KEVIN CULLEN
Commercial-News
LAFAYETTE, Ind. —
“No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks!”
Ah, the last day of school. We already had cleaned our desks out, and turned in our textbooks. On the last day, we’d come back to class, pick up our report cards, and run home, chanting the above. There could be no sweeter, better way to end the year.
Nowadays, three months goes by in the blink of an eye. But when I was in grade school in Westville, summer seemed to stretch out forever, an endless series of sunny days, each filled with about 16 hours of daylight. It was hot, but heavenly.
I liked most of my teachers, but I have never been nostalgic about my grade school days. It seemed as if they were spent reading books I didn’t find that interesting, obeying rules that no normal boy could obey and getting stuck with homework. Bummer.
Summer was different. My mother worked, and so did the mothers of most of my friends. That meant that from Memorial Day to Labor Day my brother and I were on our own, to do exactly as we pleased. There were no cell phones then, so as long as we weren’t caught doing something obviously illegal, nobody cared what we did.
Westville was a good place to grow up. Aside from Route 1, there wasn’t much traffic, and you were never more than five minutes, by bike, from open countryside. Pat and I lived on our bicycles, and if we couldn’t get there on two wheels, we didn’t get there.
Houses weren’t air-conditioned then — well, at least ours wasn’t — so we didn’t stay indoors much. Boys our age certainly didn’t want to spend their summer vacations watching game shows and soap operas, anyway. Nobody had even heard of a computer or a video game.
We played basketball on a hoop nailed to a utility pole in our street. We played softball in the empty lot next to our house. There was no public pool, but there were several mine ponds filled with cold, clear spring water. One had a rope tied to the limb of a tree, so we’d swing out, Tarzan style, and plunge in. It was thrilling, refreshing, and just dangerous enough to be interesting.
All the boys had BB guns or pellet guns. We’d shoot cans, birds, and sometimes, just for the fun of it, each other. I still don’t know why someone wasn’t blinded. We would “play Army” almost every day. I must have killed 50,000 sinister Nazis, and 100,000 blood-thirsty Japanese snipers.
I was always building something. I made primitive go-carts out of scrap lumber and discarded lawnmower wheels. I made toy boxes. We converted a dilapidated tool shed into a club house.
Nowadays, I don’t even like climbing a tall ladder, but back then, we’d climb 30- and 40-foot trees, drop a rope down, then hoist boards needed to build tree houses. The view was wonderful, and I always imagined myself up in the crow’s nest of a clipper ship, looking out to sea.
We would walk up and down the alleys, looking for pop bottles and beer bottles. They could be redeemed for 2 cents each. For 10 cents, we could buy a cold Coke at Vacketta’s Store; for a nickel, we could buy a vanilla root beer at Susie’s Drug Store.
We were active, imaginative and resourceful kids. We’d look up at clouds, explore the woods, go fishing and sometimes even ride the Bee-Line bus into Danville.
It was fun. Summertime seemed to go on, and on. We hated to see it end, and we dreaded the start of yet another year of pencils, books and teacher’s dirty looks.
Danville native Kevin Cullen is a former Commercial-News reporter. Reach him at irishhiker@aol.com.
