This week marks the end of summer vacation for the schools around here. Some have already started and the rest will be going full strength on Tuesday. It seems a little early to me; back in the day, school started the day after Labor Day. So these final two weeks were the last gasp of summer freedom.
A slight panic set in there were things to do, the last sandlot baseball game needed to be played or that last bike ride down to the Lackawanna Pool for that glorious chlorine tinged dip of the summer just to name a couple. OMG, just about now, I remembered that there was a book report due the first day of school and I haven’t turned a page yet. On top of all that, there is a trip downtown looming to buy clothes for school. Not that we had much of a choice with the school uniforms being required. Still we had to go get fitted for our white shirts and navy blue trousers. The required ties needed to be bought unless the ones we used last year are still serviceable. Due to a recent summer growth spurt, I sometimes had to switch from a Windsor knot to a four in hand to allow enough length to the tie to reach my belt.
It was this time of the year that I had to give up my summer job, usually a paper route to make time for school and homework. This didn’t make for a happy time for the route managers who needed to find new carriers or throw the routes himself. So his “vacation” was ending too. He tried wheedling and cajoling us to stay on. “You can still get up at 4 AM and throw your routes before school,” he’d explain. But fortunately our parents knew better and insisted that we quit for the school year. To their credit, every route manager I had understood and did not take it out on us that we were quitting. Besides, he needed us or our younger brothers next summer. Hmm… I never thought of there being a gender bias in newspaper circulation but I never ran into a girl paper carrier back then.
Despite summer jobs and all the fun activities the thing I would miss was the down time with nothing to do but read or lie out under the tree in the tall green grass in the back yard with my transistor radio. I would tune back and forth between WPDQ and WAPE listening for my favorite tunes. Sounds of Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and the Everly Brothers always drifted from that tinny 2 inch speaker as I watched the clouds build up in the tropical blue sky until they reached critical mass and the 3 PM thundershower would drive me to the back porch. In the early afternoon, I would always listen to “Dan’s Dusty Disks” on WAPE. Dan always played “Solid Gold” records, the songs that have disappeared from the charts a couple of years ago. Back in those days, I though Dan was coming live from that Orange Park studio, much later I discovered that Dan’s show was pre-recorded and the tapes bicycled between the Brennan stations; WAPE in Jacksonville, WBAM in Montgomery, Alabama and WFLI in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “Dan’s Dusty Disks” was my favorite show. I guess I was into oldies even back then.
There was also a sense of anticipation to the final days of summer. Soon with school starting there would be football games, running with the cross-country team, band practice and the fall social season. There would be more parties and dances, a few final trips down to the beach or the lake with classmates before the weather got too cool to enjoy the water. It was time to meet new classmates that would be joining us in the classroom. And, because we were All-American Boys; it was time to check out the new girls in school, even as the girls who were already in our class were checking out the new boys in town. There were very few of us who were in a committed dating relationship, and many of them changed during the summer. For the rest of us, it was “playing the field.”
Although I hated homework as much as the next kid, I loved learning new stuff; fractions, trigonometry, algebra, physics, chemistry and biology were all fun to me. Today, these are called STEM but back then they were fun. I get amused when I see those Internet memes that say that one never uses this stuff today; I use them almost daily in my life, just not in a formal, academic way. I contend that EVERYBODY does. You say “No Way” my response is “Yes Way!” Consider this; you are driving down the street at 35 MPH when the light turns yellow in front of you. You push the brake pedal and start slowing down. You increase of decrease the pressure on the brake in order to stop at the position you want on the road. How does your brain know how much pressure to place? What it is doing is using trigonometry to estimate the distance to the location and then applying calculus (gasp) to control your deceleration (called the first derivative in mathematics) to determine if more or less deceleration (called the second derivative) is needed to come to a stop where you want. You may not remember how to work fractions, but your brain is a mathematical genius in applied trigonometry and calculus. So don’t sell yourself short!
But I digress!
Left: NAS Jacksonville, Today Those final few days of summer freedom were the sweetest. I never complained that I had nothing to do. There was so much to crowd into these final two weeks before every waking moment would be crammed with school related activity. The last daydreams of the year will be had. Mine were usually related to playing records on the radio or flying one of the Lockheed P-3 Orions that was turning from their downwind leg to the base leg in the pattern overhead. They were headed for runway 10 at NAS Jacksonville next to the St. Johns River a couple of miles down Roosevelt Avenue. Looking back, one of the joys of my senior days is that I’ve realized both of those daydreams. True I never landed a P3 at NAS JAX but I have flown a brown and tan colored V-Tailed Bonanza with my dad and brother aboard through that downwind leg of that pattern right over that same back yard where I once lay gazing at the airplanes overhead. We were en-route under Navy Air Control to Herlong Field on the Westside, from the Daytona Beach International Airport. That’s close enough! Oh MY!
No comments:
Post a Comment