What were you doing the summer of '66?

[Les Paul]

Lawrence Ks. Living eating breathing baseball. Only perfect team I ever played on. 12 years old. Had a paper route with 75 papers and about half that route were no paying college
students.

[bivenator]

Drawing my first breaths.

[on2wheels52]

Was 13, think we earned $1/hour pulling weeds out of soybean fields (except the 120 acres of ours, that was a freebee).
Jim

[J P Stein]

Cruisin' in my "4 speed, dual carb, positraction, 409"........and gettin' on a first name bassis with the Seattle cops. 4 MPG down hill with a tail wind......4.56 gears. Standard White pump was 30 cents a gallon. I think I blew it up that same year. I remember part of the 60's.

[KaptKaos]

Not much.

[speeder]

Taking dumps.

[Bobbi66]

Making my parents scrabble for a girl's name instead of the boy's name they picked out...

[Joe Bob]

9yo, just learning how to put my underwear on rightways....

[Hugh R]

Since this started with the movie "Le Mans", I'll just add that I knew/know Bob Relyea, the Executive Producer of the movie. He must be 80 by now.

[techweenie]

Started college in Summer quarter '66. Lost virginity. That is to say, I threw it away with both hands. Bonus: the chick I was with had a highly competitive friend who also wanted a taste... good times.

[strupgolf]

Learning to drive my first car at 16, a 1961 MG midget. Blue with a white racing stripe, sliding windows in a take off frame. I loved that car and it was great fun in sunny Miami. It was so simple in everything.

[targa911S]

Taking LSD, smoking weed, listening to Jimi Hendrix, chasing women, playing in a local band. Driving a Austin Healey sprite MkIII

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by on2wheels52

Was 13, think we earned $1/hour pulling weeds out of soybean fields (except the 120 acres of ours, that was a freebee).
Jim

What did the farmers in your area call "pulling weeds out of soybean fields" (I'm assuming they didn't use that phrase). Around here we used "walking beans" which made sense because you spent the day walking between the rows chopping out any weeds you came across with a hoe. I got a job with a guy in Indiana who hired me to "chop beans." I thought I was going to drive a tractor pulling a flail chopper. Turned out I spent the day walking between the rows, chopping weeds out with a hoe for $1 an hour.

[repp]

Laying around soiling myself. same thing il be doing in another 50 years.

[imcarthur]

Impatiently waiting to be a teenager.

Ian

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by J P Stein

Cruisin' in my "4 speed, dual carb, positraction, 409"........and gettin' on a first name bassis with the Seattle cops. 4 MPG down hill with a tail wind......4.56 gears. Standard White pump was 30 cents a gallon. I think I blew it up that same year. I remember part of the 60's.

Too funny. I did a remake of that movie in 1975 with a `67 Chevelle SS which had a Vette 396 375 hp, 4 bolt main, Lunati high lift solid lifter cam, Holley 850 cfm dbl pumper dual feed carb, Hooker headers with 2" pipes and 3.5 collectors connected to glass packs, 4 spd Muncie tranny and 4.56 gears in the rear. I could chip the tires in any gear at any speed and run it in fourth at 30 mph. Got a solid FIVE mpg regardless of how I drove. I couldn't afford 98 octane (75 cents per gallon) and sold it.
Now what was I doing in `66? Ice hockey on the lake in winter, little league in spring, fishing in the summer.

[on2wheels52]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

What did the farmers in your area call "pulling weeds out of soybean fields" (I'm assuming they didn't use that phrase). Around here we used "walking beans" which made sense because you spent the day walking between the rows chopping out any weeds you came across with a hoe. I got a job with a guy in Indiana who hired me to "chop beans." I thought I was going to drive a tractor pulling a flail chopper. Turned out I spent the day walking between the rows, chopping weeds out with a hoe for $1 an hour.

Yup, 'walking beans' was used, wouldn't expect many here to know that term. I think they called it 'choppin' cotton' where that was grown.
We carried hoes but certain varietes of the weeds (and the volunteer corn) we were expected to pull out by the roots.
Jim

[fred cook]

I was between high school and college, hoping that nothing went awry with my school application so that the draft would not get me. Spent some time with a buddy who had a 1965 Dodge Coronet 383/4 speed (fast for the day!) and spend lots of time the girlfriend. My car at the time was a 1952 Ford 2dr sedan with a transplanted Mustang 289, 3 in the floor Hurst shifter and a 410 rear end. Faster from stoplight to stoplight than a 396 Chevelle! That old Ford really pissed off the guys in the Chevys! Three years later, I was a U.S. Navy Seabee. Spent one deployment in Puerto Rico and the other on Diego Garcia with a brief visit to "Nam.

[jyl]

That was probably the year I was shipped off to live with relatives in Taiwan for a year while my parents finished their PhDs in the US. For a 3 yr old to live away from his parents, in a country where no one spoke English, for a year seems like a pretty questionable parenting choice to me, but I don't recall being asked.

[Wilhelm]

Interesting that this thread starts with a video of the 1966 Le Mans 24 hrs. I had just gotten out of 8th grade and I remember trying to find some news that year of how the Fords were doing at the 24 Hrs. If I remember right, ABC Wide World of Sports had some coverage between things like Golf and Demo Derbies from Islip Speedway or some such stuff. And if I was lucky I could find a small paragraph buried in the sports pages of the Sunday Chicago Tribune. Othere than that bit of news available from those sources, I had to wait for Road and Track and Car and Driver .

In addition to delivering newspapers, I also was mowing lawns in the neighborhood for about $2.00 per. Big lawns in the suburbs. One was a Doctor who lived on the other side of town. Which was pretty cool cause most times the Docs wife would give me a ride there and back home in a red Corvette or a new T-Bird. With Air Conditioning ! Really nice !