Remembering Southern Summers Gone By

Ever wonder what summers were like for kids before organized camps and endless activities? Take a trip back to the mid-20th century for a nostalgic look at the magic of rural summers in the South.

In my younger days, summer didn’t begin when the weatherman declared a new season. Nor did it start with opening day of Little League baseball or some other sport.

Summer, for me, began at precisely 3:10 pm on the last day of school.

Teachers cleared the halls at the moment the bell rang to prevent their demise in the stampede. Books were lost in the melee. Old tests were thrown to the air like confetti.

Anyone outside would have thought a plague of locusts was loosed on the building had they not known we were all rushing toward three months of unfettered freedom.

Part of what made this freedom so special was that parental attitudes were different back then

Usually, we were nudged out the door each morning simply to get us out from underfoot. Also, it was understood that once we crossed that threshold, we were responsible for ourselves. 

One of our routine pastimes was a day spent on and in the creek.

The woods started at my backyard, and all I had to do to reach the creek was to walk downhill through the trees.

My cousin was usually my accomplice on these exploits, and we could entertain ourselves for most of a day on a stream less than ten feet wide. 

The first step was to get out of our Keds sneakers and into the water. Once the cold became less noticeable, we began flipping rocks.

We didn’t realize how much we were learning in the process, but you can discover a lot about a creek by looking under stones.

Salamanders skittered away and only quick, small hands could capture them. Crawfish flared their pinchers at us and scooted backwards. Small black insects scooted across the bottoms of the rocks, and now I know them to have been mayflies.

Eventually, rocks would get chucked into pools to splash one or the other of us. By then, the trip was unraveling, and we would find another exploit to spend the afternoon drying out.

When we wanted to fish, we could walk a mile to the stream that ran through town

Trout and suckers were the primary fish, and their bites were memorably different. Trout bit like they were pecking at the bait; suckers made your line vibrate.

To prepare for a fishing trip, we would each leave our porch lights on overnight to attract bugs. Then, in the morning before the trip, we’d go out with jars and catch whatever had come to the light. White moths were the best bait, and you could count on a trout if you had a few of these.

Sometimes, we would supplement our bait with crickets caught in the yard. To do this, we would water a patch of grass and lay a piece of cardboard over it, holding the cardboard in place with a rock. The crickets would crawl underneath while we were gone, and we would later flip back the cardboard and grab them.

As the summer wore on, we would sometimes organize pickup baseball games

One of the older boys would go to another neighborhood and issue a challenge. Then, we would gather up our teams and meet in an empty field nearby.

The ground was never smooth enough to make grounders easy to catch, so our best hopes of getting outs were from fly balls.

The games would go on until we had to break for supper, and the scores would be close to thirty runs apiece. We never stopped based on the number of innings, just the time of day.

The highlight of my summer was our annual trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina

Living in the mountains made a trip to the beach feel like entering a foreign land.

Dad and I fished all week, hoping to put enough flounder in the freezer to last until the following summer. And each year, we would catch fish we had never caught before or see sights so memorable that I recall them still.

One of my favorite fish to catch was a blow toad.

Before letting them go, we would rub their bellies until they expanded close to popping, then set them on the water and watch them float away. They would eventually deflate and swim off.

Or if we caught a croaker, we would hold it to our ears and listen to it grunt.  One year, the inlet we fished was full of sea robins that looked like a type of flying fish. You couldn’t keep them off your hook.

And each year something unusual would grab our baits, take off and we would not even see what we had hooked. The fish would swim toward the ocean and eventually break off, leaving us to speculate if it had been a ray, a sea turtle,or a whale.

The week at the beach came in July, so returning home also brought the realization that summer was close to half over

With that in mind, we would begin to schedule events to make sure we got them in before summer vacation was gone.

One of my favorites was the water balloon fight in my yard.  

We would fill a washtub full of water balloons and set them in the middle of an open area. Each of us would start with what we could hold, and then to get more you had to rush in and grab them from the tub.  

At that point, you were an easy target for everyone else. I never recall anyone going home less than totally soaked.

By the time August rolled around, the heat drove us to find shade in the afternoons.

My cousin and I often spent hours playing chess on a cool porch. Chess was a popular game among our fathers, and both my cousin and I wanted to become skilled enough to compete with them.

Our porch was made of smooth stones that held the cool night temperatures as if air conditioned, so more often than not, you could find us stretched out on these stones staring at the pieces on the game board. We would get so absorbed in our chess games that the afternoons slipped away without notice.

Looking back, I now realize how educational our summers had been

As the summer neared an end, just like the ringing of the school bell that set us free, another alarm let us know that school was approaching once again.

That was when our mothers announced that the next day we would be shopping for school clothes. As soon as we heard that, we knew summer was over.

But by then, we had squeezed every ounce of pleasure from the season.