Renown Lakewood author, Susanne Bacon, has done it again. She suggested for our July 2020, edition of Double Take we start with two words, Childhood Summers.
With having only two words, Childhood Summers, to work with, I harnessed my free-wheeling creative mind and came up with what follows.
In the summer of 1944, I began to show an early interest in driving, not knowing that in 1990 I would have the keys to my own police car. See how I am working on 10 & 2?
Summer of 1947 is when I taught the tiny girl how to ride her tiny trike.
A summer, years later, is when I taught the same girl how to drive her BMW Z4. We are still friends. She is my sister.
A photo we might title, “Dog’s Day of Summer,” relates to my pal Biff and I riding bicycles for miles with my pet dog, Colleen. Until she got too old, Colleen, chased after us all day all the way. Now I, like Colleen, am too old to ride a bike for miles.
At age 12, we even rode 70 miles on bikes from South Kind County to Lake Tapps in Pierce County. We slept in the woods surrounding Lake Tapps before there were houses.
One summer, we rode up to Bellevue from South Seattle. Leaving my five bike riding pals over the hill and out of sight, I sweet-talked a swimming pool salesman into letting six of us bike riders escape the hot August sun. Once permission was granted, I gave the classic arm movement over my head with a hardy, “Follow me!” We all jumped in and cooled off for our ride back home. I sold the salesman on the ideat that a group of wholesome boys having fun in his swimming pool was sure to generate a spike in sales.
Then came my big day in the summer of 1958. I was 15 1/2, a kid when I purchased my first car, a 1948 Ford, for $150.
When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a member of my city council when I grew up. When I was younger, I was always surrounded by girls. The photo below shows me in the summer playing a rousing game of city council photo op.
When you compare my kid photo with our real-life Lakewood City Council photo below, do you see the likeness?
Of course, my kid photo from the 1950s makes the four of us ruffians look more like we are heading to the Pierce County Juvenile Detention Center than to the city hall.
You have to wonder if our city council, decked out in all their city council finery, looked like us when they were kids?
Care to read Bacon’s Double Take? Click here.
Joe Boyle, author of the Suburban Times’ column “Westside Story”, and Susanne Bacon, novelist and author of the Suburban Times’ column “Across the Fence”, are sharing their thoughts about a variety of topics in their joint project of double features called “Double Take”. Comments are more than welcome, as they know that the world has more than their two angles – the more the merrier.
