Summer time in the 1940s and 1950s

This is from a post I wrote about a year ago. It's easy to romanticize the past, but it does seem that today's youngsters are missing something. Free time? Perhaps we didn't have as much as it seems, at least not if you had my mother.

Yesterday the WSJ ran a parenting article about overscheduling children in their summer activities. In my mind's eye I replayed the dozen or so summers I remember when I was a child--they seemed to run forever--hot, hazy and relaxed with hours of finding shapes in the clouds and bugs in the grass and bubbles in the tarred streets for bare toes.

At first I couldn't imagine my mother managing my summers for me, but looking back I realize she was quietly (she was always quietly doing something) planning my schedule. In Forreston I attended summer recreation program at the community school for games, swimming and sports. From age 11-16 I attended summer camp at Camp Emmaus. In elementary school I had babysitting jobs; in high school I detasseled corn, worked at the drug store, at a feed company and the town library. I had a horse, or my friends did, and we rode them down hot, dusty roads. After age 14 I was dating and going on picnics at the Pines, to the roller rink, to movies out of town and locally. My church CBYF had weekly Sunday evening meetings; my girl friends and I had slumber parties; the town had summer band concerts (still does) where you bought bags of popcorn and hoped to see someone special even if you didn't hear a note; and there were 4-H projects to get ready for the county fair. And the projects Mom would invent to keep us busy! Gardening, canning, cleaning, cooking, sewing, laundry. Oh my! That could cut into a sleepy summer day's reading.

Girl Scouts, Barb, Norma, Sara and Nancy, ready to ride our bikes to camp
Update: I just noticed something in this photo, which is probably from 1952 or 1953. My bike is the only one with "standard handle bars" and the other three have the flared shape, which I always thought were from the late 1960s or early 1970s. I still use a bike with this type of handle bar.