My Tahoe Summers

Another writing class assignment: Write about a summer tradition or activity:

Most of my childhood summers involved a week at Lake Tahoe. We would rent a cabin for a week up near Agate Bay on the North shore. We never went alone; at least one other family would go whether it was family friends or cousins. These trips made a huge impression on me, so wonderfully fun and exciting! Just getting there was an experience: Mom would wake us up (but who could sleep the night before anyway? It rivaled sleeping on Christmas Eve! We would excitedly make our beds and put on our pedal pushers, T-shirts and Keds and gather what money we had earned to take on the trip…so many weeks of saving up to lavishly spend! My sister and I always made each other little activity books for each other to help pass the time. My sister would wrap up little presents for me after completing a certain page and giving her a code word. It was so much fun! Mom never thought to provide any sort of entertainment for us kids and the only snack were raisin oatmeal cookies for my dad…yuck!! My favorite car game was Rhymee Stymee where we would describe two rhyming words and have the rest of us guess what the words are. (For example: What is punishment for cutting down a Christmas tree illegally? A “pine fine.”)

After driving for so many hours and going over the Donner Pass (always thinking about those poor souls) we would finally pull up in the dirt driveway and enter this cabin home for a week. The water was so refreshing and cold and really sweet, we would all drink way too much and get tummy aches the first day. Just a summer tradition!! We would be paired up with a cousin for KP duty and various other chores. The cabin had a phone but of course no television or radio. There were shelves full of Reader’s Digests whom nobody ever read. A week before our trip my dad would always go to the So Pasadena Public Library to check out oversized books about the Old West to take for the week just to peruse in the evenings.

The older kids would hang out together and have “teenage parties” etc. The “little kids” would hang together and play hide and go seek, Follow the Judge to Court, Poker Face, Murder in the Dark, etc. Traditionally all would play card games every night and put on skits of every kind to entertain the adults. Every ghost story known to man was recited year after year, prickling the hair on the back our necks and leaving us wondering if they were really true…

Jody Ricks and I, 1961. Saddle shoes and a moo-moo??

It was tradition to get extremely sunburned of course, leaving us a bit miserable for a day. We swam every day, laid out with baby oil to work on our sunburns for hours, walked down to the lake to fish for crawdads with a line and hotdog for bait. One year my cousins cooked up dozens of the little crustaceans for dinner. I just didn’t have the nerve to try one. My cousin Timmy was especially enraptured with the little creatures. For years we called him Crawdaddio.

While the dads played golf the moms would take us kids to Tahoe City to the souvenir shops. My favorite place was this little store that sold every type of penny candy known to man. Shelves and counters covered with jars, boxes and piles of candy…and each piece was one penny. Oh, it was a child’s paradise! I remember one time just looking and looking at everything while Hank Williams twanged, “Hey, Good Lookin’” on the radio. There was a little place called the Pinecone Café that served the most wonderful chocolate malts. I remember eating lunch there with my mom once. There were souvenir shops of various kinds to lure the change from our pockets. I still have this antique-looking green glass bottle I bought in a souvenir shop there.

July 1987 Spjunion Lake Tahoe. Here we are in front of Bacchi's Italian Restaurant.

Each year that we went to Tahoe we had one evening where the adults and sometimes the kids went to Bacchi’s Italian Restaurant for a nice sit down dinner. This had to be my first experience eating lasagna. Oh it was wonderful! In 1987 we had a Spjut Family Reunion in Lake Tahoe, my last time there. We all went to Bacchi’s and enjoyed one more nice Italian meal there.

One year we went to the movies and saw 2001, A Space Odyssey. My brother, a huge science fiction fan, loved this movie but I found it pretty boring and confusing. Sitting on the front row of the theatre didn’t help much, either. Oh well, it was still fun! I made the mistake of asking him to explain the movie to me and after about thirty minutes I was still just as confused, or maybe more.There was the year my sister brought her friend Sue Schofield along. Sue was an interesting person, she only ate peanut butter sandwiches (no jam, no honey, just peanut butter on bread), overly well done French fries and hot dogs (plain on a bun, no ketchup or mustard). I’m not kidding…this was ALL she would eat…EVER. (Even when married, Sue would cook for her family but never taste it.) My mom knew the quirky Schofield clan and accepted Sue and her ways but she drove my poor Aunt Maida crazy! Maida spent the week being appalled and frustrated that Sue wouldn’t eat her cooking or anything else but a jar of peanut butter.

As a city girl, I was ever fascinated with the gorgeous blue jays and the cute little chipmunks and squirrels that abounded the woods. There was the year  that my cousin Lisa and I spent hour after hour building traps (made with boxes, sticks, string and Cheerios for bait) and waiting patiently in the bushes hoping beyond hope to catch a chipmunk to bring home for a new pet. The chipmunks and squirrels just laughed at us from the trees, but we had fun anyway. I think our moms wondered what we would actually do if we caught one!


We would play miniature golf, go kayaking, hike in the woods, collect pinecones and pebbles, buy our precious little items to remember this summer kingdom when, weeks later, we would find ourselves once again imprisoned inside a school classroom ruled by spelling tests, math problems and book reports.