“They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul.” – Author Rick Bragg
If that statement is true, this is the time of year when the porch of many homes is inhabited by slightly cranky old souls. Mine is no different. While society may define us as “middle-aged,” if life was a golf game, we’re well into the back nine, playing from the rough.
And as with most people playing from the rough, we want to improve our lie. Nothing improves one’s lie in life more than a good ole front porch rant about the hard lives we lived to get here. So, pull up a chair to get some schooling.
The other day I overheard some kid whining to his mom at the grocery store about “needing” Gatorade for his workouts.
In our day we didn’t need Gatorade, or Powerade, or energy drinks to hydrate every time we so much as went up a flight of stairs. In high school football “hydration” was drinking from a long hose with holes punched in it hanging from a rusty fence—AFTER practice. Water breaks during practice were for “soft” teams.
By the time we got to college, everyone got so concerned about “liability” and “player safety” that even old school coaches took a break during a three-hour, full contact August football practice. We got Coke breaks. Ten ounces of real sugar and real caffeine in a glass bottle. If America had udders, they would yield unpasteurized pure cane sugar Coca-Cola.
Summertime meant a maintenance job at a golf course for minimum wage.
Back in the days before so many tree-huggers made us separate and recycle cans, we just threw them away. But the guy who ran the golf course could get money for scrap aluminum and he knew where to find dumpsters full of empty Coke cans.
One hot summer day he sent us to climb into the dumpster and shovel the cans into the truck. If you’ve ever seen how bees show up around empty coke cans, you know they love that sugar. Now imagine 1,500 Coke cans in a dumpster with two of us in there shoveling them out amid a swarm of angry yellow jackets.
We sure as heck had never heard of OSHA or human resources on that job. And while we’re talking about job safety…
During that same summer job, we were sent to the old indoor riflery range in the basement of White Building on campus to shovel lead — yes, lead — bullets from the dirt in that range. No masks, no safety goggles, just a couple of us breathing in lead dust in an enclosed basement riflery range.
Even a day at the beach was more dangerous. No one heard about sunscreen or SPF. The women were so tough, they put oil all over themselves hoping to get a slight burn that would fade to a dark tan.
And don’t even get started on Little League baseball. Back in our day teams were drawn up from our neighborhoods. Either we practiced in a nearby park and biked there, or one or two parents piled as many kids as possible into station wagons and drove us. We weren’t wearing seatbelts and some of us even rode all the way in the back in a rear-facing third-row bench seat. There was always a kid who couldn’t ride facing backwards and got sick. That kid was usually the kid who batted ninth and played right field.
There were no “team moms” in Little League back then, and there was no “snack” after the games. The whole league was sponsored by Roy Rogers. Their logo was on the back of our shirt and not one of us ever got a penny from them for using our Name, Image and Likeness. These days, Roy Rogers would probably have to negotiate a collective licensing agreement with the Little League players’ union.
But there was one perk. After the games, wearing our team uniform to Roy Rogers got us our choice of a free milkshake or a “bottomless soda”—a fancy way of saying free refills. Even the marketing back then was better.
But unlike these kids today, there were rules: you could only pick one. Did you take the milkshake? Or did you take a virtual trip to a land of ever-flowing soda to get hopped up on seven 24-ounce servings of Coke before bedtime?
We didn’t need parents to set up playdates. We wandered down to the park and the kids who showed up played basketball, or football, or wiffleball or kickball. We picked teams and some kid was picked first, and some kid was picked last. No one cried about it.
We tossed metal horseshoes and lobbed weighted heavy lawn darts that were so risky they were outlawed by a newer generation. We played outside all day until Mom blew a whistle to tell us it was dinner time. And after dinner it was back outside for bottle rocket wars, tossing firecrackers and firing roman candles and bottle rockets at each other. No paintball for us, we preferred our stupidity to be dangerous.
Fireworks were illegal in Pennsylvania, so getting fireworks involved arms smuggling. When kids took trips out of state, they’d sneak them back across the border. There was no internet, so we’d mail a money order to a company in some state like South Dakota that shipped them in unmarked packaging.
It was a miracle that we survived. It was an even bigger miracle that we connected with someone to have families.
Dating someone required waiting for the one rotary-dial phone line in our house to be available, calling to speak to them to ask them out. Meeting up with your friends required being on time. If you were late and they left without you, there was no telling if you’d catch up to them.
We were so badass that the high school set aside a smoking area just outside the office entrance for 18-year-old students to smoke a heater. The teacher’s lounge had a smoky haze and all the Aqua Velva in the world couldn’t mask the cigarette smell clinging to our high school gym teacher. Back then an influencer was someone trying to get you to smoke cigarettes in the swimming pool parking lot across from the high school.
We couldn’t text or Snapchat racy pictures to one another. That would’ve meant taking film to get developed. And everyone at the “same-day” photo place would smile knowingly when you came to pick them up. And we sure didn’t have filters and adjustments to make ourselves look better in photos. In photos, I was always the dorky dude with the Rinaldo’s bowl haircut.
And speaking of Rinaldo’s Barber Shop, when we played pick-up softball games in Sunset Park only Tony Trost could pull a 310-foot jack over the split rail fence and into the tomato plants in Dick DiRinaldo’s garden. Haven’t seen that done since.
It was a different time to be sure and we were just tougher than you youngsters. So don’t waste time telling me how horrible you have it. Before you know it, someday you’ll be sitting on your front porch while some AI application automatically writes all your complaints and grievances for you.
