What comes to mind when you think about growing up in Orem, UT?

I could write a book on this topic.

When I was about four years old my family moved from  North Orem to South Orem: 185 W Lakewood Dr.  The asphalt ended at our driveway, but a dirt road continued on around what would become a neighborhood be the time I left home.  I have a scar on my left foot from playing barefoot in mud puddles in that dirt road.  A piece of construction trash in the mud gave me a bad gash.

Across from our home and to the west was an open field and a dirt trail that led to the railroad track that the Orem Fruit Growers Association used.  It wasn't a fast train.  I could easily outrun it.  If we heard it coming we would run and put metal objects on the track to see what they would look like when smashed by the train.  We smashed mostly pennies, but chains looked really cool when flattened on the tracks.

On the other side of the tracks the dirt trail ran down into a gully.  We called it "the gully" or "the hollow."  An irrigation ditch ran down the gully creating a flume which descended rapidly for about fifty yards and then turned an abrupt corner.  Kids from all over the Orem area would come in the summer to ride this flume which was the original water slide.  Some enterprising soul, seeing how many kids were attracted to this natural slide built one and charged money for it.  The full blown water park originated as a mossy, concrete ditch that kids wore out their cut offs riding.  Cut offs are shorts made by cutting off worn out pant legs.

I spent a lot of time playing in that a gully.  The second great attraction of the place was rope swings that were hung from giant cottonwood trees.  The third was a bank of sand on the far side of the gully.  My friends and I began a dangerous project to tunnel into this sand bank as far as we could.  One day Scott and I had skipped Primary (which used to be held on Tuesday afternoons).  We took turns digging at the end of the tunnel.  The lead boy would dig and shove the dirt behind him like a mole.  The rear boy would remove the dirt from the tunnel.  If the lead boy thought there might be a cave in, the rear boy was to haul him out by his feet.  We thought we were being safe.  You can imagine my mother's reaction when she learned what we were doing.  My older brother Joe and his friends were ordered to utterly destroy the tunnel.

Our next-door neighbor was George and Joy Bennion.  Their children were our closest friends for much of our childhoods.  Mark was just older than I, Brian and David were just younger.

It wasn't long before the road past our place was developed and homes were built and sold.  Orem was growing faster than about any place in the country.  So I remember playing in the excavated holes that would become the basements of the new homes.  We were chased away when caught.  Kids could damage a construction site and a kid hurt on a construction site was a liability.  This didn't stop us much.  The earth dug from one of these basements formed a nice hill on which we would play "I'm the King of Bunker's Hill."  We would play "Ennie, Mennie, Mini, Mo" to determine who would be "it."  This person would stand on top of the hill and call out in an authoritative voice, "Oh, I'm the king of Bunker's Hill, and I can fight and I can kill!" upon which all others in the game would try to throw him off his perch.  Yes, there were a few broken arms from this game.

The neighborhood children would gather on summer evenings to play "night games."  These included Hide and Seek and Kick the Can.  When I was very young No Bears are Out Tonight was a favorite.  "It" was selected in the usual manner.  "It" was the bear and would hide.  The rest of the participants would then prance and skip about the yard singing, "No bears are out tonight.  Daddy shot 'em all last night."  When someone got too near the bear's hiding place, the bear would rush out to grab them.  At this point everyone would run screaming for "home."  The person caught became the new bear, and the game would continue.

Dad owned a lot that was to the southwest of ours.  I remember Dad growing corn there.  I also remember a brother or cousin lighting the field on fire and trying to put it out with a garden hose and sprinkler.  Dad sold the lot at his cost to a colleague, Don Peck who had a son, David, who became my close friend.  The Peck's had a TV which was a great draw because we usually didn't have one.  David and I both attended the BY Lab school, an elementary created where the BYU Education department could experiment with elementary education.  This meant that I was getting cutting edge stuff.  Our first business after school was to watch Batman and The House of Dark Shadows.

David was a great friend, but he had two older cousins, Danny and Jerry who were sexually abusing him.  I didn't understand this at the time, but looking back I can clearly understand what was going on.  It would have been better for those cousins if they had had a mill stone hung about their necks and been cast into the sea.  But that's another story.

A couple of years later a home was built between us and Pecks.  Don and Carolyn Donaldson moved into this home.  Their oldest child was a boy just younger than me named Scott.  Scott and I were best friends until I graduated Jr. High and went on to Orem High.

That's probably enough for now.  More in a week.