When I first received them my best friends Joey, Aaron and I spent hours playing SpaceMen and ridiculously complicated games of Hide-N-Seek. Then, a few days before the end of the school year, it seemed our teacher Miss Reynolds ran out of things to teach us. With 24 school hours left in the term a field trip was planned to our local police station. The planned trip sparked a new game in our imaginations. To be honest the game wasn't really new, a variation on Cops and Robbers, we like to think of ourselves as Crime Solvers, Ness and the Untouchables in blue jeans. The game played pretty well until the last day of school, field trip day. We had built the trip up in our minds over the past few long evenings of play. Now the excitement of a trip ten blocks from our own homes was at the impossible pitch only youth can achieve.

June 1963

It was June 1963, though I suppose the year doesn't matter much (for I am certain that the essence of childhood doesn't change much). Still it was June 1963 and the year matters if only to explain to the younger generations why my friends and I were so excited when I received, a month earlier, a set of Walkie-Talkies for my 12th birthday.