Now & Then
Prior to moving here from Oneco, we spent a lot of our weekends traveling out dirt road 70 to the patchwork 9 foot road and across a couple wooden bridges to visit Grandma and Grandpa Parks. They had built a home out here several years prior to us moving to Myakka. So I was no stranger to the area when my parents decided to make this our new home.
My adventures of growing up in Myakka City began in the 2nd grade, in a 4 room school house which went from 1st thru 8th grade. If my memory serves me correctly there were 99 kids enrolled in the school in March of 1969 when we moved out here. There were 4 teachers (they taught 2 grades each), one of which doubled as the principal. The lunch room was about the size of one of the new classrooms at the new school. There were two ladies who worked in the lunch room, one of them also doubled as my bus driver. Mrs Ozzie would get up in the morning and get the lunch room open along with Mrs. Ruth and then head out to pick up the kids on her bus route. I think there were, at the most, about 10 of us on her bus.
I remember thinking how cool it was that everyone out here knew each other out here. The bad part was there were no “neighborhood” kids to play with after school, major culture shock for this 7 year old! But, I had grandma right up the road. I’d ride my bike to her house in the afternoons and we would sit and watch the Flinstones while we were putting together patchwork quilts. I can’t say which I enjoyed more, the cartoons we watched or the stories she would tell me about raising 6 sons and 1 daughter. I think my father found these stories less amusing that I did. When I would run up to him in the evenings and say, “HEY DAD! Guess what Grandma told me you done when you were little?”, he would often get very quiet.
Growing up during my younger years I spent a lot of time riding my horse and fishing. Oh, and yes, we had girl scouts to attend one day a week also. Almost every Saturday my mom would haul a truck load of us girls into the old skating rink for a day in town. There were no clans, or clicks back then, we were all friends. At school we would sit on the playground and talk about thinks like the Viet Nam war, the latest movies, and what we thought we would be doing in the year 2000.
During my teenage years I think it would be a fair estimate to say that we spent half of our lives at Crane Park. On Saturdays it was the town meeting place. There was usually a fire going and someone had a cooler full of oysters or a hog on the grill. Maybe some mullet if someone had a good fishing trip. People would bring their guitars and amps and we’d have our own little jam sessions. There were also the square dances that use to be held at the blue building. For a change of pace, there was the Saturday night cat fishing trips at Flatford bridge.
The biggest event in our lives was when we started high school. Off to the big city and the huge school. That first day of 9th grade at Southeast was often one of total terror. We all braved it together. There was only 1 bus back then that took us all into town. Myakka City was still a small place at that time, but growing fast.
