I want to recognize the service of:
My son, James Conner; my brother-in-law, Gene Havens; my cousin, Llewellyn Thomas; my 2nd cousin; Gary Stump Jr.;Mark Quigley and Amy Quigley (they are both part of my Christian Family) and last but not least, two no longer with us, my cousin, Roland Stump, and 2nd cousin, Roger Seguine.
If you know or did know any of these men please take the time to show your appreciation for their contribution in allowing you to have the freedom you enjoy every day.
Now on to what I want to share with you today.
This week's posts are connected even though the events that serve as their individual focus happened 50 years apart.
For "part 1" I'm taking you back to the days of my childhood. Hopefully the recollections and pictures I share with you will spark some happy memories of your own.
For many in the US, each year, Memorial Day is the "unofficial" start of summer.
When you are a kid the first two things summer means to you are: no school for 2 months and the getting to play in the water.
The latter can happen on several different levels. You can do it a water park, at a public pool, a private pool of a friend or relative, or you can do it in your own yard.
When I was a kid, the pool outside Brensinger School was where I spent a lot of hot days during my elementary school days. It's where I took swimming lessons given by the Red Cross.
Until I was 10, I lived in a public housing project on Green Street, in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. It was a decent neighborhood made up mostly of lower to middle income families.
A couple of years ago I went back to see how the old neighborhood was holding up. It still looked the same. Our 3 bedroom unit was the second one going left to right.
I refer to it as a "neighborhood" but it really was a community. All the adults were friends with the other adults (or at least they knew each other well enough to engage in a decent conversation).
On most summer evenings the grown-ups, including my parents,hung out together sitting in lounge chairs just out in front of "the unit" socializing.
The kids, and there were plenty of them, gave everyone a circle of friends and playmates around their own age. Quite frequently on summer evenings, all of us from the oldest to the youngest would get together and play games together. Kickball was our favorite.
During the first 9 summers of my childhood, when, for one reason or another, I couldn't go to Brensinger to swim, cooling off was limited to a playing in a small wading pool, tossing water balloons or getting squirted with a water hose along with the other "project kids."
Our community "water park" was limited to the sector bordered how far the hose could reach. It was the grass in the upper left portion of the picture above. With no fences, of course, it was everybody's front yard.
Although it didn't happen all the time, the most memorable cooling off days occurred when all the kids would show up for a "water battle
Rather than try and describe the sequence typical of one of these soaking situations, I have uploaded a two-minute segment of one of my family's home movies. I believe it's from the summer of 1969 or 70.
There are a lot of kids in this film. I'm not going to try and name every one of them. I don't even remember some of them. But rest assured they were all good friends and part of our neighborhood. I do want to identify a couple of them.
The little girl in the black two piece bathing suit is my 4 year old sister, Shari. The teenage girl in the yellow and green one piece suit is my older sister, Peggy.
Of course the skinny kid in the yellow trunks with black stripes down the side is 9 year old "Ronnie"...that's me. I'm wearing sunglasses in the beginning because of an eye issue I was having that summer.
Throughout these 2 minutes there are multiple "battles" for control of the hose but it was all in good fun.
I recommend that you expand the video to the full screen so you can enjoy it better. Remember it was shot with a Kodak movie camera on Super 8 film over nearly 50 years ago and transferred to a digital format. Hope you enjoy it.
Although after five decades I may be seeing that video through an idyllic filter but I can't help but smile when I do.
So there you have a sample of some of the front yard fun I had back then. As a kid, where did you play in the water?
If the video or my recollections brings back to your mind some of the your favorite summer time moments I'd like to read about them. Just comment on the Facebook post I put up with the link to this blog post.
Come back next time for part 2 of this post when I share with you how my childhood summer experiences helped me create some front yard fun "now". Thanks for reading see you next time.
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