I was Born in 1954.
I grew up in the Leave It To Beaver style for much of my younger days. I walked to school in first grade along side my older brother who was in third grade. In my mind it was a mile long walk. I looked it up not long ago and it is just a few blocks. I vividly remember one house on the way had a huge honeysuckle bush. We stopped every time and sucked out some honeysuckle flowers. We lived at 1146 Hookahi St, Pearl City, HI. I went to school wearing shorts. Not shirt, no shoes.
That is our Plymouth Fury at that house.
We moved to San Marcos, TX after that for my second grade. No more barefoot schooldays. I rode my bike and we rode all over town. The rules were simple be home for dinner at 6:30 SHARP or go hungry. As soon as that was done we had to be home by the time the street lights came on.
We would ride our bikes to the middle of downtown park our unlocked bikes next to the theater and watch the Saturday matinee. 25 cents was the ticket and another 25 cents for the popcorn, sugar daddies, and a Coke in a bottle. We would walk along the side of the road and pickup Coke bottles to take to the grocery store to get the bounty and that made us enough to go to the movies.
Third grade was in Montgomery, Al. I missed the first day of school because we were still moving in. My first day in school the teacher gave us a pop spelling test. She would say the word and we had to spell it. I made a ZERO because I could not understand her very thick southern accent. Every word had extra syllables. She said a word like quarter but pronunced it "kawat-a." My parents were called to the school and they had a heck of a time understanding that teacher so they knew what the problem was. The teacher promised to try to enunciate the words better when she was giving a spelling test.
I remember the first time I ever saw a color TV it was in the waiting area at a Mexican food restaurant. The show Flipper was on and my brother and I were stunned. We did not get a color TV until many years later. Just 3 stations and very little to watch except on Saturday Morning. We were way to busy playing outside anyway.
I spent a ton of time at a buddies house and my buddies slept at our house all the time. A different set of friends every year since we moved all the time. I went to 11 different schools from 1st to 12th grade. Dad was an Air Force Pilot and we were were the Air Force sent us. I learned at a young age to make friends fast. The bad part is I don't have any childhood friends.