Radio Free Montone: School's Out For Summer
By John Montone, 1010 WINS
School's out for summer. And let's keep it that way.
I like to think of education as discovery. Whether it be the wonders of science … animal life, our galaxy or how chemicals interact. History and literature, too. Lincoln at Gettysburg. The adolescent angst of Holden Caulfield. Advanced algebra and trigonometry. Hey, a few kids I went to high school with seemed to understand them.
One of the greatest periods of discovery in my life was that annual down time we call summer vacation which some politicians say should be done away with. Do away with those politicians instead.
Summers as a small child in the mid-60's were day-long games of baseball with a ball wrapped in electrical tape, snagging fireflies at night and listening to our fathers as they talked on stoops about The War. Their war. Their voices dropped when discussing buddies who didn't make it home.
There were above-ground pools in my neighborhood and an ice cream parlor on the corner. During breaks in our baseball games we ran three blocks to buy cold cans of soda at a place we all called, Browns, but sign over the door read, "Boulevard Stationary," and whose owners were a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Castro. Mr. Castro remembered the Brooklyn Dodgers and egg creams which he told us were NOT made with eggs.
Two weeks every summer my family went down the shore where we stayed in a tiny cottage with a swamp in the backyard. I caught pollywogs with a summer pal and watched them sprout frogs legs.
One summer in middle school all the girls suddenly seemed much older than I was and my friends all seemed to vanish. I spent the early morning hours delivering a newspaper called, "The Bergen Edition of The Hudson Dispatch," along streets that ended on the edge of The Palisades.
I rode my bicycle on my paper route, plucking tightly-folded newspapers from a canvas bag with a rooster and a rising sun on the front. I would fire the papers from the middle of the street and sometimes I would miss the front porch and hear some man yelling at me as he retrieved his paper from the bushes. I opened a savings account that summer.
Ten bucks in the bank, five in my pocket. To kill time during the day I started my own Strat-O-Matic baseball league. I would have finished an entire season had I not run into a friend who was walking alone to pick up groceries for his mother. Turns out, he hadn't seen any of our friends all summer either. I later heard one of my friend's father saying, "The boys are going through an awkward stage."
Right before school started that year a teenager showed up at the schoolyard where we had resumed our baseball games. He showed us black and white photos of Asian women his older cousin had mailed home Vietnam. The women were naked and we waited every day for him to come with new photos.
Radio Free Montone: School's Out For Summer
In high school summers were spent working at a super market with dozens of other guys then getting a ride back into town with an older kid who sometimes bought us beer. Other guys stopped home where they poured some of their old man's booze into a jar. The unscientific mix of vodka, gin, bourbon and scotch burned going down and coming back up. We sat on boulders in the woods drinking and talking about how the upper classmen were dating all the girls in our class.
By the summer of junior year the freshman girls hung out with us. I'm not sure whether we go better looking or got our drivers' licenses. We all had our favorite places to go with our girlfriends. And after we dropped our them off we met in a parking lot a block from the high school where we exaggerated our conquests.
I drove my father's '63 Dodge Dart with the push button transmission home right in time for my midnight curfew. My mother would be watching Johnny Carson and eye me suspiciously from the sofa. My father would look up from the living room floor where he had been dozing. "Whaddidya do all night?" he'd ask.
"Nothing," I always said.
And that's what summer vacations are…nothing and everything.
