I go back to the summer of 1984…

It started quite by accident. The movie Footloose is on Netflix, and since I had never seen it, I decided to watch. It took me back to the time when nearly every song on the soundtrack was a big hit, there was no internet or compact discs in our world. Boomboxes with cassettes were prominent in the movie.

Then June 4 came, and I heard it was the anniversary of the release of the album Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen. That was all it took. 1984 had a hold on me!

It was my first summer living with Jim at his house in Macedonia, Ohio, halfway between Cleveland and Akron. The home had three quarters of an acre of land and an above ground swimming pool. It was a great place for entertaining.

The Springsteen album was our standard background music. The house was a split level, and we could put the stereo speakers in the windows and blast it outside. I know there was plenty of other music we played, but this album is the one I remember best. 

This essay isn’t about the album so much as remembering the people and a couple of events the summer I was turning 29. I dug out a few pictures I have that represent summer weekends at our home, and a couple other related items.

First, check out my office at Freeman Manufacturing where I was the credit and collections manager. The picture was rather dark and taken with a crappy camera, so I adjusted as best I could. I got a real kick out of the seeing the computer. What a lunky box!

I had a couple of friends at work —Jeannie and Arlene—and one Saturday they came and hung out at the pool.

On the 4th of July we had a pool party for friends. It was mostly people from our work places with others sprinkled in. The weather wasn’t super, but the pool volleyball happened anyway.

On my 29th birthday, my friends from work took me to a bar/restaurant called Pickle Bills which was on the Cuyahoga River in the Flats, an up and coming entertainment area. At the time, singing telegrams were popular, and my friends paid to have some Tarzan guy come and sing to me and tell jokes. It was crazy fun, although frankly, he was a tad creepy. (Jim and I had celebrated over the weekend because he played golf on Mondays.)

To finish off this little walk down memory lane, I’m including a video of the Springsteen song from the 1984 album that has stood the test of time with me. I won’t say the summer days of 1984 were exactly “glory days,” but they did represent a certain time in my life where I was enjoying the results of decisions I had made a couple years earlier. Everything felt new and exciting, and so in that aspect, there was a touch of glory!