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Summer Memories: Adults reminisce about childhood days of fishing, lightning bugs, kiddie pools
Journal Graphic by Nicholas Weir
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Published: June 30, 2008
Updated: 06/30/2008 12:55 am
From the vantage point of today, it's hard to imagine adults looking on unconcerned as kids run to immerse themselves in a cloud of DDT.
That's why Rhonda Scales, 51, prefaced her recounting of a favorite summer memory with "this is going to sound weird."
After supper on a summer evening, she said, six or eight kids would gather in the front yard of her grandparents' house on 11½ Street to play. About the time the street lights flickered on, one of the kids would call out, "The bug man is coming! The bug man is coming!"
All the kids would look, and sure enough, here he came -- the man driving a truck spraying a cloud laden with the pesticide.
Nobody knew about the hazards of DDT for humans in those days, she said. All they knew was that the cloud smelled sweet and felt cool to the skin.
"We would be running around and dancing in that cloud of pesticide," she said.
They would stay in it as long as they could, going back to what they had been doing only after it had dispersed.
The other day, I poked around such places as Thruway Shopping Center and the fishing pier at Salem Lake asking people about fond memories of summer as a kid. Scales was one of a number of people willing to play.
Rebecca Bobbitt, 46, who grew up in Elkin, said that she and her best friend had so much fun that they didn't want the days to end.
"Our mothers would get angry trying to get us to come back in of an evening," she said.
She reeled off a raft of pleasant memories -- lightning bugs, hopscotch, club houses in the woods, parents sitting under trees to stay cool, playing cowboys and Indians in the swell cowgirl outfit that her grandmother gave her.
When Bobbitt mentioned home-churned ice cream, her friend Lara Overby, 36, interjected that, when she was a kid, the adults were likely to ruin it by adding peaches or some other fresh fruit.
"Oh, fruit in my ice cream!" she said with the same tone people use when saying, "yuck."
In her book, plain vanilla with perhaps a dollop of Hershey's chocolate syrup was the way to go. Her satisfying, peach-free memories include swinging on the swing that looked like a horse in her backyard, horsing around with her grandfather and cooling off in the plastic kiddie pool.
For Marvin McBride, 51, summers meant the sense of freedom brought by riding his bicycle down Green Street. Looking back from a present in which he needs a job, he said he really appreciates the no-bills-to-pay aspect of summer as a kid.
Marantha Long, 28, especially loved that first day after school got out when she could look forward to a string of days ahead before she had to go back. A scoop of vanilla ice cream in a sugar cone would make the day even better.
When David McGill said that his fondest memories included picking tomatoes and cucumbers, I checked to make sure he hadn't misunderstood the question. Not at all.
"You got paid by the basket," he said.
It wasn't much, McGill said, but it taught him a lot about responsibility, and the spending money in his pocket meant freedom. He lived in South Carolina in those days, and, on Saturdays, his grandfather would take him fishing along the Black River. They might start at 7 a.m. and not come back home until 7 p.m.
"There wouldn't be that much talking, just fishing," McGill said. "That was fine with me."
On the other side of the Salem Lake pier, Dennis Cunningham, 25, was adding one more layer to his memories of his favorite summer time activity -- fishing.
"You get peace of mind while you're having fun at the same time," Cunningham said.
He grew up fishing at Salem Lake with his father and siblings. This particular morning had a touch of sadness to it for him. Ordinarily, his father, Dennis Cunningham, would have been there with him, but cancer had put him in the hospital.
For Antwonne Newsome, 36, just the fact that he was out of school made every summer day great.
"It was like being off the whole summer from work," he said.
His favorite summer memories revolve around a group of about eight boys that did most things together, including going crabbing and fishing and spending time at the local boys club, where they would shoot pool, play flag football and dodge ball, and go on field trips.
Newsome, who had hit the pier after he got off third shift at Reynolds Tobacco Co., was busy helping his 7-year-old son, Dante, establish his own memories.
"He's having a ball," Newsome said.
For Dante, catching eight fish to his father's three was a sweet bonus.
"He's beating me pretty bad," Newsome said.
■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.
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