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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What were your summers like in the 80s if you were a kid/teen?  Fun? Boring? Both? I was a kid on the 80s and keep hearing about how boring they were. My summers in the 90s as a teen weren't even boring. So what was it like for you? Was I just lucky?[/quote]

Born 1975. Grew up in St. Louis (Clayton) 
Latch key generation with two working parents. It was super normal back then to just let kids roam freely and that’s what we did. I doubt my daughter will ever have this level of freedom in her childhood here.

Free range summers! Age 8 onwards, up and out by 7:30. Wake up, make my bed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, make a brown bag lunch, grab my pool pass, some allowance money for treats, a towel, and my house key on a lanyard. Tell my dad or mom I am going to be at the pool all day. They said, take a quarter to call home if you’re in trouble, be home by dinner time (6:30pm) and off I went to Shaw Park Pool. Everything I needed was in my little pink Huffy bike basket.

By the time I was 9, I learned how to put my bicycle on the front of the city bus. I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t know about this. I had enough allowance money for bus fare and could take the bus all the way downtown to Union Station. It was glorious!! Me and my Instamatic camera would spend hours just bicycling around the city looking at everything and taking photos. I wandered all over the park under the Arch. I would spend a few hours in the city, get home in time for dinner, get back on the bus (it took a little while to learn how to read the schedule) and no one was the wiser. I used babysitting money to develop my photos at the Glasers drugstore. I got pretty good at doing street portraits!

From age 11, I went to sleep away YMCA camps every summer for 6 weeks in the Ozarks which was pretty cool. I loved it. Otherwise I was free ranging from Clayton to downtown to Ladue on my bike. I got as far as Plaza Frontenac once and got a ride home from a friend’s mom who had no idea how I’d gotten there!

I miss those summers at Shaw Park pool. 
All the cool Clayton high school kids wore ray bans and to me as a middle school student I idolized them. We would go to the Galleria nearby at night after dinner at home and just roam around. My parents said as long as I checked in by 10:30 I was okay.

By 14. I spent a lot of my hours in summer hanging around on the Wash U campus - it was directly across the street from my junior high school. I loved the engineering department and science lab. No one even questioned whether I was a student or if I belonged there. I got to check out fiber optic filaments in the lab and enjoyed watching the summer interns do chemistry experiments. Today I look back and it blows my mind that I got away with any of this.

By 16, summers still revolved around the Shaw Park pool, suddenly it was more about spending time at the cool kids houses (I was not one) and getting invited to house parties with older kids.

A group of Wash U students moved into an apartment building near my house and recognized me from the summer before. This was the year my braces came off. I had my first beer and was hanging around college guys who didn’t know I was in high school.
My mom figured out what was happening and intervened before anything happened and told them I was 16 (I was so mad but today I am grateful)

Those were the days.[/quote]

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