Welcome to The Red Bank

About

          by Tony

The “Red Bank” was an actual red dirt bank in my Mom’s best friends back yard and that is where me, my sister, my cousins and my friends spent about 40% of our childhood. There we dug into this red dirt with large spoons our grandparents have given us who lived next door. Doesn’t that sound like fun? You have to understand this was back in the 60’s, a time without video games, cable tv, satellite tv, cell phones or anything else we take for granted these days.

We didn’t have a great deal of toys and this was fun to us. It was a time for imagination and we played out our greatest roles in those days. We would make up all kinds of make believe plays and the red bank was our stage. Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians and much more. I did some of my best thinking on that red bank and my best hiding too.

Another place we spent time was in mason park which was only 1 block from our house. We would walk there and swing on the swings and walk through the woods. We would find turtles and take them home. There was this one tree that was shaped funny we called mr. humpback and that tree is still there even today. This is a picture of him to the left.

Funny to think back on those days and wonder how in the world we managed to survive without getting mortally wounded by something in those woods. I mean take a look at this little stream, a sewer run most likely that we played in like it was a beach.

I guess you can chalk it up to the miracle called childhood, where it is a miracle any of us survive to adulthood. The park was our oasis from the restraints of the adult world where for a few hours we could be masters of all we could survey. I sometimes wonder why our parents let us go off own our own like that. I guess it was a different time, it’s hard to imagine a time where small town America was actually safe but having lived through it I know it was real.

I don’t really want to go back in time to relive those days, the world of today does have it’s advantages and it’s horrors but all in all I like the world of today even with it’s nightmarish downsides. We had not yet done Vietnam and were still enjoying being the worlds most powerful nation. The USA was about to launch into the space race and I watched on TV as Neal Armstrong stepped on the moon, that was July 20th 1969 and I was 8 years old. Just because those were good days and safe days does not mean they were better days. It was great to grow up in that time but I think it would have been even better to grow up in the age of the internet.

Instant knowledge via the internet on any subject you could ever want to know. Our best source of knowledge was our classmates and friends who heard it from someone who had heard it from someone. The words of my day were “Right On !” and “Cool Man”. I really can’t recall much more than that, although I am sure there were more cool sayings.

As for how all of this relates to the Red Bank, it doesn’t really except that the Red Bank was a place we would go to play when I was very young. Now the Red Bank is a place I will be going to play in my more senior years. This site isn’t about anything in particular, it’s just a playground, a cybernized virtual playground and the cursor is my big spoon.