Angie Klink

Category: Culture Pops

The most memorable summer of my childhood was during “The Turquoise Years.” In 1965, the summer I was six was drenched in that carefree color.

It was the warm-weather glory time between kindergarten and first grade—the first summer I could ride my blue Sears bike without training wheels up and down the sidewalk in front of our turquoise house. I was free to pedal as fast as I could without those extra side wheels jangling and slowing me down. I could balance. I could ride holding the handlebars with one hand and eating a vanilla wafer from the other. I knew all of the idiosyncrasies of every piece of sidewalk and driveway on the block—where the cracks and dips and holes bounced and bumped the wheels of my 20-incher. Up and down the block I pedaled, sometimes crossing the quiet street to ride on the other side, but most often staying on our side of the street, safe.

I’d knock at the door of my blonde, perky neighborhood friend Sherry Johnson. We played dolls, hauling out my turquoise Skipper case or my array of baby dolls, clothes, buggy, highchair and accessories, or we’d swing on the swing set in my backyard. It was an old thing, handmade from lead plumbing pipes. My parents had inherited the octopus-looking contraption from some friends whose kids had outgrown the swing-set stage. The pipes had what was probably their tenth coat of white paint slapped on over years of peeling layers. The weathered, red wood seats of the two swings hung from rusty chains, and the teeter-totter set your teeth on edge honking like a goose, metal grinding metal as Sherry and I glided back-and-forth in the July sun.



My sixth summer was wide open. I had no place to go but outside, under the glow of the season—out to the grass where I could plop myself down and look for four-leaf clovers or collect dandelions and take them into the house to present to my mother who was watching As the World Turns or dusting the Zenith console in her turquoise pedal pushers.

I took no summer camps. I did not attend daycare. Bible school was my only summertime commitment, and I loved that. We made clay mangers for baby Jesus and brought home papers and creations each day. But it was just one week of the summer. The rest was cream.

Our turquoise Mercury was a child’s dream. The car’s top was boxy, and the back window was totally vertical, not slopping like most cars’ back windows. With a flick of a dashboard button, the back window lowered completely, opening to the wind. The minute we got into the car, I’d ask my parents, “Can we put the back window down?” My mother was scared that I’d get my fingers or head stuck in the window, and she didn’t like “all that wind blowing,” as she said, so often she wouldn’t want the window down. But my father would ignore her and press that wonder button. Down the window would swoosh. I’d sit in the back seat feeling the white Naugahyde stick to my legs and the breeze in my dishwater blond hair.

The summer of my sixth year was the best because it was before I was old enough to realize there was anything bad in my world. I couldn’t see my family’s past hurts, grief, mistakes, and baggage. I couldn’t see how it would all rise up in the future. I was still fresh from God. I loved everyone unconditionally, and I thought they loved each other unconditionally.
You can see my naive bliss in the slides my father took during a family picnic under the turquoise carport. I look so happy hamming before the camera. My sisters in their beehive doo’s and their husbands in crew cuts pose for family shots. It all looks so happy and suburban—so very Dick Van Dyke.

The summer I was six, life was perfection in turquoise.