70s-child: Onset Beach:

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Onset Beach:

Back in the day my grandparents used to take us to Onset Beach in Wareham. It was a lot closer than the beaches on Cape Cod. I haven't been there since around '79, but back then it was always packed with people. As I recall the Kayak Center used to be a restaurant / snack shop, and my grandmother used to give me 45 cents to buy a frozen Milky Way bar. I don't know if you've ever tried eating a frozen Milky Way bar, but basically they were so hard it was like gnawing on a block of plywood. To this day I have no idea why I never decided to buy something else, but she told me to get a frozen Milky Way bar, and I figured she was paying for it so what the hell....

Don't expect much out of me for a quarter:

As a kid, I never got an allowance. That's something my folks weren't into. They were very generous with me, I never lacked anything, and usually when I asked for something they'd get it for me, but an allowance just wasn't going to happen. In '76, just before my folks split up, dad decided to give me a "job". It was sometime in January and the weather was pretty brutal, so he told me he'd pay me a quarter if I'd open the garage door for him when he got home so he wouldn't have to get out of the car and open it himself. We lived in a split level house (a raised-ranch), and the garage was in the lower level. The very first night, I was watching TV and I heard him pull in and stop at the garage door. I didn't want to leave my show, and it was pretty cold down there in the garage, and I was rather warm and cozy and comfortable sitting in front of the tv, so I basically ignored him. He honked. He honked again. And again. And again. Finally I heard him open the car door, open the garage himself, pull into the garage and slam the door shut. The way he slammed the door, I could tell he was angry and that I was in trouble. He came upstairs and just looked at me. Let's just say I lost my job that night, which didn't really bother me. A QUARTER??? I didn't get out of BED for that kind of money...