Scared of girls!

The summer of 1971 was a very interesting summer for my brother and me. I would say that was the summer I had the most fun, because that was when my friend Ronnie and I started our paper baseball league, sort of a spin-off of paper football. Most any kid from the '70's remembers paper football; well, we just took the paper football and played baseball with it!

That was also the summer when some of the girls in the neighborhood noticed my brother, who was 14, and I guess they liked him, but he was slightly uncomfortable with the attention. Once they detected that, there was no stopping them! There was one of the neighborhood girls that told him, "You're scared of girls!" Whenever they saw him with me and Ronnie outside, they started chasing us around the block. Mainly they were chasing my brother and Ronnie; I was only 9 years old and couldn't do much for them even if they had caught me, which they never did.

This was a sort of turning point for my brother. He’d always been a little shy around girls but this was something that even caught him by surprise. The girls in our neighborhood were like sharks; once they smelled blood in the water there was no turning back. If they sensed that you were scared of girls, they would not hesitate to exploit that fear; in my brother’s case, the girls in the neighborhood were honed in to his psyche like radar!

In my case it was a little different; mainly because I was younger. I was not quite as hesitant around girls as my brother was; I had my first “girlfriend” at 8 years old! She really wasn’t my girlfriend, but she knew I liked her and back then she liked me, too. The thing is, I only saw her twice in two years because she moved out of our neighborhood soon after we started “liking” each other.

Years later, we moved to a neighborhood not far from where she had moved, and we wound up going to the same school. I wasn’t any more or less hesitant around girls by then (I was 13), but she apparently had moved on and had little interest in me by then. Now I knew what “more fish in the sea” meant!

They never caught my brother or Ronnie, either, but they sure made him sweat! Even now when we reminisce about the old days, any time I yell out "Scared of girls!" he gets what I call that "Eddie" look on his face. Forty years have not dulled the senses!

Check out the music trivia below; you probably forgot all about this oldie!