Personal History - (Almost) All Good Fun

What did your family do for fun when you were a child?

Going to the park
Playgrounds meant great fun - climbing, swinging, kicking and tumbling. A playground had been built almost across the street from us, and we went there. The monkey bars at Washington Elementary School beckoned every recess (and we did have significant amounts of recess back then.)

A park downtown, called Liberty Park, was also a place we loved to go. It had a lot more space to run around, and great playgrounds.

Lagoon
The closest amusement park to Salt Lake City couldn't compare to Disneyland, but we didn't care. Lagoon had the coolest haunted houses that I could almost tolerate (my tolerance for horror of any kind was notoriously low from a young age), and the best roller coasters (I remember the Wild Mouse ride, that felt like it would dump me out every time it turned the corner), and the World War I flying ace ride (I always tried to get the Sopwith Camel, like Snoopy's plane), and a swimming pool that seemed to stretch out forever.

The last time I went back there, I'd just turned twelve, and the years didn't make any difference. It was still super fun (and the boys were much cuter as well). Actually going to Disneyland later in life still didn't change my mind about this place. The local carnivals have a charm of their own that the mega parks can't match.

Television
Mostly our entertainment consisted of our little black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears and the tinfoil, that eventually grew into the color TV with the rabbit ears and the tinfoil. Eventually just the TV remained.

The problem with TV consisted in the ephemeral nature of the shows - you had to live your life around the television, instead of the other way around. When the TV Guide showed up with the schedule of all the shows, I would sit with it and circle when each show came on, and what time I had to be there. If you weren't there, you missed the show, and no replay existed. It was just gone.

This was most tragic around Christmastime, when A Charlie Brown Christmas came around. Nothing, and I mean nothing, interfered with Charlie Brown shows, and the Christmas one was most sacred. The years I missed the show, for one reason or another, were so sad. As soon as video came along, I figured out how to record that show, and I never missed it again. :-)

Visiting Linda Shirts and her kids
The Shirts family emerged first in my consciousness as people I knew outside my home. My mother and Linda grew to be best friends (and still are friends, even today). Their similarity to us drew us together, I think...we were both young families, either mostly boys or in Linda's case, all boys. We played together a lot at their house, just down the street from ours.

They had a chain-link fence, and a wonderful horse chestnut tree in the front yard. You couldn't walk barefoot in their front yard when the horse chestnuts fell, because their husk grew some wicked spines that would poke your feet. But we would pick them on purpose, not waiting for them to fall, and pry them open and pull out the horse chestnut, which was like a beautiful brown and smooth stone, like the color of a horse.

I don't remember ever roasting them or eating them, but I loved to collect them in my shirt and just run my fingers through them over and over. Very soothing feeling.


Bikes
My best Christmas ever was the bike Christmas. There is no feeling in the world like getting transportation with a big ribbon on it, that's yours.

It took a couple more years to learn to ride it, since I was afraid of falling over. The seat was too tall for me, and my feet couldn't reach the ground, but I was too afraid to tell my dad about that. So I waited until I was taller. While I waited, I would sit down on the metal part in the middle, and push myself around with my feet.

There was a big parking lot down the street, near where the Conference Center in Salt Lake sits now, that had a little bit of an incline and we could go around in circles. My brothers, who could already ride their bikes, would ride around and around in circles, and I would ride more slowly behind them, gradually getting used to the speed, always keeping my feet ready to hit the ground in case I lost control.

I was not about to fall off that bike, and I never did.


Movies - Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi
I shared my dad's love of movies, and he taught me in the ways of the nerd.

When I was six, we went to see a new movie called Star Wars. We arrived at the movie theater in downtown Salt Lake, and the line of people waiting to get in circled around the block. I'd never seen anything like it before - but I was six, and I didn't get to go to the movies much.

We waited in the line, and I marveled. Once we got to the ticket booth, the ticket person told my dad all the tickets were sold. We had to come back again. Disappointing in the extreme.

We did come back again, and Star Wars was amazing.  Couldn't wait to see the sequels when they came out, and my dad took us to see each one. The first trilogy film that I remember, and when...I won't spoil the ending if there DOES happen to be a human being on Earth remaining who hasn't seen these movies yet...the climactic end of Return of the Jedi came, the crowd whopped and yelled and applauded. I was sixteen, and I'd never seen a reaction like that from a movie before. Never seen its equivalent since.

Swimming - near-drowning
We loved to swim at the Wasatch Gym - I think that's what it was called. A heavy smell of chlorine filled the air that I associated strongly with that place. We could smell it every time we walked or drove by that place.

I almost drowned there a couple of times when very young - saved on both occasions by my dad. My fear of underwater noises, combined with my fear of the ocean after watching Jaws at age six - made it several more years before I successfully learned to swim, but we always loved water, and playing in the shallow end.