9.07.2014

Happy Grandparents Day

I remember a time when my dad used to roll me down the hill in his old tires..
...Those were good years.

2 comments:

  1. Well, my dad never did that, but he did let us kids ride on the running board of his old Ford. The safety authorities would look aghast at that today, but we did it for short distances--for example, at a campground where we went tent camping in the summer or just up and down our street. The old Ford didn't have automatic transmission or air-conditioning, but it did have a crank that enabled you to open the front windshield about three inches at the bottom so you could feel a breeze coming through. The windshield wipers did not have their own little motor as wipers do now. They operated somehow off a vacuum produced by the car when it was running. The faster the car went, the greater was the vacuum, and so the faster the wiper blades went. Once a year our dad took a photo of each of us four kids perched on the hood of the car. He took other photos of us as well, but why he chose to make an annual thing of the car photo, I don't know. This is nostalgia day.

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  2. Another thing our dad did was to take us tent camping for about 10 days of his two-week vacation every summer. How I looked forward to that! We would leave in the dark at 4:30 in the morning in order to get through Boston before the heavy traffic. In those days there was no bypass of the city. We would get to the campground, usually Campton Pond State Park in the White Mountains, in the mid-afternoon, and Dad would begin erecting the two tents and a tarpaulin "fly" over the picnic table at the site. One of the early chores was digging a ditch around the tents to carry off the rainwater in case one of the frequent mountain storms hit us. Mom was the cook, and she did most of the cooking over an open fire in the campsite little stone fireplace. Coleman gas stoves came along in a couple of years, but we couldn't afford one at first. In fact, we could barely afford to make the trip, for this was during World War II and gas was rationed. Dad would save up his gas coupons for the vacation. Going downhill in the mountains, he would sometimes shut off the car engine, which you could do in those days, and coast in neutral. Once he coasted seven miles. We visited the attractions in the White Mountains, especially the less expensive ones. There was a stream by the campsite with good drinking water (hard to believe today). Beyond the stream was the Mad River, well named because it was a pretty turbulent water course. We kids had such a good time. We were never ready to go back home when the time came.

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