Summer Vacation

My mom was fond of calling us little animals, and like little animals, we didn't need calendars or watches to tell time. We had what were called "cirkidian cycles" to keep us regular. 

Calendars might  say that the first day of Summer began on June 21st, but we kids knew better. Summer officially began when our family went out to Dove's Candies to celebrate good report cards at the end of the school year. From the moment the bell on the door rang as you entered, you knew you were in an honest to goodness ice cream parlor; everything was trimmed in stainless steel, including the little water cups with the paper inserts. And the air smelled like homemade chocolate, much like I imagined Willy Wonka's factory smelled. In fact, Dove ice cream bars were invented at this Chicago shop in 1956. (The rest of the country didn't get them until 1985. )

 It was a great way to start the summer.

The clock might say that the end of the summer day came at about 9:30 in the evening, but we kids knew better.  The official end of the day came when the street lights came on. And we found many ways to occupy ourselves during the hours before then. If you didn't have a pool of your own,  you might go swimming at the nearby firehouse pool on 60th Steet. The YMCA had a pool, as well as summer sports leagues and arts and crafts. Little league, scouting, family vacations...there were all kinds of things to do to keep busy and avoid your mom giving you housework.

Sometimes you just stayed home and played with the neighbors. You would go to your friends house and in a sing songy way yell,

"Yo Kathy ! (or whoever)" through their screen door to call them out for fun. Legos, Barbies, board games, ...we spent hours being creative because nobody had invented  playstations yet. Heck, we didn't even have deluxe lego sets. Sometimes a group of neighborhood kids would get together and play games such as kick the can, red rover and a game called statue maker, in which you were flung across the lawn and became a statue in whatever position you landed in. I have reason to believe that this game was made up solely as an excuse to fling people. We were big on things that involved flinging people.

As we got older, we took the bus to Comiskey park to watch the White Sox, or maybe we took the bus to Oak Street beach because back then it was safe to let kids do that. Or, maybe our parents, having seen us fight amongst ourselves,  knew that we could take care of each other in times of trouble.

The fall equinox, or end of summer, comes at the end of September, but we kids knew better. Summer officially came to an end with the St. Nicks school carnival at the end of August. It wasn't a big carnival, but it did have games and rides and a beer garden and whatever else you could fit in a parking lot and down the alley.

The carnival was a big deal to us kids because we got see our school friends that we might not have seen all summer. More importantly, the school carnival was often the first time you got to see which of your friends had grown boobs over the summer. Or grown a mustache. Or both. And since everyone's parents were working the carnival, it was often an unsupervised night of funnel cakes and tilt-a-whirl for the rest of us. Little animals following pheromones, and maybe a little beer?

And at the end of the summer, everyone agreed that this was the best summer yet and it couldn't get any better than this. But we kids knew better.