Summer Daze Not Purple Haze

Before a summer job, before a driver’s license, before girls (sort of), was the summer of seventh grade. It was 1969 - the year of Woodstock and the summer of love. If it weren’t for the news coverage I would have missed them both. I did own a pair of button down purple hip hugger bell bottoms but that was as radical as it got in the Carroll household that summer.

My interest that summer was in filling hours of idle time with my friends playing games, eating bad food and wishing we were 17 years old (New Jersey’s painful driving age).

Lacking the ability to text my friends, I would wait until 9 a.m. to phone them because my mother insisted it was improper to call earlier. Eventually I would hook up with my two buddies Gary Costa and Bill Garrabrandt.

A typical day would start with a game of three-way stickball against the wall of a local school. The outcome was predictable because Bill always won but it filled the time which is a theme you will see repeated in this column.

In “the old days” eating lunch out with friends was never considered. Fresh cold cuts from a local deli on a Kaiser roll or the classic peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread were standard lunches that could be hustled at any one of our houses. The three of us could polish off a half gallon of milk in one sitting although Tang was the drink of choice at the Costa home.

Our afternoon routine usually involved a trek for dessert. We might hit the local candy store where thirty cents could buy three Hershey bars. A more adventurous trip would be a bike ride to Howard Johnson’s restaurant which sat in a rest area along the Garden State Parkway. Ho Jo’s as we called it featured 28 flavors of ice cream and a weird mix of travellers and locals. It was a longer ride from home but it filled the time.

Now well fed, we would cruise the nearby Brookdale Park looking for girls. If we came upon a pack of girls (and they always travelled in packs) we would enchant them with our cycling abilities and charm as we rode bicycles with no hands and shouted at them. This mating ritual sometimes led to an invitation to hang out and fill the time until dinner.

None of our families ate dinner at the same time so we could scout the best meal or meals in advance. If Gary’s mother was cooking a great meal we would get ourselves invited. If we got excused from the table quickly, we could score a second dinner at my house an hour later and so on.

I was surrounded by NY Yankee fans so most evenings were spent in someone’s basement or front porch watching the game. A bag of Wise potato chips and a full bottle of Brookdale Soda each would get us through the ninth inning.

A ten o’clock curfew meant I rarely saw the end of any Yankee games because the Mets dominated the television in my house. I’d then finish off the day with a bowl of cereal and some Johnny Carson with the folks.

Then it was off to bed - satisfied that I had filled the time in more summer day.