Racing the Neighborhood Now and Then Briefly

Dipping one's toes into the murky waters of childhood memories is therapeutic, so I'm told. It's also pretty exhausting. Case in point, remembering life at Everett High School (that's it to the right). It was my first. It didn't take - neither did the second, Cascade High.

What's a family to do with an unmotivated 16 year old who'd rather play hooky ... at the public library reading every book he could get his hands on? Why, have him get a GED and on to Community College, of course! That's it to the left. Guess what? It didn't take any more than the high schools, so off to the Navy I went.  Just after I had protested the recently mandated selective service registration by refusing to do so! 

Story of my life with higher education, as I'd do that same dance at a number of institutions over the next 17 years trying to catch that elusive degree. And story of my life with sticking to my political principles. But my heart's in the right place.

I tell ya, it's kind of creepy being able to tool around your old neighborhood courtesy of Google maps street view. It's too bad the technology wasn't around 40 years ago. I'd like to be able to cruise the homestead over time, watching it morph from how it was to how it is. I imagine in 30 years that this'll be a handy feature for future headcases (ya know, the ones being fucked up right now) as well as anthropology/sociology or city planner/architecture buffs. Then again, that'll play havoc with revisionist history (at least with some of the visuals your defense system might have since re-purposed for sanity's sake).


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My neighborhood has changed surprisingly little over the years. The biggest single difference seems to be the walling off of individual properties. Fences and landscaping were for backyards when I was a kid - now a good half of the homes on my old block have big ol' fences around the front along with trees, flowers and shrubs winding around and through the enclosures, all neatly trimmed and weirdly isolating. Everything was so open when I was young!

Other than that ... The same old plum trees still line the edges near the curb, the hospital and high school look pretty much frozen in time (okay, some minor nods to technology with the signage). Same corner stores and whatnot (well, they have new names and likely new owners, but look otherwise alike). More cafes and coffee shops, a vacant lot where we played pick-up ball kitty corner from our block is now a fancy little park.

It's easy to slip back in time. And out of the house, they were usually good times for me as a kid. Man, I can just see the Big Wheels riding down the street, the banana seat bikes with playing cards in the spokes, our Evil Knievel plywood jumping ramps over three(count 'em) trash cans (well, on their sides) in the alley, army forts built in the backyard thatch of bushes. Buying paper kites from the corner store and flying them all over the place. Building wooden hydroplane models. My best friend Brian lived with his grandparents and we'd use his grandpa's tools and paint to craft these hunks of wood into passable miniature replicas.

Hydroplane racing was HUGE in our neck of the woods, certainly back then anyway (this was '68 or '69). Miss Pay-n-Pak and Miss Budweiser were the Yankees and Red Sox of that particular universe. Remember, we didn't have professional football or baseball in our state back then. You had to go clear to Oakland, California to find such things and the A's were indeed my team as a kid (a great team to have in the early 1970s). But they could be only so much my team given their geographical distance. So we had Soccer (go, Sounders!) and Hydroplanes.

Brian was always the Budweiser and I was always Pay-n-Pak when we 'raced' each other on our bikes, dragging those hunks of wood we had lovingly crafted behind us, pretty much destroying them in the process. I hated the Miss Budweiser. When I started to drink, I always loathed Budweiser beer too. I'm pretty sure it was the red-neck image and awful after taste but there's something inside me that always harkens back to that rivalry. Turns out, the boat owners, drivers and crews were incestuous, with Miss Budweiser and Miss Pay-n-Pak pretty much interchangeable apart from the sponsor's name slapped on the sides. What did we know?





Any time you wanna race hydroplanes, Brian - give me a shout, if you're out there.