Time now for more memories of Old Marietta … When Martins or starlings blackened the sky every summer evening on their way to roost in Glover Park in the middle of the Square and simultaneously blackened the tops of cars parked around the Square?

When all the theaters observed the Blue Laws and closed during church hours every Sunday afternoon and then re-opened for one showing around 9 p.m. and nothing else was open except drug stores?

When your family was considered very fortunate if your father owned an automobile?

When school closed the last Friday in May and didn’t re-open until the Tuesday after Labor Day, which left three full months of freedom, with not one thing on your schedule? A real vacation meant visiting relatives for a few days.

When a real baseball-loving kid would find a radio somewhere and listen to Dizzy Dean and Al Hefner broadcast the Game of the Day on a hot summer afternoon. If you were lucky, you would hear the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox or Chicago White Sox, or maybe the Boston Braves against the New York Giants, rather than the St. Louis Browns against the Washington Senators or the Philadelphia Athletics.

When a kid with a homemade flip, not a slingshot, and a pocket full of small rocks thought he was armed for an African safari. He was always on the lookout for a small forked limb to make a replacement for his present firearm. Other Summer pastimes were bumblebee or lightning bug collecting in fruit jars, four-leaf clover hunting, peashooter battles, tying strings around the legs of June bugs (same family as the Japanese beetle) and sporting your own personal flying machine, marble shooting, mumbly peg wars, homemade kite flying (not just in March), and skating on your steel, ballbearing skates if you were lucky enough that yours lasted this long after Christmas.

When every kid collected newspapers, saved metal, aluminum foil and rubber and put them in large bins at all the schools to aid the war effort?

Bill Kinney is associate editor of The Marietta Daily Journal.