My stepdad was taking "The Gang" to a movie in the pic below and snapped the picture.- my gang in the 60s.jpg (104.86 KiB) Viewed 1169 times
We rode our bikes everywhere, we fished in the River, we rode to the park when chores were done and saw the same stuff over and over. SSDD. (King fans will know that one.) We would go to the boat ramp and help load and unload the fishing boats from the trailers. (Wives and Daughters in swimsuits.
) We were good kids, but we were also eleven and twelve... sometimes the dad's tipped us.We were also into building models. Cars, Trucks, military planes and Tanks... then we moved to planes you could fly.... wooden framework, you flew on a control handle. No remote controlled jobs at that age. But, you had to carefully cut the balsa, glue up the frame, coat it with the tissue paper and then paint that with a special solution called ... "Dope." It hardened the tissue and you could then paint the wings and fuselage and fly that puppy. Most of us flew with the angry mosquito sounding .049 engines... cheap and reliable.
I had finally finished building a nice underwing flyable and needed some dope to paint the plane. Mom and Dad were working so I jumped on my Stingray bike with the cool banana seat and took off. 5+ miles to the hobby shop, but I wanted to fly that plane. I was flying down a long hill on the way home, having secured my purchase, and a Police Officer pulled me over. I wasn't afraid or concerned, I had done nothing wrong. We didn't associate with those who did.
The Officer strutted up to my bike, which I had dismounted and stood looming over me, looking down. He was huge, and built like Hulk Hogan.
"Where you going in such a hurry son?" He asked from behind the cool mirrored shades, rolling that tooth pick to the other side.
"I'm going home, Sir." My parents taught me right, I called everyone out of their teens, Ma'am or Sir.
"Where are you coming from?"
"Um... I just needed some dope, so I ran out to by some and I was in a hurry to get home and use it." (I had NO idea how bad that sounded.)
HE looked stunned. He looked harder at me now. Rail thin, sunburnt dark brown (My Native American ancestry easily visible in the summer) Ragged deck shoes, cut off shorts and an old white T-shirt. Standard outfit for our group. Play clothes #1
"What's in the bag?" He pointed to the bag I had looped over my handlebars...
Duh... I thought, I just told him. "That's my dope."
He grinned. "Well let me have a look at that."
I handed him the bag. He opened it victoriously, and the smile faded.
"What's this?" He held up the two small plastic bottles.
"Airplane Dope, it's on the bottle."
He read the label, looked at me, looked back at the bottles, looked at me, looked back at the bottles. Finally he shook his head and dropped them in the bag, hooked the bag on the handle bars, and turned to leave. When he grabbed the door handle on his car he turned and looked over his shoulder.
"Slow down son, you were FLYING down that hill without an airplane. If you had hit a pothole or some gravel, you could have been seriously injured."
When I told my stepfather about it that night, he died laughing at the "Went to get some dope," line.
My stepfather worked for IBEW and they were building those big power towers that carried the huge electric lines across the country. We moved from North Florida, all the way up into KY. I kept looking out the window of the car for the blue grass but never did see any. What a disappointment. We lived in motels, moving a half hour ahead of the path of the towers, then living there until they passed us and he had to drive a half hour to reach the next site. Then we moved a half hour ahead of the path again... NINE schools in a single year. But, I saw a lot of the country. 
