My memories Dave Dopp

Class of 1963

After WW II ended, my Dad returned to upstate New York. Work was scarce in Oswego, so he headed West looking for a better job. He landed in Painesville working as an electrician for Naugatuck Chemical. I spent 1^st and 2^nd grade in Madison schools until my parents moved to Geneva.

Third grade was traumatic. Leaving my friends behind for a second time was not easy! Making new friends in a new school was hard.

Fifth grade was my most memorable year in elementary school. Miss Schneider’s class met in the basement of the public library. Miss Schneider really turned me on to reading! She had a big box of comic books. If you did really well, you could pick a few to take home to read. She also got me an adult library card because there was very little in the children’s section that interested me.

In Junior High, some of us at lunchtime used to walk down to Pop’s, a little café next to the movie theater. You could get a hot dog and a lemon-lime phosphate for a quarter. It was better than the school lunches! For a nickel, you got a song on the juke box. I remember the first time I heard “Honeycomb” was in Pop’s while I ate a hot dog and slowly sipped a lemon-lime phosphate (through a paper straw).

Remember the little candy shop, kind of in an alley across the street from the school playground and behind the old post office? Many of us would walk over during lunch to get our Pez candy and those little candy dots on a strip of paper. Do they still make those, I wonder?

As we grew older and some began driving, music became even more important. I mean, everyone knows a ’56 Chevy runs better and rides smoother with the music turned up REAL loud; don’t they? I wonder if the “old folks” back then got as irritated as I do today when some young kid pulls alongside me at a red light blasting his Rap music so loud it rattles my windows and jars my fillings. (Then I stop to chuckle. Basically, things really don’t change between the generations.)

Remember the chocolate malts at Reeses? The hot dogs at Eddie’s Grill? Perch fishing at Fairport Harbor? Spending all day after Thanksgiving looking for just the right Christmas tree? And Christmas shopping at Hill’s? Building snow forts? Remember the drive-in theater and all-night movies?

I remember my first real date. We went to the movie theater downtown. I wasn’t old enough to drive so my Mom took us. How nervous I was about putting my arm around my date. I think we saw “The House on Haunted Hill” or maybe “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”.

I remember bowling Saturday mornings at Sonny Lanes. And swimming at the swimming hole above the dam by the covered bridge over Grand River. Remember the abandoned school house at the top of the hill? It was kind of spooky inside!

I remember driving through Geneva-on-the-Lake in the fall after everything shutdown. How sad it looked with no people around.