Ahhh, born in 1942 my childhood was close to perfect. If only I would have gotten that pony.

Life in the early 1950’s is rendered in crystalline purity. Refrigerators are replacing the icebox and television is new on the scene. The times were simpler, the choices fewer, and the freedom greater, as the kid navigates through daily life on the island, joined by Dickey, Larry, and the whole gang.

The Village of Island Park - 1948

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​There’s one thing that sets him apart from most of his friends. He has a ton of schemes rolling around in his noggin.  He plays alone for hours and hours perfecting his Wild West Good-guy image. He’s the fastest draw, cleanest cut ‘yes maam’ cowboy on the planet. When he saunters into a saloon, he orders sarsaparilla. He has no idea what it is, but he knows it ain’t “whisky”.  Whisky’s what the bad guys order.  Since as long as he can remember he’s wanted a horse, but no matter how much he begs, his parents don’t budge.

        Do you ever wonder what it was like to have been a kid in the 1950s? Living in the country, in fact, on an island? Five hundred acres of woods, swamps, hills, and grasslands. Where wagon trails became roads, the horse was replaced by the automobile, and the residents lived mostly in houses built at the turn of the century as summer cottages for city folks.
        It was a place where those with a mind too, could interact with the wild critters that made it their home. A place where kids could roam safe in the knowledge that someone was watching.
       

      He’s a forty-four inch bundle of attitude. If you can picture a skinny barefoot kid with nothing on but his swimming trunks, ribs and bony shoulders layered with a thin coating of skin, you know what he looks like. He has a hiene haircut, and sometimes his mom makes him wear a cap that buttons under his chin.
​     He hates that. He has black high-top tennis shoes and Levis that he puts on when it’s too cold for bare legs, and at least once a year his mom soaks his foot in peroxide to cleanse the latest nail-hole, complements of his rummaging in the islands dump.