Via Wikimedia Commons.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
FEB. 21, 2023 | Having been born in the South, we boys growing up never even thought of how hot it got in the summer time in Georgia. It was just plain hot, and we accepted that in the days before air conditioning was standard.
Suffer from heat? Not us. Sweat during the summer? Probably, but it seemed natural, and didn’t slow us down.
There was no organized playground nearby. There was a small open field, a little unlevel, where we played baseball. The pitcher was slightly up the hill from the batter but we paid that no mind. We were too young for the pitcher to throw very fast anyway.
Have organized adult supervision? None at all. It was a little early before Little League, et al arrived in our area. But play baseball on an open field in our neighborhood? Yep, most of late winter, spring, summer and into fall. (This was before we had paid any attention much to girls. None played sports with us.)
As to baseball equipment, it was simple. Most of us had our own bat, but we usually had only one aged baseball, which was pretty ratty from use. There was no spare ball, so if someone fouled off a pitch into the nearby bushes, the game stopped while we all searched for it. As that ball got more use, the cover came off, so it was repaired with black friction tape. That made it a little harder to hit, a little more difficult to see than a white ball. You couldn’t hit that taped ball quite as far as you could when the ball had a leather cover.
Basketball for us? Not so much. In our neighborhood, no one had a hoop. We went from baseball in spring, summer to fall and warmer winter days, then to football.
As for refreshing ourselves, eventually, as we got a little older, somehow we managed to have a few coins, often earned from different chores. We didn’t have much money in our pockets, maybe five or ten cents. But a drink only cost a nickel back then.
We would go to a store’s soft drink box, and pull out a drink from the icy water. That drink box’s icy water was mighty cool on our hand.
Feeling we needed to get as much as we could out of a nickel, our choice of drinks was not those days’ standard six ounce Coca Cola, but the 12 ounce Royal Crown, which we knew was also a Georgia product. (Pepsi in our crowd was not so popular.) Royal Crown also produced 12 ounce Nehi fruit drink, a secondary choice. Its best were Orange and Grape sodas. Strawberry was red enough, but more watery. And the Peach tasted awful. Don’t expect Nehi ever made much money off that Peach offering.
If one of us had another nickel, we bought a pack of salted peanuts, and each poured some into Royal Crown, or Coke. One long pack of peanuts would be shared by all. We never mixed peanuts with Nehi drinks. It tasted far better with a cola product. While we never recognized it, we were cooling down with those icy soft drinks back in that day before air conditioning.
Today you might need about a dollar to buy a soft drink or even that sleeve of salted peanuts.
Growing up in the South was mighty hot, but, we only thought of it as normal times.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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