Born to be Wild in Sixth Grade

Sixth grade was a big year for me, the nascent blossoming of attraction and longing for girls. In that year I attended my first party where I kissed a girl, a few girls even. We played post office and the memory of kissing a pretty girl at age 11 was indelible.

It was a year to be cool, or as cool as an 11 or 12-year-old punk kid could be. Collarless suits were a big hit: iridescent, but especially sharkskin, because that’s what the Beatles wore when they came to America in January/February of 1964 and even young kids like me were trying to emulate them in dress or by starting bands with a musical knowledge of about three chords.

My parents had an above ground swimming pool enclosed by an eight-foot wooden fence. After Labor Day the pool would usually be drained and the fenced-in ground left unused until the following June. It seemed such a waste not to use it for something. The pool entrance behind the fence could be accessed by means of a small gate with a combination lock, but during the school year we left the gate open and I would often park my bicycle inside behind the fence because the space between the fence and the empty pool was two to three feet, certainly enough space to fit a thin 24-inch-tire kid’s bicycle.  

As mentioned in an earlier post about my ill-fated career in safety patrol (see "Resigned" April, 2013), the walk from my house to the school was two blocks up a hill and one crossing of a street, very close. Most kids lived several blocks away, or further, and their walks took forever. They barely had enough time to walk home for lunch and back again (the school did not have a cafeteria).

I don’t remember when or how the idea first occurred to me, but one day I realized I could help some of these outliers by allowing them to park their bicycles in my backyard, inside the pool fence (gate unlocked). By parking at my house it would be a shorter walk for them to the school and a bigger plus was that after school at 3:00, they could just hop on their bikes and get home sooner with more time to play. I believe my intention was not entirely altruistic---some of it certainly, because in sixth grade I was very gang or pack conscious, gregarious, everything became about “the gang.” But I believe I also charged my classmates to park in the backyard inside the pool fence and charged a nominal fee, maybe a quarter, candy money. My classmates and school chums appeared more than happy to part with a quarter for this convenience. My mother was home all day and often in the kitchen, and she may have seen what I’d been up to with the bicycles, but she hadn’t caught on or said anything. For one thing the fence obscured a good deal of what mother would be able to see, and after all there were only two or three bicycles in the beginning, which seemed pretty harmless, no big deal.

That soon changed….

At first the plan had been sound, working without a hitch. The two or three kids that I’d been helping for a small fee arrived at my house daily after I’d finished eating lunch and about 10-15 minutes remained of the lunch hour. Perfect. Plenty of time to walk back to school, maybe too much time. But word traveled and more kids wanted to get in on the cool offer of parking their bikes in my yard, and regrettably I let them, up to 12 or 15 bikes eventually, and that was not the worst of it. Many of the outlier newcomers were more aggressive than the first few. They would reach my house by 12:00 (not sure how, they must have inhaled their lunch), only halfway through the hour break, and being restless and aggressive, they chose not to park their bikes right away because they had so much time on their hands. Instead these miscreants rode their bikes around the school grounds en masse, showing off for girlfriends by executing “wheelies,” riding double or triple, and taunting the officious but legitimately concerned safeties who were only trying to enforce the rules, pointing out that even a lone rider on school grounds during school hours was illegal and subject to punishment. And the whole mess had happened so quickly! The new kids would not listen to my warnings about parking their bicycles only, nothing else. I had unleashed a tide of wild terrorizing pre-adolescent male cyclists on our beloved school all because of a good intention to make some kids lives a bit easier. They had never technically been my responsibility but the most aggressive of the lot were ignoring my warnings concerning the school.

 Everyone was clearly out of control by now. Some kids were arriving late after I’d already started walking back to school, and some of them arrived by the time the afternoon session had already started and in their haste threw their bicycles any old place in my yard or maybe leaned them against the outside of the fence. Not good. Of course the teachers noticed this rowdy, disruptive alteration in the smoothly-running routine of their day. So I fell afoul of the school authorities once again, and while I sensed that stunt riding bikes on school grounds was probably a “bad idea” and “wrong,” I still joined in and rode with the rest of ‘em, most likely to impress some girl I had a crush on.

            There came a phone call. There is always a phone call. It was time to cease and desist.

            My mother told me to stop immediately. I mostly felt relieved because I hadn’t known how to stop it, I’d been under the sway and influence of the gang, the pack, the wild angels, and that created a fairly big problem for a number or people. My mother mentioned something about “insurance” and I only had a vague idea of “insurance” at the time. She explained to me that because bicycle riding wasn’t permitted on school grounds during school hours (which seemed odd because we were always riding our bikes by the school when it was closed) if a child was seriously hurt---thrown from his bicycle, say, or maybe crashed into a wall or a parked car---the school, without insurance coverage for that type of serious injury, could be held liable and sued. To protect against that type of serious injury or, God forbid, accidental death (no one wore helmets in those days), the school would have no other recourse but to sue my mother. Anyway, I got the gist of it.

            From that day forward if a kid tried to unload a bike in our yard while I wasn’t there my mother politely reprimanded him and he took the bike away. That period of vigilance was short-lived as word spread quickly once again. The fun was over and the lock placed back on the pool fence gate until next summer.