Summer of ’67

One of my Millennial coworkers recently resigned to move her young family to the green and leafy Chicago suburbs. “I can’t raise my kids here,”  she told me.  “There’s too much crime.”

“So you’re moving to Chicago?” I asked blankly.

“This must be a horrible place to grow up,”  she continued, “my kids would be wrecked for life,” and now I was annoyed, because I absolutely loved growing up in Fort Lauderdale and because I was annoyed I felt compelled to call my brother, who is a year younger than me, to share my coworker’s opinion and to verify that my recollection was not faulty.

My brother was as irate as I was.  “It was a different era, but I think we  turned out just fine,”   he said stoutly, “‘in spite’ of being raised in Fort Lauderdale. ”  I felt vindicated and sighed in relief, but then, more or less simultaneously  we began to reminisce about the summer of ’67, a summer that stands out as being especially wonderful.

In the summer of ’67 my brother was preparing to go into first grade at Bayview Elementary and I was going into second. In the late spring of that year our parents had just bought their dream house  —  but it was not quite ready so for that summer they rented a house  on a quiet side street between the ocean and Birch State Park.

“Remember that summer,” he said.  “Mom took us to the beach every morning?”

I remembered. For that whole summer, unless it was raining,  we were at the beach by 8 AM and stayed til lunch.  “And then Dad would take us back every night before dinner,”  I reminded him.

He laughed and reminded me that we weren’t allowed to swim at dusk because Dad said that’s when the sharks were feeding.

“But Dad went in,”  I said.

My brother agreed.  “He just wanted to swim without worrying about us,”  he said.

During the long hot afternoons my brother and I would explore Birch Park: It was a large, pristine wilderness area with a lake  and a miniature railroad that took tourists on rides around the park. Because most of  our neighbor’s houses were winter homes, boarded up for the whole summer, we were the only kids in the neighborhood and we had the park to ourselves.  There was a lazy, shallow river that ran through the park and we would go fishing in the brackish water and catch bream which we carefully put into a bucket to show Dad after work.  “What did Dad do with the  fish we caught?” asked my brother. “We couldn’t eat them.”

“I think he threw them back in the river,”  I said, and it occurred to me we probably caught the same fish over and over the entire summer.

“Remember Mr. Glenn?” I asked and of course he did. Mr. Glenn was the railroad’s conductor and he would let us take free rides on the train if there was room —  and there always was.  We would spend hours riding that train and marveling at the damage done by Hurricane Cleo several years before.

“Remember the raccoons?” he asked and we both laughed.  After lunch we would head to the park with Wonder Bread in our pockets and feed the raccoons; by the end of the summer dozens of raccoons would run up to greet us and my mother would marvel at how much Wonder Bread she was buying.

“It’s amazing that we were allowed to just wander,”  my brother mused. “Totally unsupervised.”

“There were rules,”  I reminded him.  And there were: We were expected to be in the driveway when the street lights came on and it was an ironclad rule that we were inside at 3:00 when the daily thunderstorms would hit.  And we were absolutely forbidden to ride our bikes on A1A.

“But then you broke your arm when you fell off your bike on A1A,” said my brother.

“They had to have known,”  I said, “but they never said a word.”

“Maybe they figured the broken arm was enough punishment,”  he said.

“It’s a wonder we weren’t killed,” I said. “Remember Mrs. Davis?”

Of course he did.  Our neighbor Mrs. Davis was a widow who worked  afternoons in the glove department at Burdines downtown. After lunch, we would wait for her to drive away in her ancient Corvair  and climb the huge banyan tree that was next to her house, get on her roof and then jump into her pool.

“It was a different world,”  mused my brother. “But it was a great place to grow up.”

“So we had happy childhoods?” I asked.

“Idyllic,”  he said firmly.

I sighed; Back in the present my coworker was still extolling the benefits of raising her kids in the wholesome environs of Chicago.

“Good luck with that,”  I said.