Being musically inclined, I associate many times in my life with specific songs. Summer is resplendent with such notable songs (pun intended.) Here are but a few examples:
Mungo Jerry: "In the summertime, when the weather is hot...."
George Gershwin: "Summertime, and the livin' is easy...."
Nat King Cole: "Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer...."
The Jamies: "It's summertime, summertime, sum sum summertime...."
The Lovin' Spoonful: "Hot town, summer in the city...."
Seals & Crofts: "Summer breeze, makes me feel fine...."
I could go on, but usually when I go on like this I totally forget what I was talking about in the first place. I just chalk it up to a flare-up of CRS. The music of summer is second only to the music of Christmastime in my mind. Since Christmas happens in the winter, and I increasingly dislike winter, summer songs rule! I spent many, many hours as a kid listening to Top 40 AM radio, faithfully reproduced in low fidelity by the tiny speaker in my very own transistor radio. It ran on a 9-volt battery and had five transistors! Since the computer you are using to read this has a processor with the equivalent of at least one million transistors, my 1960s-era radio was like a stone ax to a caveman - simple, but it got the job done.
Think back to when you were a kid - say, 11 or 12 years old. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Oops, wait a second - I should have told you read all of the directions first, and then think back, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Do that now, please. The memory of summer when you are young offers a feeling that you just don't forget. It is sight and sound and smell and taste of summers long gone. They are the ghosts of summers past.
Most kids of my generation probably have memories of summer similar to mine. The days were new unstructured, unscheduled adventures unfolding each morning. I remember the smell of summer mornings, the sound of birds singing, that feeling of freedom from school, homework, and just about any of the responsibilities that plague us now as adults. We might have had chores, but other than that - just sweet, sweet freedom. We found things to do everyday, and seldom whined that we were bored.
Some years I went to Boy Scout camp for a week in June. That was the only structured activity I encountered most summers. The Boy Scout summer camp of 1972 will forever live in infamy. That was the year Hurricane Agnes brought torrential rains to my part of the world. It rained most of the week, and by Thursday water was flowing though our tents like miniature rivers. Friday night, the five remaining campers from our troop, along with the scoutmaster, spent the night in the scoutmaster's Volkswagen Beetle. As you can imagine, it was not an enjoyable experience, and our Boy Scout training to that point had not fully prepared us for such circumstances. When my dad took me home the next day, I helped him put our downstairs furniture on makeshift sawhorses and concrete blocks in preparation for the impending river flood. The water came up two feet into the first floor of our home in June of 1972. While it was memorable, it was really not enjoyable.
I recall that I read a lot of Hardy Boys books one summer, though I don't remember how old I was. My friend's father had a huge collection of Hardy Boy books that he collected as a kid, and he would let me borrow them, a few at a time. One summer, I got through them all. Each was a fun, quick read with familiar characters that I got to know as friends. It was the literary equivalent of binge-watching shows on Netflix today.
Some days were spent riding bicycles, leisurely exploring the island I grew up on. Before you ask, it wasn't an exotic tropical island. It was, and still is, an island in the Ohio River. For a kid on a bike though, it was full of cool places that many adults didn't know about and certainly couldn't access by car. It was magical!
There is one summertime experience that will live forever in my fondest memories. It was the Thomas Joyland Shows. Thomas Joyland Shows was a traveling carnival that made summertime stops all over West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and I'm sure other states, too. It had rides, sideshows, carnival food and carnival games. I would save up pocket change for months to spend at the carnival, and my mom or dad might give me a few bucks to sweeten the pot. You could do a lot at Thomas Joyland with just a little bit of cash when you were 11 years old.
Besides the great carnival foods (I had my first corn dog there,) Thomas Joyland had sideshows. Real live sideshows! Some were not geared towards kids my age. Some, however, had universal appeal. I remember how exciting the barker made the rats from the sewers of Paris sound. "Step right up and see the largest RATS in the world, LIVE from the sewers of Paris, France!" Each time I heard it, the word 'rat' just jumped from the barker's mouth like the staccato crack of a gun report! How could I not see the world's largest RATS?
My buddy and I each paid 25 cents to go into the tent housing France's finest vermin. That would be like spending $1.50 today, so it was a handsome sum to see Parisian rodents. Oh, the anticipation! Since I lived on an island in the Ohio River, we sometimes saw what we referred to as river rats. They seemed pretty big to us, but RATS from the City of Lights would surely dwarf them all and live in our nightmares forever!
We paid our money at the booth and got our tickets. The worker at the entrance to the tent silently and solemnly took the ticket from our hands. We walked inside the tent. The air was heavy, with an almost supernatural vibe you could almost see. There in front of us was a large wooden pen with walls over four feet high! It had to be that high to contain the vicious, snarling, hideous creatures imprisoned within. We walked up to the wall and peered inside. There they were, in all their glory, on a bed of wood shavings. As advertised, they were HUGE! They were as big as a lot of the dogs my friends owned. Heck, they were as big as my dachshund! Wow!
Well, maybe they weren't the size of a German shepherd. What really surprised me was the fact that the world's largest rats from the sewers of Paris were so colorful. They resembled enormous guinea pigs, with some black and white ones and some orange-brown ones. They just sort of lied around, not moving. We knew they were alive because we could see them breathing. I don't think we would run screaming from the tent if one managed to escape. We could easily outrun one. Heck, we would have out crawled one! What a disappointment - no nightmarish vermin here. I have since discovered that these were likely cuy guinea pigs or something similar. Here is a link to some information on cuy guinea pigs: http://www.laguineapigrescue.com/cuy-reports-and-sightings.html
One year I did win a treasured prize by defeating one of those vile, rigged carnival games at Thomas Joyland. I don't remember in which game my victory was won, but I do recall the glorious prize my skillful hand secured. It was a sword! Well, it was a little sword, maybe about four inches long. It had a glossy enameled cobalt blue handle, and came with a genuine vinyl scabbard, or more accurately, a paper-thin vinyl sheath. It was beautiful to my pre-adolescent male eyes. It was actually a letter opener, but since I didn't get much mail back then, to me it was a tiny sword!
My mom was never an 11-year-old boy, and could not comprehend the significance of a fine quality weapon of this caliber to a young male entering adolescence. So, like many things that my mother deemed unsavory or dangerous, it mysteriously disappeared one day, never to be seen again. However, it will live forever as another ghost of summers past.
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