Fun in Napa--1960's style!

It's nearing summer in much of the Western Hemisphere. In just a little over a month, summer will officially arrive in our environs. So... I grew up on a ranchette in Coombsville, east of the City of Napa, but our address was still Napa. The city limits were at Silverado Junior High School, about one and a half miles from our place. We had two acres on which to do pretty much what we wanted to do. Boy did we play. We played anything and everything. My brother was just 21 months older than me and until we grew apart, we were playmates. The people next door had a grandson that came to stay with them every summer. And then there were he two boys across the avenue. We were all playmates. The place next door had a fallen eucalyptus tree in the corner abutting our place and one other larger parcel. We played in and around that seemingly from sun up to sunset, breaking now and again to eat and take care of other things. The fallen tree became ships of many kinds. I recall we made it a pirate ship many, many times. But it was also our spaceship, or a Navy ship cruising the open Pacific. Imagination is a wonderful thing. In addition to our two acres, Mt. George School was just down the avenue, less than a half mile away. We would often get together with some of the other guys outside of our immediate circle and play baseball. The school had somewhat of a diamond and we would use whatever we could find for bases. As far as we were concerned, every game was the 7th game of the World Series, sometimes complete with sound effects: "He hits it a long way, I do believe, THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT, THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT, THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT, THEY'RE GOING CRAZY! Napa was not too hot, but it helped that one of our friends had a pool. He was everybody's best friend. Two or three times during the summer we would go up to his place further up Coombsville Road. 'In the day,' no adult supervison was needed, though his mother would sit at her kitchen table and watch us. I was the only baseball fan in my house. My brother would play catch with me once and a while. When he lost interest my folks bought me 'Pitch Back,' a springed net, with metal frame so I could catch and throw baseballs til my little arms could not do it anymore. It was sooooooooooo cool. Sometime in the mid-60's we got a formal recreation program at Mt. George. The area had been ignored for so long and now we had it. Once a week we walked to the pool at Silverado for an afternoon of frolicking in the cool, clear water, then back again by about 5 pm. The pool is still there, having survived the fiscal crisis that schools have faced in the last few decades. We made our own fun in Napa in the 1960's. We did not have Nintendo, or X-Box. We did not have cable TV. We did not even have air conditioning. (I've written about that too.) Once in a while, there would be a special show at the Uptown and someone would drive us there. It was a little far to walk. Napa was fun! Tom Ontis is a Napa native and ex-patriate now living in Contra Costa County with wife Shelley and four kittie cats: Daisy, Lucy, Cookie and Buster Bright Eyes III.