Each week, I share my childhood with my grandsons.
Question: What was the best gift or experience you had for your birthday?
Birthdays were a pretty big deal for me when I was a kid. It wasn’t unusual for 20 to 30 girls to come over to our house for a cookout and sleepover. The grocery bill for my parties must have been huge what with the cases of soft drinks, hamburgers, and hot dogs, not to mention the cartons of eggs and bacon Mom bought for the party. Daddy used to complain he’d find coke bottles in the craziest places for months afterward.
Daddy would man the grill. Those were the best hamburgers and hot dogs in the world! Then after dinner, we’d have a birthday cake from Pat-a-Cake Bakery and ice cream. I loved birthday cake and would always go back for seconds.
The first year I had a sleepover, we slept on the screened front porch at the house we were renting. It ran the length of the house and with the weather so mild, we lined our sleeping bags on the floor. We’d play records and dance or talk or play games. On my eleventh birthday, we had a basement with a pool table so we played pool or sneak around the neighborhood, tapping on windows and scaring kids we knew. Then we’d collapse onto our sleeping bags and get a couple of hours of sleep.
The other thing that always happened on my birthday is my Granddaddy Smith would give me $2 in Kennedy half-dollars. We shared our birthday–he was born September 28th, 1903. I was born September 28th, 1961 when he was 58 years old.
