Ah, the blissful years of youth. My parents are married happily at this point. My mother works from home babysitting kids during the day. I am starting real school now. I am in Kindergarten. Socializing with other strange new people. Exploring the world in ever bigger loops on my bike.
During these years, I spent a lot of time with my cousin Kyle. He is the cousin who was born ten days earlier than me. Our parents would take turns watching the kids. Since we were basically the same age, we had a lot of things in common. But we went to different schools. So we did not see each other until weekends. But on those weekends we really had some fun. I will dedicate this weeks blog the three activities we did most often...
Totem Bowl
We were registered into a junior league bowling. I mean, really junior. Basically, the moms would drop off the kids at the bowling alley and then the kids were grouped up into teams of three or four. We would then spend the next three hours "bowling". Not that any of us were any good at it. But, they did play music and it was fun to see the pins go down and get reset. And I guess I did learn the basics of the game. This was before automatic scoring machines. So, someone else probably had to keep score. If anyone was keeping score at all.
Plaza Theaters
When I was five or so, our little Marshalltown Mall opened up. It was a nice venue with three anchor stores and a handful of other retailers. It was exciting and made Marshalltown feel more like a big city...like Des Moines. Well, in this mall was a new movie theater. It had two screens! TWO! The old Orpheum theater only had one...now our town supported three indoor movie screens and even a drive-in theater in the summer months! We were movin' on up! Well, on weekends this theater would show kids movies or movie marathons for kids. Again, mom would drop us off and give us a few dollars for candy and leave us there for the next few hours. It was great fun to see so many movies. I grew a real appreciation for the Disney live action films of the day. This was before the days of the VCR, so the only real way to see movies was to go to the theater.
Skatetown USA
The third location where our mothers would drop us off for hours at a time was Skatetown! This place was the best! Rollerskating was at an all time high in popularity. The place had a great concessions stand. And it was probably my first exposure to a disk jockey. The DJ booth was right on the corner of the skate rink and you could go up and actually make requests! We would get dropped off there around noon and picked up again at 5pm. Usually all of that skating left us hungry and tired. But, ready to do it all over again the next week!
Those past times were good times for sure. A great way to hang out with your cousin and get away from two younger brothers. I think there was some kind of a discount card that our parents bought which allowed us to go to these places more often. I remember taking that card out and getting it punched off each time we went to any of these three places. And then when the card was done....so were we.
Times have changed. Now Totem Bowl is still much the same....although it seems run down by comparison. The Plaza Theaters moved to a different part of the mall and now feature eight screens! And Skatetown closed a few years ago and was not replaced by anything. No more skating indoors in Marshalltown. Awe...
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