Our trailer had three bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen area. There were two bath rooms on opposite sides of the place. We got the bedroom on the west side, my uncle had the bedroom right next to us, and Uncle Buddy had the east side bedroom to himself. My sister and I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom. That was usually done when there was a full trailer. At other times we had a couch with a fold out bed.
We use to go to the trailer quite a few times in the early days. Many times we would go up for a weekend, but we would always go up for a week when my dad had a vacation. These usually happened around my sister's birthday in mid July and my birthday in later August.
We would always bring up the cats during these weeks and the cats would go crazy at nights. One time our cat Angel got stuck behind some furniture that was placed diagonally across a corner wall. It was because of Uncle Buddy that we learned that cats love to play with pipe cleaners. Our cats would go into his room just to stare at him for hours and I'm guessing it was partially due to that.
Before 1988, we had an old Beta camcorder. This thing was rather large and had to have a really bright light on top of it when we were indoors. I don't think we used it too often up there. I have a vague memory of my dad aggitating Uncle Buddy, then rotating the camera 90 degrees for some reason. I remember thinking it was the funniest thing when I was a kid but I sadly can't find the tape so I don't remember what my dad said. I
have found stuff from 1987 which included my uncle waving his butt at the camera, which was also pretty funny. Later that night it showed my sister, our favorite cousin and me playing. It was my birthday and my dad asked me what the date was. I sorta mumbled it, and my cousin was frantically trying to get me to repeat it.
During the early years we didn't play too many video games. We brought up all the Atari 2600 games early on but my parents always made my sister and I do other stuff. Under the bed were a few containers containing a bunch of toys. The best thing we had was a bowling game. You set up the pins and they're held up due to some magnets. Then you pull back on one ball that's attached to the outside of the board and it snaps and hits the bowling ball. Our parents gave us each a drawer and in my drawer when I cleaned it out was a piece of paper with the results of one of our bowling games. I can't remember who won.
I began collecting small games at 99 cent stores around this time. We got several magnet games. These were small games that you kept the pieces inside by folding them up and they could fit in your pocket. The first few games were classics like tic-tac-toe, chess, chinese checkers, while the last few included a baseball, football, and basketball game. I forget which game it was, but one of the games was virtually unplayable. It was either the basketball or baseball, but the instructions made two players roll two dice to figure out what to do, but it never made any sense. It was probably the basketball because I remember that baseball told you that if you roll something, you get an out or a double or whatever.
I also got quite a few electronic games. I can't remember what they were called so I'll have to describe them. One game had a hippo head opening and closing it's mouth. You had to put a blue marble down and snap it into his mouth. Another game was a frog that lept up and ate something when you pushed a button. Your goal was to collect all the flies hanging on a tree before time was up. I think the tree popped out like the pieces in Perfection. A third game had a mad doctor and some round pieces that spun around him. Your goal was to first flip the pieces to reveal the magents on them, then to push the button again to get a hammer with a magnet to pick the pieces off the board. The mad scientist was thrown off the game if the timer ran out. I really should look for these games and make a blog entry about them.
I had a few windup toys, as well. My favorite was a shooting gallery where you had to knockdown four cans, even though you could win by pulling the trigger as hard as you can and snapping it. The rest of the games just involved pulling the trigger and snapping balls from one poin to another. For example, there was a monkey that swung back and forth and you needed to get balls (usually eight) into its arms so it could drop them off in the goal area. Many games were like that. On the side of these small games were the titles you got for your score.
We were really into puzzles at The Beach. We had several plastic bags filled with puzzles from Disney, Woody Woodpecker, Snoopy, and one Mario puzzle. Most of them were 100 or less, but we did have a couple that went up to 200. I think it was the Snoopy puzzles that took the longest. I liked the Mario puzzle, but it was too easy at 60 pieces. The weirdest puzzle was the inverted Disney puzzle. We were so use to looking at the box while putting the jigsaws together that it was weird that everything was inverted.
The rest of our toys included several toys we had when we were toddlers. We had one Snoopy toy that you pulled to cause Snoopy's ears to spin while it made some noise. We had some toy workbench where you drove in plastic nails and screwed in plastic screws. It had a ruler too, but I stupidly gave that away to our favorite cousin.
We had a Mr. Potato Head and his Missus, but we also had a lot of the Potato Head Kids from some cartoon show from that time. The kids were lumps that basically had two holes, one on their head and one on their bottom. You couldn't do much with them besides exchange their hat and feet. Still, I always thought it was cool that we got a rarer Potato Head Kid that looked like Hermes because my mom sent away for it.
Ok, enough with toys! Let's move on to something else.
We had a basic cable service at The Beach. Everytime we went we had to pull out a paper and remind ourselves where all the channels were. Despite this, I think my sister and I watched a lot of Home Shopping Network. We were at the age where non-cartoons bored us. We would watch these channels when we couldn't think of anything else to watch. Thankfully we knew better then to bug our parents to buy anything on these channels. At night our parents watched a lot of Nick at Nite, which was good when it showed stuff like Gilligan but I hated when it showed stuff like Alfred Hitchcock or Superman. I really hated it when I was trying to go to sleep and the tv was still on at eleven for some drama that I thought was dumb.
I wish I could have been a little older back then. The UHF channels started dying before I could have appreciated the cheesiness they offered. My mom said that she saw an MST3k-like show which I believe is called "
Canned Film Festival" while up there. It would have also been fun to compare the local "Delmarva" stations to the more professional Washington DC stations back home.
Delmarva is a silly name, by the way. I've always thought that.
Delaware used to have a lot more farms, so there weren't as many places to go early on. There was a mini-mall across the street from the McDonald's that marks our turn off Coastal Highway. We used to visit this mall a lot because it had a Superfresh grocery store and a Roses, which was a local Wal-Mart like place. The inside of the mall had a Radio Shack which may still actually be there. It also had a big food court. At it's peak, there were all kinds of things to eat, but my favorite was a place called "Hot Diggety Dog", a perfect name for a hot dog restaurant. Sadly, after it's peak, the mall quickly started losing stores, even Hot Diggety Dog. Roses and Superfresh lasted for a while longer.
One of the places we always go to is Rehoboth Beach. For us kids it had
Funland, which I can spend a whole post on. Basically it had rides, arcade games, and games where you can win prizes. I don't think too much has changed so I will save this for another day.
Other places at Rehoboth included two 99 cent stores back then. This is where I got stuff like the aforementioned magnet games and some pins. I collected a few pins shaped like states. Those can also be shown on a later day. I ended up hating these stores when I became a teen, but for then there was some interesting stuff. There were also a couple tshirts stores, although there are half a dozen today. Some of the tshirts were dirtier then what I was used to. One tshirt had a guy stuck in the butt cheeks of a really fat woman. Another tshirt had a parody of a drug PDA
See Dick Drink
See Dick Drive
See Dick Die
Don't be a Dick.
Some of the stuff I've seen in later years makes this seem tame, but this was pretty memorable.
There were a couple arcades, but I didn't play in them too much at the time. I did play mini golf on the roof of one of the arcade places.
We rarely went on the beach itself. My sister and I hadn't learned to swim so we were wimps when it came to the ocean. We once bought some sand castle toys from Rehoboth Mall, but we didn't have
any luck building a single thing.
When it came to swimming, we preferred a pool. And there was a public pool in Nassau Park where our aunt and grandma had a trailer. There were two pools, really, but we soon abandoned the kiddy pool. The other pool was L shaped, from 3 feet to six feet vertically and eight feet for divers. I could probably save this for another day.
I think I'll end it here. There's a lot more I can say about Delaware, but I want to save the 1988-1994 era to later posts. For now, I'll leave us with one embarrassing story. One time it was early in the morning and I wanted to go outside and play. I decided that I could just dress myself that day. Which I did, and I got outside and ran around for less then a minute before I realized I was missing something. I forgot to put on my pants, so if anybody was looking, they saw a young boy running around in his underwear for a few seconds before running back in.
