by James Thompson

Created on: February 28, 2009   Last Updated: March 06, 2009

I was a teenager in the 1950s. For those of you who are now thinking, "What a lucky guy," I have a bucket of cold water to throw on your imagination. Most of us can identify with the old TV show "Happy Days", but not in the way you might imagine. You see, the characters on that show were very true to life. There was only one "Fonz" in any of the groups prowling the drive-ins in search of cures for raging hormones. The rest of us were along for the ride and a vicarious thrill observing those alpha predators in action. We sat in the car eating our hamburgers and fries and telling lies about our own experiences in the land of petting and pawing.

Knobbie's was the place to be in Indianapolis in those days. It was just like all the other hang-outs everyone else frequented. It's only attraction was it was close to my neighborhood. How many nights did I sit in Fred's car with four other sex hungry boys munching away while the go-getters charmed the prom queens and their more plain companions sitting in Daddy's convertible? Teenage girls always seemed to come in herds of one really attractive female accompanied by at least two other examples of the breed ranging from so-so to downright ugly. On the few times I managed to screw up enough courage to participate in an attempted pick-up, I always wound up with one of the sidekicks.

To tell the truth, most of us were scared stiff about approaching girls. Girls were like poisonous fish to us. They looked good, but they had sharp edges, fangs, horns and deadly stings capable of deflating any ego in an instant. They always seemed to be two steps ahead of us in any conversation, and they always delighted in seeing us squirm. We all knew they were just toying with us lesser examples until something real came along. One of the most humbling scenarios involved some athlete cruising by in his candy apple red 1932 Ford coupe with the loud exhausts. Their passage would prompt a flurry of screams, shouts and waves with us serving as the forest green backdrop.

Sure, I'm like everyone else of my generation. I lie about what a great time it was and how much fun we had at the drive-ins. It's amazing how selective your memory gets with age. Truthfully, I can't believe how shy I was and how I let so many great opportunities pass me by. I thought about trying to help my grandsons avoid my mistakes, but their world is so different from the 1950s. They face entirely different problems, and they must find their own ways of coping with the teen world. One thing is always the same, though. It's still important to grasp every segment of life while you're living it. The only advice I've given them is to jump off every cliff and damn where you land. They don't have drive-ins, but whatever their equivalent is, they need to learn not to be afraid to take a chance.

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