"I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong, After the boys of summer have gone..." Don Henley, "Boys of Summer," circa 1984
It's kind of hard to believe that 40 years have passed since the Summer of '84, a pivotal one in my maturation and, quite arguably, one of the last of my true childhood.
When I say "true" childhood I mean it literally, as the growth spurt that ensued between 1984 and '85 saw me growing nearly as tall as my 6’0 tall father, my voice dropping about an octave deeper than his, and later that fall, I grew enough facial hair to take my first foray into "Magic Shave," a god-awful smelling concoction that was my bridge between a boyish smooth face—and a grown man's razor!
Thinking back, the “Summer of '84” actually started that May, the 12th to be exact, when about six of my friends spent the night at our boy Kevin Caswell's home to celebrate his 12th birthday. Back then, Caswell's house was always a great spot to spend the night for one crucial reason—he had a huge color TV and full cable, including HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime—in his room. Which meant that when we were supposed to be "asleep," we actually were eating snacks and watching R-rated movies 😂.
A few weeks later, with school being out at FAMU High and Bellevue Middle School, my friends and I all settled into the routine of going to the “Kids Get Smart” summer enrichment program in the morning, followed by swimming at the FAMU pool behind Jake Gaither Gymnasium, which was followed by a quick trek back to our houses to eat, change clothes, and spend the rest of the day riding bikes, building forts in the woods, playing basketball, football or four square, and finishing up the day by playing Atari at any one of our houses until it was time to go home.
This era was doubly special to me because my first cousin, Charles Christopher Hobbs, came down from Newark, New Jersey to spend the summer with our branch of the family. While Charles was only five months older, hailing from the big city, he seemed worlds wiser to me— particularly when it came to girls, because he had grown up with his older brothers and, well, knew a lot about a lot things that my sheltered self was utterly clueless about at the time. 😂
Charles was an amazing dancer and by the time he arrived in Tallahassee that June, the movie "Breakin'" had taken the nation by storm as one of the first feature films to heavily feature the rap music and break dancing culture. In fact, Charles was the first person that I ever saw do the "windmill" maneuver live! And when Cuz unpacked his suitcase, he had multiple pairs of the "fat rat" shoe laces that everyone was placing into their Adidas, Nikes, and Converse sneakers! Ever the teacher, Charles had me, his "little cousin Chuckie,” hip to the latest Hip-Hop lingo and gear within a week of his arrival!
The “Windmill”
Now, while 1982 and 1983 had been ALL about Michael Jackson's record breaking "Thriller" album, 1984 was ALL about Prince as both his Purple Rain album and movie hit theaters to great fanfare in late July.
That summer, when we weren't break dancing to groups like Run-DMC, Whodini, or the Fat Boys, Charles and I were reading and memorizing the lyrics and appreciating Prince's sheer genius.
While I enjoy every single track on the Purple Rain album, my favorite song from it was (and remains) "The Beautiful Ones," a love ballad so powerful that his on-screen (and real life) love interest, Apollonia (above), was moved to tears…
True to my eclectic music tastes, the Summer of ‘84 also found me enjoying the soulful sounds of Lionel Richie (Hello), along with Pop/Rock legends Cyndi Lauper (Time After Time) and Billy Idol (Eyes Without a Face), to name a few!
Speaking of music and movies, as we were true 12 year old children, we did truly childish stuff, as the Summer of '84 saw me/us take some of the very last whoopins of our lives. There were two that really stood out; in early June, Charles and I joined several of our friends in using the hidden key to enter our friend Caswell's house—when no one from the Caswell family was home! We were only watching cable TV, mind you, and we knew where the hidden key was because Caswell had told us where to find it. But Mrs. Caswell had NOT given nann one of us permission to enter her house, and after she called my mother and told her, momma grabbed one of my father’s leather belts and got to swinging while simultaneously reminding us both that such was "breaking and entering"—a felony offense! Years later, when I began defending burglary cases in court, I often thought to myself and chuckled "momma was RIGHT!"
The second whoopin' came about a month later when Charles got into an argument at my maternal cousin Eric Williams's house and during the course of the ensuing scrap with our friend Dave, grabbed a pool stick and fractured his skull. When my father went to Dave’s house and saw his injuries, I was sitting on the back porch when I saw him walking down the street with two fists filled with switches. As I hadn't been in the fight, I surely didn't think that any of the switches were for me, but after Charles took his whoopin', Dad called me in the room and gave me one, too, because he said that I should have stepped in and stopped the fight! 😡 😢 😂
Charles and Charles Hobbs in New Orleans circa 2014…
While the butt whoopin' didn't really hurt all that much, what DID hurt was that Charles and I were then placed on indefinite punishment—which meant that we missed just about every classic movie that came out during the Summer of '84, including:
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Gremlins
Footloose
The Natural
Ghostbusters
Our punishment basically meant that we could only go outside to cut the lawn, trim the hedges, or do whatever other physical tasks Dad came up with for well over a month. It was torture, as each and every day, we would hear our friends riding bikes, or bouncing a basketball to go hoop up at the park across from our house, and we couldn't do anything but sit there and read books and magazines (the Atari was moved from my room, too).
By late July, Dad had softened up…somewhat…so much so that when my older maternal cousins Lee and Eric Williams came by and asked could they take Charles and me to see Purple Rain at the old Parkway Five theater, Dad relented and said "yes." I don't think that Dad (or Momma) knew that the film was R-rated (nudity), as such was the first "grown folks" movie that I ever saw in a theater.
Several weeks later, Charles packed up and headed back to New Jersey to start 8th grade, while I was eagerly waiting to start 7th grade at FAMU High! My boys from the hood were all starting 7th and 8th grades at Bellevue Middle; we didn't fully appreciate at the time that we only got to hang out on the weekends, and as we soon finished middle school and entered high school and college or the military, our chances to hang out grew fewer and fewer until eventually, they became as rare as a Papal election. Thank goodness for Facebook, a medium that allows most of us to maintain ties over time and space—bridged by social media!
Now, if you're wondering what has triggered these memories today, well, when Tallahassee got struck by three terrible tornadoes this past weekend, my native Southside, which includes FAMU and Florida State University, took a devastating beating. As I drove through my old neighborhood with my mom yesterday to survey the damage, I ran into one of my oldest friends and partners in crime from the Summer of '84, Jesse Moki, who was checking out the damage near his childhood home as well. We spent about a half hour reminiscing about the old days and how good we had it as kids—back when even the bad days were actually really good ones—all things considered.
Lest we forget...
Love it. Good times being a child of the 80's.