By Jim Palmer
A few months ago, in my column, I asked the readers of Senior Perspective the question, “What were you doing when you were 10 years old?” I asked them to submit their answers for publication. We received a very nice response, and these responses are printed in this edition. Since there were so many, we published the stories according to where the person lives now. If there was room, added more. To see all the responses, visit our web site (srperspective.com).
Reading all these letters, it got me to think about what I was up to when I was about 10 years old. I am a decade or two (or three) younger than many of our readers, so you will see a distinct difference in my childhood. But if you are older, you likely remember the mid-1980s and maybe my story will remind you of your children or the neighbor kids. Here is what I was doing back when I was 10.
Most of my childhood was spent in the small town of Stewart, Minn., and some of my favorite years happened about the time I was 10, which was 1984. We had just moved into a new house (it was actually an old house but new to us) located a few blocks from our previous one. My younger brother, Steven, was just two years old, so I played with him a little bit here and there and watched cartoons (like The Smurfs, HeMan, Scooby Doo, Transformers) with him on my lap when he wasn’t fussy. I spent most days with a few neighborhood buddies and/or my older brother, Mike, and a couple of his friends.
If it wasn’t a school day, a typical day for me when I was 10 involved biking over to one of my friends’ houses or waiting for them to bike to my house. Kids would bike everywhere back then and show up unannounced on a daily basis. From there, we often played outside (basketball, football, baseball, frisbee, or a made-up sport). We also spent time in a poorly-crafted treehouse in our backyard. If we had a few guys interested, we would bike out to a place we called “the pit.” We would go to the pit fairly often. The pit was an area a few miles outside of town that had woods, a lake, and lots of interesting things. It had what appeared to be a water treatment area next to it, so it was probably owned by the city... but I’m still not really sure. It was acres of fun for us, and we rarely saw an adult on the property (and I don’t think they ever saw us). We would make forts, build rafts, climb trees, and just hang out.
One regular day activity for many 10-year-old boys in 1984 was to play video games on the Atari 2600. This was the first really big in-home gaming system. My favorite games were PacMan, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong, Pitfall and Decathalon. We played our games on the only TV in our house, an old Zenith console TV that was the size of a stove, had three channels (cable came a few years later) and very low resolution. Not only did we play our own video games, we would also trade with others in town. There was a boy in our neighborhood named Brett Carrigan. He had a briefcase filled with Atari games. He would stop over and we would try to make a trade like a traveling salesman. Brett was pretty saavy with his “sales”... and he had to be because he didn’t have the best games to start with.
When I wasn’t playing games, I was watching games on the old Zenith. I followed the Twins, the North Stars, the Vikings and the Minnesota Gophers football and basketball teams. I was just starting to get into the NBA as the Lakers (led by Magic Johnson) and the Celtics (led by Larry Bird) were regulars in the Finals just about every year during this time. I would schedule my days around the big Magic-Bird matchups. The Timberwolves were not around yet, but the NBA was getting more interesting every year. In 1984, a young Michael Jordan joined the league. He ended up doing okay.
The town of Stewart wasn’t filled with many entertainment options, so when we needed to find something more exciting to do, we would find a ride to nearby Hutchinson to go to a movie (Ghostbusters, Gremlins and The Karate Kid came in 1984) or we would go to the arcade in the mall. We could spend hours in the arcade on $5 in quarters. Arcades and malls were great social destinations in the 80s. Also in the mall was a Godfather’s Pizza, so just about every birthday party involved arcade and pizza in that mall.
At the end of each day, if I was at a friend’s house, I would hop on my bike and ride back home in the dark. And then do it all again the next day.
Our parents didn’t always know where we were, but they could find out pretty quickly if they needed to. Since we lived in a very small community, everyone knew everyone, and there were some older residents of Stewart who kept a very close eye on me (and other kids) through their kitchen window.
It was a simpler time. Not as simple as the 50s and 60s (and earlier) ... but still pretty simple (nobody I knew had a personal computer yet). It was a fun time to be 10.
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