole day sprawled on the couch with my brother glued to the tv. Much appreciated by my ever-understanding mother!
ReplyDeleteIt's still coldish in the south of England, but at least the sun is shining.
ReplyDeleteI remember summer holidays cycling around my neibourhood with my friends, and one particular summer a large road construction site was only a few minutes away, we would go and 'play' in the huge drainage pipes, and on a massive mound of earth we called Annapurna, and most dangerously on a still unfinished footbridge. Because we were only ten we could squeeze through any fencing gaps and get in anywhere it seemed.
What amazes me now is that my parents used to let me do this sort of stuff, although I probably didn't tell them I was crawling through drainage pipes on a building site during the summer evenings. We had to be home by a set time (7.30/8?). Howadays to allow a child that sort of freedom would be classed as neglect I expect.
Also, another freedom we had as children in the late 60's, was we could all walk to school on our own, me(aged 6?), my younger friend, and his brother, 2 years my senior, it was only a ten minute walk and involved only one busy road. In England now most kids seem to be driven to and from school, and funnily enough many of these children are now too large to walk anyway - I know this is a ridiculous generalization, but when I went to junior school there was one fat person in my class of 30ish kids. Am I allowed to say fat? too late, I've said it.
ReplyDeleteBeing a farmer's son meant helping out with the harvest every summer. Which for me meant days of unskillled labour stacking bales. This involved trudging round the corn field or hay field after the baler and arranging the bales into mini stacks (five on their side on the bottom then four on the next three layers, arranged like bricks so they held together). These were then picked up by a tractor with a kind of forklift attachment with spikes and put on the back of a trailer and taken to the barn, where we piled them up in layers to the roof.
ReplyDeletePoints in favour -
1.you were outside most of the time.
Points against -
1. lifting the bales by the bailer twine and using your knee to put them on the top two layers gave you nice blisters across your fingers and soon wore out the knees of your denim flares.
2. Hay bales when wet weigh a helluva lot more than straw bales and it always rained.
3. Stacking a load of warm wet bales in a barn produces a lot of hot steam espcially when you get up near the roof.
4. You didn't get paid.
Oh and the other main thing I remember was picking wild oats, which wasn't as much fun as sowing them.
The summer of 76 (by law you always have to call it the long hot summer and mention Dennis Howels, minister in charge of drought) was fantastic - just finished a levels and memories of swimming in various rivers, sleeping out in the open air in the lake district and car wheels spinning in melted tar trying to get up hills in the Yorkshire Dales.
Bambi mentioned road construction - In about 1971/2 the Great North Road was diverted through our farm and became the A1M and as he mentioned, a great playground, culminating in a long ride down its freshly tarmacked length just before it opened, me on my bike and my sister on her horse. After it was completed I would get dropped off on the motorway by friends' parents, walk across the carriageways and up the field to home, hardly any traffic, so lived to tell the tale.
The summer was made for kids. Running around without a shirt on, getting dirty, going out with dad for frozen lemonade or ice cream, Jan & Dean ("two girls for every boy") on the radio all the time, and the best part, no school!
ReplyDeletefinishing the spring of my discontent and getting ready to begin another summer of my discontent.
ReplyDeleteWas anyone else into pyrotechnics and explosives?
ReplyDeleteWe used to buy weedkiller (sodium chlorate) and mix it with sugar...buy crow-scarers (big banger like things) and take the gunpowder out...steal magnesium ribbon from the school chemistry lab...then make all sorts of nasty shit like incendiary pipe bombs.
Happy days! It's a wonder none of us were maimed for life.
I can remember breaking open 303 bullets and using the powder to set alight to a wasps nest. Well, you know, we didn't have a rifle, so what were we supposed to do with them?
DeleteAlso setting off bangers in teapots to watch the lid fly off.
Other none explosive exploits - using the elastic from inside golf balls to create catapults to fire metal staples in class into other boys' legs, in the days before long trousers. Such innocent times !
Bullets???
DeleteWhy didn't we meet up back then?
Rewind...
DeleteBullets???
How the fuck did you have bullets? They're proper bullets.
From the rifle range I think, security was a bit lax, although I wasn't involved in that bit. Not sure what we thought we would do with them, the wasps' nest just provided a solution to the problem.
DeleteLiving on a farm, I was used to shotguns and rifles lying around, you didn't have to have them locked away in metal gun cupboards in those days. Thinking about it, we never used to lock the outside doors at night either.
There was always lethal chemicals lying around too. I remember that my dad dropped some rat poison in the kitchen, when it came into contact with water it gave off cyanide fumes. The floor must have been damp cos down went my dad and my mam, who was on her own, had to drag him out by his feet into the fresh air.
Magnesium ribbon? We used Jetex fuse. 13-year-olds buying the stuff over the counter.
DeleteOh, yeah, we dismantled firecrackers, broke open Estes rocket engines, matches, bullets, all in the pursuit of larger explosions. We made pipe bombs. Zip guns. Worked on blow guns but were stymied by no available neurotoxins; there was a dearth of poisonous frogs in my neighborhood. :(
DeleteMade our own chlorine gas, too. Nasty stuff.
break from school and being around people, farm work good times
ReplyDeleteBorn and raised in California, mostly within shot of th'ocean, so all that fun stuff sang about in pop songs for the last number o' decades. The summer of '85, tho, in Needles at the onset of my archeology career, was not only at the opposite end of the state from the ocean, but around 120 degrees (F) the day I rolled in to start the gig. Was provided a mobile home by the gov't, and it had no AC but at least a swamp cooler, which I didn't turn on until I got off work, thus coming home to a big metal box in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Still, I loved it, and am heading that way tomorrow with my 12-year-old twins for a spring break desert run.
ReplyDeleteC in California
Fishing in a small rented boat with my father & grandfather.
ReplyDeleteTh' 4/5g© proffer a scented nosegay of reminiscence here, but does any youse bums wants th' album? It's swell. It's also in stereo, so let's have none of that "the power and depth of the original vinyl mono mix, mastered by Irving Forbush and pressed at Acme Lacquer (Hackensack) is the only way to go" crap. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYes please, with a bullet
ReplyDeleteGroovy.
ReplyDeleteSo, how come you din't work your cover magic for this one? I men, the original IS bowling shoe ugly...
ReplyDelete"Bowling shoe ugly" - stored in data bank.
DeletePlaying baseball. Looking for things to do on my grandparents' farm. Love the album & the cover is part of its charm
ReplyDeleteMy new cover has no problems with charm.
DeleteNow that's what I'm talkin' about. Sprit of '67 right there...
DeleteThank 'ee! Mr Swami has a point about charm, but it's something that only attaches itself after familiarity, in retrospect. The problem with the original design is that it's badly (terribly, actually) drawn, and I doubt anyone but teenage girls would have found it charming at the time.
DeleteI note that the prematurely released The Best of the Lovin' Spoonful had a similar cartoon cover. It's not as badly drawn, though.
ReplyDeleteI listened, & liked it. Gracias.
ReplyDeletechildhood summers? Airplane Glue, Brown paper bags. Mowing other people's lawns. Running like the wind. And, of course, listening to The Young Rascals! Thanks for the reminder, I listened to my copy again, it had been a while.
ReplyDelete