In Late 1963 or early '64, my brother began dating a girl namedCarol. This would normally have not been a significant event. A few of our gang were dating back then. What made it significant was that Carol had a sister and between them they had friends, all girls.
Up until that point, our gang never really hung out with members of the opposite sex. I guess that, by today's standards, we were late bloomers. It's just that there was always more fun to be had hanging out with the guys than going out on a date.
A good example of this was when one of our friends was coerced into taking his date to see 'My Fair Lady'. Then after the movie, to add insult to injury, he was made to sing the entire lyrics to 'The Rain in Spain' before he could get to first base.
The next day, when we gleefully related to him our adventures of the night before, he angrily swore off girls until the year's end.
As it turned out, Carol's house was a hangout of sorts for her and her sister's friends. After school they would meet there for a bit before homework and dinner.
My brother was able to persuade the sisters to allow our gang to also meet there in the afternoons, under the condition that we not go near the refrigerator or any breakable objects. Of course we agreed. It was the winter after all, and too cold to gather outdoors.
It turned out to be a great after-school hangout. The girls were attractive, fun, and nice (in fact, I ended up marrying one of them), and it was a short four blocks from my house.
After a while, our good behavior (we didn't break anything and only raided the fridge on rare occasions) allowed us to go there on weekend evenings.
Carol's parents, as it turned out, went out often on Friday and Saturday evenings. The girls would inform us of their absence by the following method. If the front porch light was on, the parents were home, if the porch light was off, they were out.
Many a chilly weekend night was spent in the wooded area across from their row home waiting for that porch light to go off. Sometimes the parent's car would gone but the light stayed on. We surmised that on those times, the girls just didn't feel like dealing with us. But most of the time the light went off on cue and we'd run out of the woods cold and grateful.
Unfortunately it was on those nights when stuff did get broken. We'd play games like 'hide and go seek' with the lights off (as I said in other blogs, those were innocent times), and sometimes, in the dark, things got a little rowdy. But the sisters always had a good excuse for their parents whom I'm certain, after a while, thought them to be extremely clumsy (or very poor liars).
Eventually when some of us began to date, we used the basement for make-out sessions. Because of privacy issues, only one couple were allowed in the basement at any given time (we were banned from the second floor bedrooms for the obvious reasons). So we used a kitchen timer to monitor each couples basement stay. On crowded nights, it was 15 minutes per stay. On less crowded evenings, it would go up to 30 minutes.
We did have some flexibility with this system. When the timer went off after 15 minutes, the basement dwellers had the option of evaacuating that area or buying a part, or all, of the next couples time. If you were lucky enough to follow a particularly horny couple, there was good money to be made. Some of our gang who were broke, purposely followed these couples just to make a buck. But most of the time the kitchen timer rule worked like a charm.
The girls became known by our gang as 'The Rat Pack'. I'm not sure how that label started but it seemed appropriate at the time. I think the girls just called us 'the idiots'. We ended up having many adventures together that will be spoken of in future writings.
The guys and girls still did things together even after I enlisted in the army. When I returned from Vietnam, I proposed to one of the rat pack members, Veronica. We married 6 months later.
And yes, after almost 40 years together, we still occasionally set the timer for 15 minutes and head down the basement.