The last of the old-fashioned American summers before technology ruined the fun
- Chuck Thompson
- Aug 3, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 16
OPINION / HUMOR — When I was a kid we didn’t have emergency heat advisory warnings and cancel things in advance. We just figured it out for ourselves, used deductive reasoning via common sense to decide it’s hot. We didn’t wait for instructions from our phones (mostly because they were house phones affixed to a wall or sitting on a table or desk.)
We perspired and persevered.
We would take turns, dropping like a sack of bricks due to heat exhaustion and our friends would laugh — and then, once we regained consciousness, it would be little Timmy’s turn to pass out from a heat stroke.
We did this all day, until we went home, showing off our scabs and scars to our friends the next day.
We drank from a hose, we swallowed pool water (before it was possible to know anyone pee’d in it) and played football and soccer in someone’s back yard, coming inside momentarily for a cold Sunny Delight or glass of milk - something that would cause a cramp by the time we swam to the deep end on a dare to touch the bottom of the pool.
(I’m 46, for context to the story)
Then we walked around the neighborhood, pushing our bikes, while old people in their yards stared at a bunch of little kids and shook their heads while thinking, “Kids these days… using calculators and cassette tapes and then CD things with their abomination Vanilla Ice Cream music. I’ve heard of that b*stard, too. Dan Rather interviewed him on the CBS news last week. Stay off my lawn!”
We’d go down to the river on our bicycles, our parents had no clue where we were but they locked us out of the house, it was 95 degrees, so it was fine - they knew we were somewhere in a 2 or 3 mile radius, either playing in a backyard, walking down the road or climbing trees, and falling out of them as the last tough generation of the 20th century did — by hitting every branch on the way down.
No, we didn’t need emergency heat warnings from our phones, we didn’t need directions from GPS to get back home. We used our brains to figure out how to get home when we got lost in the woods or rode our bikes around so much that we ended up in a neighborhood we knew nothing about.
We didn’t need, nor have, anyone telling us where to go or how to find something or when to be scared or to feel hot or cold.
It was the late 80’s and the early 90’s.
The last of the pre-internet pioneer children. The last of the “just yell for my mom, she will hear you!” When you fell off your bike and broke your leg.
We did things and made decisions on our own….
Now — excuse me while I look up where the closest Chick-fil-a is. I don’t know where it is. Im sitting in a parking lot trying to get a good signal on my phone and not going to try to find it on my own just driving around.
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