#ghostsinthegraveyard

6 Growing up a girl in the 70’s and 80s meant Barbies, Shrinky Dinks, Cabbage Patch Kids, Strawberry Shortcake, anything and everything Star Wars, and of course Atari video games. It also meant riding bikes everywhere, “slip n’ slides”, water balloons, jumping on the trampoline all day long, “tubing” down the canal, and of course going to the arcade to play MS. PACMAN followed by a DQ MR. MISTY. You see, I grew up on the Highline Canal. We lived in “Hutchinson Hills”. When we weren’t outside, we ran around Tamarac Square causing trouble. We roller skated the carpeted hallways of University Hills Mall. We rode water slides at Celebrity Sports Center. But the best of all was that we lived directly across the street from a little strip mall with a PDQ (yep, “Pretty Darn Quick”) convenient store on one corner and a Dairy Queen on the other with an arcade sandwiched in between. Heaven? Yep.

Naturally all of us kids in the neighborhood made a pact to ask for our allowance in quarters. We spent ‘em at the arcade and at DQ. The arcade probably had an agreement with DQ to get all the quarters back to refill the games. For the summers of middle school, I swear our diets consisted solely of chili cheese dogs, fries, and Mr. Mistys! Who knows how I grew to be 5’9” in one summer on that crap.

At night, every kid in the neighborhood would come out to play games in the streets- “Ghosts in the Graveyard”, “Sardines”, “Capture the Flag”, “Pickle”, “Kick the Can”, “Spin the Bottle”... There must have been fifty or more kids some nights! We played from dusk until we’d hear moms call and the very last one of us had gone home. We’d sleep (mostly because we were forced to) and then get up and do it all over again the next day. We had an awesome childhood! If we wanted to find a friend we’d ride bikes to their house looking for them, screaming their name the whole way. If we wanted to go to the arcade we’d rush through our chores or beg for allowance early and head out.

Growing up we had garage sales, lemonade stands, and sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door. We knew everyone in the neighborhood and they all knew us. The 70’s-80’s was a time of INNOCENCE. It was a time of trust and belief in the honesty & integrity of friends, neighbors, heck even strangers, to all do their part in raising good decent kids for the sake of society as a whole... Believe it or not, for the most part, it worked. At least in our neighborhood, it did. We rarely got in trouble. We rarely lost our minds. We rarely even got out of hand. We rode bikes, played games, jumped on the tramp, had sleepovers, and spent quarters like they were going out of style. Unfortunately for us they did, in fact, just about as fast as they came in. So long Ms. Pacman. We had a great run.