:) Times have changed. My oldest brother (I have 4) is 15 years older than I and he spent most of the summer working for a neighbor helping in a big, big garden (pulling weeds, harvesting, and helping sell Tomatoes). When I came along, my

"paying job" was taking care of a couple of neighbor's dogs while they were on

vacation. I spent a lot of time horseback riding, roller skating, etc. I didn't work much, I guess. One of my brothers spent the summer with a relative that had

a big farm and worked pretty hard, but loved every minute. At 9, I had several

girlfriends nearby and we played paper dolls, cards, etc. too.

Continued...;) I did have household chores that I had to do...dust, help with dishes,

pretty easy stuff I guess.

I live in the hot, humid south. I have a younger sister and we were inseparable! We would play barbies, or put on tutus and dance around. We looked forward to being out of school just so we could play together. Then, summer would come and we would say to each other, what do you want to do? I don't know, what do you want to do? We'd ride bikes or skate, walk to the convenience store and buy penny bubble gum. Lots of times, we'd play with the neighborhood kids and they loved sports. Football, baseball, basketball, you name it.

Every weekend, our mom would take us to Rawlings Country Club. teehee! Why is it funny? It wasn't a country club. It was just a couple of pools in the hills of Joelton and they were fed with spring water. Talk about ice cold! We'd take a lunch there and have teriyaki steak on the grill. Sister would be a big ol' chicken all day long until, five minutes before time to go would finally slide down the long slide, wondering why she waited all day long to do it? Or jump into the deep end of the pool off the diving board. Mr. Rawlings was really cool though. He fell out of a plane in the military and survived it! His parachute didn't open, but he curled up in a ball and only broke his hip.

Late in the evening, we'd know it was time to come home and we'd play on our walkway until we had to go in. Other times, we'd catch lightning bugs at my grandmother's house, and put them in a jar with holes poked in the lid. Along with all our cousins. Grandmother (Beulah) liked to have cookouts and picnics, so we did that a lot, and saw a lot of our cousins.

Summer was lazy, hot fun!

The Rawlings

actual picture of the actual pool. Which doesn't exist any more.

What a great project. She can follow inventions then and now. The telephone, television, computers, and as Rob mentions above the way children play.

We never had playdates. Just went outside and shouted your friend's name under their window!

I remember sitting by the telephone waiting for a phone call. Or, getting mixed signals when arranging to meet someone and there was no way to figure out what happened.

We only saw movies in a theater. I remember when they introduced PayTV. Who thought that would catch on?

Well, "way back when"--for me--was the 80s, and Summer meant being outside from sun up to sun down (and after dark, too, to play Ghost in the Graveyard!), going inside only to eat and go to the bathroom. My best friend, Sarah, lived up the street from me, and it was a given that she'd show up at my house or I'd show up at hers, knock on the door, and say, "Wanna ride bikes?" So, we'd ride bikes for a while, break for a snack or to use the bathroom, then back outside to continue riding bikes or to go exploring in the woods or to roller skate (one time we even set up a "lemonade stand on skates" with our boy best friend counterparts, Matt and Jeff, where we delivered lemonade to people's doors!) SO much fun!!

I grew up in the 60s in upstate NY in a typical neighborhood. Every morning, bright and early, my sister and I and the neighborhood girls would walk to the playground where they had a recreational program. At 8 am they'd take us to the lake on a school bus for swimming lessons (which cost a quarter) and we'd get into the icy cold water and practice blowing bubbles and doing the dog paddle. On the ride back to the playground, we'd sing 99 Bottles of Beer on The Wall. We'd spend the rest of the morning playing checkers, doing craft projects like making lanyard keychains, and playing croquet.

We'd go home for lunch and then spend all afternoon in our pool. It was a small pool, great for making whirlpools with the help of the neighborhood kids. We'd also pretend we were Weeki Wache mermaids. I don't know how we knew about Weeki Wache mermaids but it's an underwater show with women swimmers wearing a mermaid tail. When we were done swimming, we'd lay all the lawn chairs on their sides and cover them with towels and blankets and make a fort. We also rode our bikes alot. Our favorite destination was a cul de sac street that we called the circle sidewalk, and we loved going round and round it on our bikes.

After dinner we'd go down to the Little League field, not to watch the game but to buy bubble gum cigars and Lik-M-Aid candy at the concession stand. We'd play in the woods until the game ended, then go home and catch lightening bugs or play Hide n' Seek. Sometimes we'd sleep outside, not in a tent but in sleeping bags right on the lawn, which was a nice treat for the mosquitoes. Under the cover of darkness, we'd sneak over to another neighbor's and steal cherries from her tree. I'm sure if we asked she'd let us have some but that never occurred to us.

We didn't go on vacation because there were five kids but for special outings we went out for ice cream, which was soft serve and called custard on the east coast. We'd go to the Catskill Game Farm and see the animals. We always went to the county fair, which had a lot of rides and carnival games. If you ever go on the Scrambler, make sure the bigger person sits on the outside of the car. I learned that the hard way as my big sister slammed against me repeatedly and I thought the ride would never end. We were allowed to get either a cotton candy or a candy apple and it was always hard to choose.

I hated to see summer end, but I loved getting my new back-to-school clothes, shoes, and lunch box.

Our town had a large public pool in one of the city parks. Every summer our parents would buy a family pass, and the four kids, or at least the three boys would spend much of the day down at the pool nearly all summer. One summer I remember the city raised the price for the family pass from something like $35 to $75, which my father felt was an unreasonably large increase, so he decided he'd show them and not get a pass that year.

That lasted about a week. My mother went to him with an ultimatum saying : "I don't care what it costs. You are going down to the pool and buying a pool pass. Right. Now."

mayflower brought back another memory in another lifetime. Where we lived in California, they had summer school for kids that was free. But it wasn't school. You could learn how to dance ballet, or explore tidal pools on the coast. It was really different than hot lazy fun. Very interesting and productive. My sister couldn't do those things with me since she was only 1-5 years old.

I was her age in the 1950's. I remember being told every day, go outside and play (I was an only child). Had two best friends next door, a boy a little younger, a girl a little older; we did everything together. In the summer, in Seattle, we'd go to Green Lake to swim or play in the kiddie pool. We'd go to Alki Beach (also right in the city) where I learned to swim in the chilly waters of Puget Sound. We spent hours running through the sprinkler on sunny days. I remember lots of bike riding in the neighborhood, playing in the shade of the treed lots we lived on, picking fruit from the Italian Prune trees, the raspberry bushes and apple trees, all warm from the sun. Sometimes we'd go to Bible camp for a week, which I detested, all except for the snacks, lol. Once in a while we'd get to go to the Woodland Park Zoo.

When we were a little older, there was an outdoor trampoline park (a business) that was close enough to ride our bikes to. Not so much concern with safety in those days - but I never knew anyone to get hurt. We loved when we got old enough to be able to ride our bikes all the way to Green Lake on our own - several miles, I believe, in the city, on the sidewalks. We'd have a packed lunch, ride to the park, eat and then ride home. We were probably 9-11 years old between us. We'd go to a movie matinee sometimes, which was a big treat.

Seems like one of our moms would always have KoolAid or frozen homemade popsicles (did they make them with KoolAid, maybe?) I can't even imagine drinking that stuff now.

Yes, Olychick, Kool-Aid Popsicles. The Good Humor man would also come around.

Ran loose through the neighborhood, playing with neighborhood kids. Ran in the sprinklers, barefoot all the time. Dug in the yard, making a river flowing down hill. Walked to the local swimming pool, stopped at the "little store" on the way. Joined the library's reading club for kids. Jumped off the (low) garage roof onto the lawn. My mother, sister and I mowed the lawn with a push mower. It was so hard and so hot, I remember just collapsing in the grass when we finished. I drove by our old house recently; it looks so rundown, was nicer when we were there. Summer seemed endless in those days. There was little or no adult supervision. Mid-1950's.

Mayflowers reminded me, the ice cream truck came around. That was fun!

I grew up in the south, and until I was a little older, we had no a/c. When I was around 9, we would still play outside and I guess it didn't bother us that much. We'd drag out dolls, or whatever, out on the porch, play in the woods (until my Mom declared it off limits in the mid-summer because of snakes), played badminton. We lived in a neighborhood with lots of kids, so we would eventually end up at someone's house and read comic books or just hang out and play cards. On weekends we'd be at the lake usually. My folks almost always had a place on the lake and so did my friends. And of course there was a week of Vacation Bible School at church. If it got really, really hot, we'd get to go to the movies. There was a really sweet couple who owned the theater in town and they catered to the kids. Fifteen cents for a movie in those days, maybe went up to a quarter. And popcorn or candy and a coke as about the same. You could go cheap to a Saturday matinee and cool off and watch a horror flick or western and you were good for a while. I saw GWTW with my Mom there for the first time and Jailhouse Rock with my older cousin where we swooned over Elvis.

After we reached those magic teen years, we would kill to go to the pool. Failing that we'd take a big quilt to the side of the lake and a few friends would play canasta all day. And then we could drive, yay, but hardly anyone had their own car back then.

If I was at home with nothing to do, I'd read, or my mother would keep me busy learning to iron or sew.

My "Way Back When" was in the 50's. I grew up on a farm in the Great Lakes area, so my activities were a bit different than those already described here. There were no neighbors close by, no street lights, so side walks to play on. But I was very good at entertaining myself whenever I had some free time. I did have 'chores' to do twice a day, helping my Dad with the cows and calves. We had a few dairy head, and it was my job to take over the care of the calves when it was time to separate them from their mother, to teach them to drink from a bucket and eat hay and/or grass. Had to clean their pens. I also helped in the fields during harvests. My Mother took care of the gardens, and I helped with that sometimes.

When I was quite young, I had a sandbox to play in, I was very good (I thought) at building farms, etc in the sand. I could spend hours playing in that sandbox! I was also quite good at playing things like cowboys and Indians all by myself. I did have a bicycle, a hand-me-down from my much older sister, that I taught myself to ride. But I could not ride it on the road, so I traveled many miles to many foreign places, just riding up and down our driveway. I loved to read, too, and did a lot of it. There was a lake not too far from our farm, and sometimes on really hot evenings, my dad would drive us down there so I could play in the water for awhile. I never did learn to swim.

I think my still vivid imagination was nourished by my childhood experiences. There was no TV, no telephone (until my early teen years), but we sat as a family and listened to the radio in the evenings. Sunday was always a day of rest. We'd have a nice dinner (not all that much 'rest' for my Mom!), then sit on the front porch and read, or watch whatever traffic there was going by. Sometimes in the summer we played Croquette in the front yard. Life was so-o-o-o different than from what it is now!

Good luck to your 9 YO, Bobbi! I do so hope she finds inspiration among all the varied experiences shared here! I love to see creativity in kids!

Rusty

ETA: Actually, it was the 40's and early 50's.

Oh wow...lots of memories that I had forgotten, too. :) On rainy afternoons, we would go to someone's house, front porch, etc., and play Monopoly or other

board games. Forgot about the ice cream truck coming through every day. I lived

about 4 blocks from the Elementary school..used to play on the playground there

in the summer too, and meet up with other kids. Thanks for the sweet memories

everyone. Funny....never just stayed inside and watched TV unless we were sick,

(or maybe grounded for the day) LOL

My parents never let me just relax. When I was young, I was sent to a day camp. Then I became a counselor there until it closed. After that, it was summer school, followed by a steady babysitting job. When I was 16, I was hired at a clothing store -- my father worked in another branch.

I always envied my friends who could just spend the summer hanging out.

Mayflowers, we had a second home in Saugerties. My DD's grew up going to the ranch down the road from the Catskill Game Farm.

What town are you from?

Went to summer school and did crafts....laniards, potholders, etc. roller skated, played jump rope, king of the hill, red rover, countries, potsy, softball, tag, caught lightening bugs in a jar, and board games....mostly Monopoly. Waited for the Good Humor man to come.

Eld, I grew up in Beacon.

Jillian is so thrilled with your recollections from childhood. Tomorrow, when there is more time, we will go through them thoroughly and she plans to make notes for her novel.

Oh, she says your identities are safe as she'll use fictitious names. lol

ETA - Thank you everyone that took the time to respond.

Community pool, Brennan Pool in Rouge Park, Detroit. Hours roller skating and practicing the hoola hoop, climbing fences and sitting in the raspberry patch and eating our hearts out, that was the best place to hide for hide and seek! Comic book exchanges that one of the parents would organize (she had polio and lived in an iron lung, but was a very involved parent).

If she runs out of topics... lol!... I found this list of questions to ask the relatives. I saved it for my family history book I'm putting together. LINK It's a great time to start asking those questions we all wished we had asked are loved ones when we were growing up. There are different lists out there if you think this one is too grown up.

I enjoyed those memories too! I was a kid in the 60's. Summers were all about free-form fun. Playing outside the house, getting fresh air and sun and exercise, was considered healthy by all the grown-ups. If we didn't keep ourselves busy (and outside a good portion of the day), Mom would "suggest" things like pulling weeds from the lawn or dusting the house, so we quickly learned to not ever say "I'm bored." We were real lucky -- there was a great big vacant lot, about a half-mile square, directly across the street. Part of it was scrubby brush and trees, part was an abandoned cement plant, and our favorite part were the large sandy fields full of cool rocks: petrified wood, obsidian, sandstone, rock roses, all sorts of stuff --free for the taking! There were lizards, rabbits, and once we caught a mouse (rat?) in a bucket! There were ravines and hills for dare-devil bike riding stunts. Mom's only rule was that no one kid could go there alone, there always had to be at least two of us together. That was the best.

I grew up on a farm, so, horses, go carts, baling hay. Our 9 year old takes classes at the library, swims, fishes, plays on her swing set, fills the bird feeders and baths, try to keep her busy!

Such fun memories to read! My siblings and I were voracious readers and spent a lot of the time at the library - partially because it was air conditioned! Our neighbors had a pool and would frequently hang a flag out, letting neighborhood kids know it was okay to come over and swim. When those neighborz were gone to the cabin, they left us in charge of taking care of the pool, and then we could swim as much as we wanted. Woo hoo!

When we were not on vacation with our parents, we spent the entire summer playing with our friends from the street. Games like skipping, hopscotch, red light, red rover, war, etc. We played with our dolls and rode our bikes. Played tennis and marbles, croquet and badminton. Filled our little kiddie pool in the back yard. Played store and restaurant, pretending the leaves were plates and the twigs were french fries. We slept out in our camper in the garden, popped popcorn and listened to the radio. We read on the deck, lid in the grass and looked for four leaf clovers. We ran through the sprinkler, blew bubbles, tried making our own kites and flying them, played with our hula hoops and threw balls back and forth. We caught tadpoles, picked berries, cherries, rhubarb and hazelnuts. Summer as a kid was wonderful!!

My parents divorced when we were very young..........I was under 2 yrs old and my brother was just a few months old. The 3 of us moved in with my grandparents. As kids my brother would spend one month every summer with our 3 cousins who were boys. I'd spend the month with my aunt and uncle who had no kids but raised and bred standardbred horses. I loved my summers, going to the different tracks when they raced, and getting my picture taken in the Winner's circle. When I was older I'd help with the horses hot-walking them, feeding them, etc.