I remember block parties in So California in the 60s and 70s. I lived out my youth there, all my school days were at the green house mid way down the block on Jackson Ave in Orange, California. It was a block of ranch houses, all built similarly, one story, 3 or 4 bedrooms, garage. Many homes were also equipped with 2 parents and 1 to 4 kids, batteries not included.
Each year one of the block party organizers got a permit to block off the ends of the street and we gathered in the street. It was a self contained event, safe from cars driving through. We’d set up a volleyball net that spanned the pavement and play till our hands were ball-blistered and our foreheads were sun-singed. The kids would bike all around, never mind if it’s sidewalk or street. After the sunburns and skinned knees, we’d end with a fireworks show we thought could only be beat by Disneyland.
The middle of the block was where everyone naturally gathered, handily, right in front of our place. A row of card tables bought from Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog, or earned with books and books of green stamps were set out on the sidewalk with cotton tablecloths billowing in any possible breeze on a hot California day, or from any passing kids on bikes. Those were the days we would clothes-pin playing cards to the bike, just where the card would fwap fwap when the spokes hit them and make an extra breeze along with the noise.
My mom always made her signature bean pot with four, count ’em four, kinds of beans, a spin off of barbecued beans, with mom’s special touch. I have no idea what the special touch might have been. I wasn’t partial to beans. I’d always go for the hot dog, ketchup, mustard, pickle relish (the sweet kind) chips, potato salad and later, dessert. My favorite neighbor always made a red velvet cake, one of the least necessary kinds of food ever invented, but at least it had frosting and was a fascinating deep maroon color inside. It was traditional, so we knew what was coming when it came time for the cake cutting. That first time I experienced it though…the cake color was a shocker.
I always ended the day with a sunburn. You have to expect that. After hours of riding bikes, bumping or spiking a volleyball or eating at a mid-street picnic table while dads barbecued and moms chatted over spent paper plates or mother-henned the food tables, most of us got a sunburn on the 4th.
To warm up for the fireworks, the kids all had small cardboard boxes of sparklers and “snakes,” small black pellets that expanded into charred snakes of ash after being lit. After dark was the best time to light sparklers, but some people can’t wait till dark. Our imaginations ran circles around the shapes we could draw. We tried to guess what our friends were writing in the air with their magic wands of flickering sparks. Some could manage only their names, but really, isn’t that enough for a kid? Ephemeral sparkler skywriting.
As night fell, Chuckie, from the house across the street, and his dad set up the fireworks purchased with pooled funds from the whole block, for a relatively spectacular show. This was one day that Chuckie didn’t have time to throw rocks at neighbor kids. We weren’t afraid of Chuckie on the Fourth. He was busy helping, handing his dad the next glowing punk for lighting a fountain or spinner and like an amateur magician’s assistant, or maybe like Vanna White, he would relish the ooh’s and aah’s from his neighbors who sat on folding chairs and stained pine picnic benches set out in the street like a two dimensional amphitheater.
At 9PM our party wound down and some of us would watch the Disneyland display from any available vantage point, a roof, a ladder, or standing on the picnic benches in the street. Like a cherry on top of that red velvet cake, a few booms and flickers from Anaheim finished off our Fourth of July. Maybe Disneyland beat our block party display by a mile, but the whole day added up to a terrific opening act.