Some pleasant summer memories before the video game era

By Jeff Orvis

The first of August. It's a time when kids are probably dreading heading back to school, even as they wake up each day wondering how they will fill the time and not be bored. Parents meanwhile are counting the days until their little darlings are placed in the capable hands of educators, so that for a few hours each day at least, curing boredom won't be the parents' problem.

Through the magic of way too many TV channels and reruns, I have rediscovered “The Waltons.” For those of you who may not remember 30-40 years ago, it was a show featuring a family of seven children, including an elder son who narrated each episode. The family lived on Waltons Mountain in West Virginia during and after the Great Depression. As the kids grew, their summers were filled with chores, including feeding and tending to some livestock, helping in their father's sawmill or their mother and grandmother with household chores. Free time was spent exploring the wonderful wilderness surrounding the homestead.

Naturally, being involved in the writing business for some years, I gravitated toward John-Boy, the elder son. I didn't have six brothers and sisters, one sister seemed to be enough when I was growing up. But in each episode, as John-Boy remembers different times of his childhood, it stokes the fire of my memory (how's that for fancy description) of what life was like for me way back in the dark ages growing up near the Quad-Cities.

I may be the only person you know who spent some of his formative years living on an estate. Before I started kindergarten, our family moved to an estate that had been developed by a local industrialist and was then the property of Alcoa, where my dad worked. There were two homes on the property. Before you jump to conclusions, let me explain that we didn't live in the 33-room mansion, but in a two-bedroom apartment over a three-car garage. From the attic to the basement, or sub-basement, this brick building had five floors. My bedroom overlooked the mansion and I was probably the only kid in Riverdale Elementary School with a tennis court in my front yard.

Our back yard was bordered by a ravine with thick woods. Over in the corner of the property, was what we called “the dump.” Years before, it was used to dump cement and other building materials from a nearby neighborhood that had been carved out of a farm. More on that neighborhood later.

Alcoa was in charge of general maintenance on the property. That meant that they cut down the diseased Dutch elms and scooped the snow from the drive leading up to the property from the highway. We were in charge of mowing our front and back yards. The tennis court was usable, but it was made out of cement slabs and you had to know how to gauge the bounces when the tennis ball hit the cracks. It was also a great place for yours truly to learn how to ride a bike. I don't remember when that great day came, but I know I was probably the last kid in my class to take those training wheels off the bike!

As I said, my dad worked at Alcoa in the metallurgical testing department and as the plant photographer. Mom stayed home until we reached junior high age. Besides taking good care of the house, she would sometimes go off for a couple of hours, wandering through our woods and bringing home buckets of wild black raspberries. There was probably some mushroom hunting involved at times, but I avoided those things. But Mom made the best jelly out of the berries and I just assumed that everybody had homemade jelly all winter.

For any younger readers out there, I should explain that this was an era before home computers, video games, 100+ channel cable TV or even color TV for that matter. But we looked forward to days like we've experienced around here for the past few weeks. We would finish breakfast, head for the door and Mom wouldn't see us until lunch time. When you have tennis to play, woods to explore, forts to build and sisters to torment, who needs video?

We had our share of wildlife around the house. We might see a deer or two each year, plenty of squirrels and birds and an occasional woodchuck. Why we never encountered a skunk in those woods I'll never know, but I'm eternally grateful! We also had a couple of cats who adopted us. In fact one of those cats led to my biggest mishap in those early years. Our apartment was reached by an outside wooden stairway. One day, I was sitting on the top step and leaned down to pet our cat on the next step. Next thing I knew, I was tumbling head-over-heels down about 14 steps. My sister ran over and just stared at me and I had to growl, “Go get Mom!” Somehow, I was helped up the steps and spent the rest of the day in bed. But I think I was good as new the next day – no broken bones!

When I was in junior high, we had an opportunity to move to a rental house, also owned by Alcoa, that was about a half-mile away. It meant a third bedroom and life closer to a real neighborhood. The final straw came when we began hearing a family of raccoons that had taken up residence in the attic of the apartment.

Life in the neighborhood originally known as “Pleasant Hills” was a different experience. It also gave us an opportunity to become friends with a family that resembled the Waltons, at least in the number of kids running around. But that's another story for the next time.

The point of all of this is if you are a parent or grandparent, there might be great value in jotting down memories of your own childhood. If you came from a stable, loving two-parent family, you were truly blessed. But even if you had your struggles, there had to be some good times to remember. Memories don't cost anything, especially the good ones!