When I was Young and Growing Up In New Jersey

We didn't have much to do as kids in the late '70s and '80s. We played pranks and did silly things like sliding down the staircase on a mattress. Our parents weren't always happy with our behavior.

MY DAD:

Some people had Dads who yelled or who were very strict. Some people had Dads who went to the store on the corner for cigarettes and never came back.

          My Dad is none of those Dads. My Dad was a pussycat. He didn’t know how to punish us. Neither did my mom. My mom once told my Dad to give me a spanking- I don’t remember what I did. I was 5 or 6. My Dad hesitated, and then took me upstairs and told me to lie on the bed. Neither of us knew what a spanking was or how to do it. My mom didn’t either. That’s probably why she told my Dad to do it in the first place.

          “Do I take off my pants?” I asked my Dad. I was wearing a dance leotard with snaps at the bottom. The longer I took, the more my Dad hesitated. “Never mind,” he said and walked out of the room. That was my first and last almost-spanking.

          My Dad was not intimidating at all. He was so not intimidating that we kids could tease him and he wouldn’t do anything about it.

          My Dad noticed that I was in the habit of changing my clothes several times a day, according to my mood. I left them in piles on our closet floor. One day my Dad said, “Did you ever hear the story about the girl who left all her clothes on the floor of her closet?” No, I said.

          “Her clothes turned into doodie,” he said.

          Another day, my Dad saw me leaving all my clothes on the floor again. He asked me if I remembered the story he told me the other day.

          “Yes, is that the story about the girl who’s Daddy was made out of doodie?” I asked. Now, if my Dad gave spankings, that might have been a time for him to give me one. But my Daddy just laughed at my cleverness.

          We could make fun of my Daddy and he was okay with that. When we were teenagers, my friends and I and my sister went shopping at the mall. In the early ‘80s in New Jersey, teenagers could take a bus to the mall by themselves and walk around alone. But for some reason no one was there to pick us up. We called home and my mom told my Dad to pick us up. He was very late picking us up. We waited and waited and waited. While we waited, we decided to make up a song and a matching dance, for Daddy. We were always making up songs and dances.

          “You’re late Daddy, you better watch out.

          Because we’re really mad and we’re going to shout.

          You’re late Daddy, you better watch out.

          ‘Cause we’re going to kick your a*s inside out!”

We thought that was hysterical. We sang it to my Dad when he picked us up. We did the whole song and dance for Daddy, just like we had practiced. If Daddy was the spanking type, that would have been a good time as well. I don’t think we got in trouble. Daddy was probably impressed with our performance.

          We kids were pranksters.  Of course there wasn’t that much to do in the late seventies, early ‘80s except watch The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, Charlies Angels, play board games or make up games and get into trouble.

We made crank calls and recorded them on our tape-recorder. I got this idea to put fake titles on my parents’ books. My mom had a book called, “When Couples Part,” and I wrote “F” and put it over the P. I thought I was so funny. We found my Dad’s nudie magazines under the bed. He wasn’t very good at hiding them. We cut out papers and glued them to cover up the naked women. My Dad never said anything. Then he would have to admit that he hid naked magazines under his bed, or that he looked at them.

My friend Hannah was getting renovations on her house on the 2^nd floor. There were drywall covering the room to get the addition. We thought we were very funny and we drew nude  people on the drywall. It was blank and boring. We thought we’d make it entertaining. Hannah’s parents were not amused. We had to paint over our artwork.

My mom wasn't immune to our teasing. When she went through the drive thru window at the bank, we kids in the back of the car yelled from the back seat to the bank teller, “Four lollipops please and a dog biscuit for the driver!” We thought we were so funny. After that, my mom left us home when she drove to the bank.

 

 

The Light Lunch Lounge:

          Since there wasn’t much on TV and often not much to do, we had to come up with ways to entertain ourselves. Someone came up with the wonderful idea to take a mattress off our bed and slide down our staircase. This was a lot of fun. But my sister’s mattress was low quality and smooth. It wasn’t a good quality mattress. It went way too fast down the stairs, with her on it and she crashed headlong into the front door. We decided not to use her mattress anymore.

          We also thought it would be fun to jump out the window. We obviously weren’t too bright. Our first floor window wasn’t too high off the ground�"maybe 8 feet. I’m not sure, but after one jump, we realized it wasn’t too bad. We are lucky no one broke anything!

          We had a breezeway in our house. It was a room that was off the side of the house. One door led to the front of the house near the garage and the other door led to the backyard. At night I always made sure the doors and windows were locked, so no one would be able to get into our house through the breezeway.

          One summer we kids decided to start a restaurant on our breezeway. We set up tables and chairs, and Julie’s friend Rebecca made great small pizzas on English muffins. We created menus and signs. There was a window from the kitchen to the breezeway. We used this as our window in which the cook could pass the food to the server in the breezeway. We used the bell from our PIT game for the cook to notify the server that the food was ready.

          We had several boys in the neighborhood who loved Rebecca’s mini pizzas. We wanted more customers, and we drew signs on construction paper with magic markers and put them around the neighborhood.  We called our restaurant the “The Light Lunch Lounge”.

          My mom wasn’t too happy with our “Light Lunch

 Lounge”. We used all her dishes and left the kitchen

 a mess, and we also sold all her groceries and 

pocketed the money for ourselves. We were proud of 

ourselves though. We had our own business! So what, 

sometimes our only customer was my friend’s younger 

brother. He loved Rebecca’s mini pizzas.