First grade was also at Birch Lane elementary the same as Kindergarten. This now is the 1984-85 school year. One year older, one year, weirder. Our teachers name was Loyola, which was the name of the next street over. Now, a year into this school business, with the same kids as the year before as well, school was a comfortable place and everyone knew everyone.

First though we do a throw back. The Summer of 1984 we drove down to Phoenix Arizona to visit Cindy and Rich, who of course had just the year before left us to start their new adventures. This would reunite me with Melanie and now a slightly older William who was born a couple years after Mel and I.

This was a very familiar feeling trip. I don’t know how long it was but since life pre-kindergarten was always filled with going or having Melanie and Cindy around it felt more normal than the past few months had been with all its new things.

This was also now a year into the post original Star Wars trilogy, which I was still into. I mention this because one thing I remember about being in Arizona that year was clipping the Star Wars comic from the paper in the morning.

Now the weird part about this story is I remember it being cutesy, and meant to be funny, but when I look up the comic strip on google it’s essentially comic stories going off the main plot of the series from the time. But I have a distinct comic Jabba the Hutt, so this is something ill have to expand upon later.

The other main memory from the trip was the thunder and lightning storms at night. One night during a big event I sat outside with Rich and Dad as we just watched these massive lightning strikes off in the distance. You don’t really get storms like that in California and up to this point in my life, Arizona was the most far out exotic place I had travelled to and these storms were intense.

Being away all summer though kept me from really re-investing time by hanging out with friends I made in Kindergarten. I had known one child, Andrew from our time in pre-school and his tendencies towards loud misbehaving was always memorable. But through a lot of first grade I seemed to just be friend with whoever, so a lot of the girls like one named Laura I would play with too at the time.

Her family along with another lived in a complex which I believe was owned by the local university, as far as they seem to own it and have torn it down these days (2023), unless they were in the other complex that looked exactly the same, in which it is still up and on campus to this day. That’s all hard to state and remember since I was so young.

Anyway knowing those couple families, Mom had signed me up for Campfire kids, and so a couple of the girls from class I ended up hanging out with more of the time back then. Then of course next year when Dad would get us our Ti/99, see 1985 for that, Laura would be one of the first kids I would invite over, since she was I think the only other kid I knew that had access to games on that system.

But this was now deep into that toy golden age and the new action figures that came out also meant new status in the playground. We are a year out from anyone even knowing what a Nintendo is, so it’s all action figures and cartoons, all the time. This driving force would start a sort of keeping up with the joneses attitude with other kids collecting the same toys. And in 1984 we would get Transformers, which made the boy end of friendship a real rat race of what you owned.

Next though was a weird thing that was popular in first grade, which was proving you could eat paper. As an adult when six-year-olds do weird things like eat paper we just think they are deranged and write it off. But I specifically remember it being a challenge in first grade that most kids would step up too. A conscious decision by the peer group as a whole to prove you could do it. Along with bragging writes for their accomplishments. A wonder it must have been when our teacher kept getting our workbook pages turned in with missing pieces in the corners.

At this time I would start to act up more, after all if you act up enough you get a puppy dog right? But to me I always felt I was being funny and never took it as disobedience, to me saying something out of turn in class was for the comic timing and it was hard to understand why adults though it was so terrible. Of course, as an adult you also learn sometimes that is just because people never grow up and understand comic timing. But I just had a hard time with the idea of being six and having to be serious for seven hours a day.

Then of course there was an early fad in the first grade that I got very into. He-Man Stickers. He-Man had been a big hit now for a couple years as action figures, but the stickers were about to take Senora(Senorita, I don’t remember the surname anymore) Loyola’s class by storm.

image 59 Masters of the Universe Panini Stickers. A seclection of the He-Man action figures from the 80s

He-Man, not the action figures I’ve talked about, but the Panini stickers and sticker book. These according to the internet came out in 1983, but if my memory serves these up as a major part of first grade. Which makes sense, a lot of things would come out but take a second or two to get saturated enough in the marketplace for kids my age to see them. Once the stickers started making the impulse aisle at the grocery store, then they would make it to the class. These stickers were sold in packs of five for twenty-five cents and could be found at most grocery stores as I just mentioned and anywhere else that could put something kid height at the checkout line.

Oh, the smell of those packs when I opened them is holding receptors in my brain that probably should have been used for things like remembering birthdays. But instead, I have the everlasting ability to see those blue packs and smell the smell. I collected those sticker packs hard, so did a lot of the kids in class. The nice thing about the packs being a quarter and in the impulse aisle at the grocery store was that they were easy throw-ins when going shopping with a Mom or a Dad. Whether it be one pack, or twenty it was a nice incentive to be nice during the grocery shopping chore with the folks. I worked hard and filled up the whole book to complete the story. Once you were something like ten short you could order up the last ones you needed direct and have a full sticker book. I sat down with Mom when I got to that point and cataloged and ordered them up.

Back then when you mail ordered something the four to eight weeks delivery time was no joke. And there is something interesting about two months when you have only been alive for a few years. It’s forever. If and when the stickers arrived, I don’t remember. The He-Man panini sticker trend that was so consuming was over before they ever got to the house. There was a rapid succession of things that came in 1984 off the coattails of the year prior. We have more new G.I. Joe stuff; you could still get Star Wars stuff and Transformers was going to come out this year and would really squashed the care for stickers. Gotta’ save those quarters when you’re begging for a Starscream.

Other things would also come this year to keep my attention shifting. In the Spring of 1984 Mom signed me up for tee ball. In the prior fall I had started playing team sports with K-division soccer. Soccer is an interesting start for American kids, since soccer wasn’t on television at all back then. I obviously liked the uniform though as I can follow pictures through that time with me wearing my bright yellow duds for that year.

image 60 Me at the dinning table in the same soccer unifrom i am using to kick the ball on the right at the community park in Davis, CA. (1983)

Tee ball then in the spring of 1984, would be the first sport that I had some idea of what it was coming in. This first year we were all so little I just remember they would let us all hit one round, then play the field, and no one kept score. By this point I was starting to develop my overarching personality as well, which gave Mom a small catalog of silly pictures when they attempted to take my portrait for the team photos.

It was working though, this was now my second team sport and in the fall we would start up again. And so, I started down the road of watching football with Mom and Dad Sunday afternoons. Now in the 90s this becomes a real big deal, but  right now I was in the right spot in 1984 for football to blossom in my area of the world. This would be the year Dad took me to my first professional sporting event, a San Francisco 49er game in December against the Minnesota Vikings.

Now I remember being at this game, I remember loving the program and scouring over the various statistics and pictures of players for the season. For years I figured this was a game with the Fresh Bill Walsh lead Niners against the aging Bud Grant Vikings. Which was something else considering that’s seven super bowls between those two coaches.

However, in 2022 after years of scouring YouTube the game was finally listed online. I can’t reiterate how important posting these old games are on YouTube even though the NFL frowns at it. History of these live events are so important to some people and the NFL just either sitting on the footage or letting it get lost to the networks trash heap is way more criminal than rebroadcasting a forty year old game on YouTube, and you would hope someone could figure that out.

But what I learned then was no Bud Grant. He had just retried and handed off to a Les Steckle, whom my brain doesn’t remember existing. That game ended at 51 to 7. The Niners had lost one game all year and watching them just walk all over the Vikings hit my six year old brain in the right spot. Go Niners.

This also happened to be the year the Niners won the Super Bowl a month later. That game is the first televised game I remember watching with actual memories. Obviously, I attended a game prior so I had been watching them, but I can remember sitting on the floor and watching the Niners trounce the Dolphins vividly with Dad on that Sunday. Me, Dad, Joe Montana, Dwight Clark and Wendell Tyler, I had a team.

My Soccer team that year was a little kid soccer team. So while the Niners were soaring, most of soccer was trying to get to juice boxes and orange slices, well and goals. After the confusion of K-level soccer, year two we know goals are the most important thing in the soccer world. Then orange slices and Hi-C.

It was around this time that I think Mom started back to college in some capacity. Now that I was in school during the day she didn’t have to stay home and keep me calm. This meant some days when I would go to different day care places and start to interact with a lot of different types of kids.

Decades later I can remember being at these places, mainly the one that was just a bunch of us at my mother’s friend’s house, but I can’t remember the conversations. Instead, it’s just the moments when I was sitting and doing things on my own that really stick out. This is when I can remember swapping arms on He-Man figures, where my Stormtrooper Luke Skywalker story comes from, and pondering why I didn’t have what toy along with why so and so, who was such a jerk, had one. That was an early crisis for me, understanding kids that were just jerks to other kids. I could find being a jerk to be funny if you didn’t mean it, but I didn’t get the kids that weren’t joking. They just ended up looking like dummies to me because there was no punch line to their behavior.

This is also when a very important part of the action figure legacy for kids my age was so important. Nail polish and the bottom of our action men’s feet. Mom’s when kids would go somewhere to interact with other kids and their toys would use a shade of nail polish to mark that kid’s Star Wars or G.I. Joes guys. That way when it was pick up time, all one had to do was turn over the plastic men and collect up their guys to come home with them. So, if one ever say got into vintage loose Star Wars collecting, there are some more than authentic characters out there with painted feet which isn’t an imperfection but just a sign of authenticity.

Back to the Jerk kids though, their behavior would torment little me. Not that they were targeting me, just that they seemed to be rewarded for their bad behavior. By now I have cognitive reasoning and my parents have been taking me to church since birth. One very strict lesson little kids are taught then is that there are rewards for good behavior and bad is punished . If I do good in school I can get a Transformer, which in 1984 were the new rage near the end of the year.

Thus one of the harder concepts to wrestle with at that age is the rewards for doing well when kid x, who is just terrible also got a reward from his parents. I would question the logic, which in turn, poor Mom and Dad, would seem like they were tricking me with their reward system based on good behavior, well minus the Napoleon story.

Of course what I didn’t know growing up was how much more well to do most of the other kids in town were than us, at least in my immediate circle at school. We lived in a suburban bubble. My parents did fine we just happened to live somewhere where others did more than fine and maybe a few of those more than finer’s spoiled kids that maybe behaved terribly to their peers at all times but were still rewarded.

And that’s an interesting thing to wrestle with. It’s not dire like some kid’s situations, but it’s a weird developmental thing for kids in areas where you’re not dealing with hand to mouth issues. Sure, as adults we can wrap our heads around it, but at six adults are just drilling this idea into your head that the world makes sense, and that good behavior is rewarded and bad is punished. But then everything you watch seems to tell another story. First grade what a time.

As I said though 1984 introduced Transformers which became the new fad to essentially replacing the He-Man stickers and almost all else for a while, to the elementary school world. This in turn made for one of my more memorable Christmas mornings.

image 61 Ryan during his absolute moment of Joy on Christmas Morning and The Max Rebo band another item received Christmas of 1984

 

Generation one Optimus Prime and Megatron were waiting for me under the tree that morning. From the picture you can see I got up so early they sun isn’t even up yet. This was the Christmas that cemented the idea that the day can feel magical. Years later when I found Mom had pictures from that day, I was amazed to find the one above, where I could see genuine joy in my face. It helped with the fact that I remembered the event so well. It was an extremely happy day, and the day was hard wired.

Which keeps me coming back to how important this time was at the age of six, a lot more details of things were getting put in long term memory at this age. Also, on this Christmas I would get the Max Rebo band action figure set from ROTJ. Not only can I remember having this toy set for years and recognize it in the background of old pictures. I also remember the process of getting it from the mall in Sacramento. Having to sit in the car and wait while Mom and Dad dealt with the mail order end of it. Seeing the Rancor Monster from ROTJ in the store when we were first there and coveting it. But mainly I remember the design of the mall. Which is funny because over the next decade or so all the malls in Sacramento would overhaul from the generic bland look they had so I can’t for certain say which one it was, but I think it may have been Florin Mall. I could be wrong though since Florin was the only mall to stick with that design through the 90s.

Turns out what kids get can stick. The two transformers were so important to me that even without the pictures the memory remained. While it seems superficial you have to remember how much simpler the world is for kids and how the over simplification of how kids are taught it leads to the importance of events and things, Megatron, a poodle and a program from a football game memories. Talks with important adults at school trying to teach us valuable lessons. Sure they probably happened but I couldn’t pick Loyola know out of a police lineup, but I can remember how Optimus transforms.

Anyway I liked school at this age and I worked to fit in and overachieved as I could. Let me let everyone in on a secret, first grade wasn’t really that hard, so overachieving wasn’t either, if it wasn’t for my behavior I would have been a model student, but you know, I needed a that dog, so outbursts in class had to happen.

After Christmas break and the start of 1985 we have the second half of first grade to go. With my new confidence in learning the class power structure, collecting the right toys and being funny in uncalled for times I started to really get a foothold with the my peers, that being the boys in class. One of the boys, Brian, who had the almost identical name as we worked out in our brains, started mock entering my Mom’s GLC to go home with us at the end of the day.

Mother would tell him he needed to get out and wait for his ride and then we would do these pathetic looking sad faces and say “Bye, bye, bry bry or ry ry” accordingly. For whatever reasons my mind has, I remember doing this especially during parent teacher conferences, which was a week that we got out of class at like 1pm every day.

And it was of course on this backend of the school year that Laura brough over the Texas Instruments games and we played in the office. I only bring this up a few times because one, early gaming and two, after she came over was about the same time the weird little kid boys versus girls thing was forming in our classroom and it would be a couple years before hanging out with girls was cool again.

That feeds into the weird peer pressure that kept building this year, have the coolest new thing, you cant like this you have to like that, eat some paper, curse words are cool to try and get away with saying. As I keep saying that age and that grade are this strange developmental time when school becomes a given part of life’s narrative and friends become a major influence on how one assumes they are supposed to behave.

1984, as much as I sold the years prior, this is one that stuck in my consciousness as meaning something. Beyond all my personal stuff I have mentioned there were national things going on that were, while technically not the first, firsts for me. A presidential election, I wasn’t aware of the 1980 election, but this election, yeah I was. I was a kid, I didn’t have politically obnoxious parents so I really just remember that Reagan came out the champion of the election. That was my view of it at that age. The electoral college wasn’t in the brain until 1988, in 84 I just knew two men wanted to be president and one kicked the other’s backside.

This also shapes how I view Reagan as a person too. I know people grow up and get political, but when I was six he was just the President, and no one could seem to deny him that, so the archetype of what an American president is will always have some Reagan in my mind. I was too young to understand nor care about viewpoints, he was just the president on TV and a winner, and he talked to your football team when they won the Super Bowl. That’s a solid guy for a six-year-old. Oh and he hated drugs and those were bad too.

Also he was down with the Olympics, which in 1984 were in my home state and were such a big deal to everyone. We watched Mar Lou Retton win her gymnastics gold with so much fanfare from Mother on the event, that I thought maybe gymnastics was super important to the world stage. That helped the introduction of Wheaties and so many other things as Mary Lou became a spokesperson to peddle wares to people like Mom and me that just say her as a hero.

And think about it, up until 1984 most of what I remember from TV is cartoons, a lot of which are selling me toys. Well and Star Wars, which was obviously also formative. But here now in 1984, I’m watching live events, sporting events, election coverage, with my parents and retaining what it is and forming my own views on it who could feed and walk a dog and knew which breakfast cereals were healthy! Especially the last one because I wasn’t allowed to have the cereals I really wanted. No matter how much I begged I could have Wheaties or Shredded wheat, but no, no Ryan, no Lucky Charms.