The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
For the first 18 years of my life, give or take, summers were clear-cut and closely tied to the school year’s beginning and end. And for virtually all of those years, school started the day after Labor Day. Labor Day also marked the start of football season, the end of the tourist season in my tourism-oriented hometown, and the growing season’s end. It was a clean finish to the summer and an unmistakable kickoff of fall.
Then things got fuzzier. My senior year of high school, classes started the Monday BEFORE Labor Day. The powers that be insisted it was just the way the holidays fell that year, and the school needed to open a week earlier to accommodate the Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter breaks. Still, they never went back to a post-Labor Day start. A year earlier, the NFL had expanded their season from 14 to 16 games and kicked-off the Sunday before Labor Day. High school and college games were moved up a week, and before anyone realized it, the full-stop punctuation of Labor Day had become a hazy semicolon between the seasons.
In my youthful years of a definitive summer’s end, Labor Day was treated with begrudging respect. Not the Fourth of July’s bombastic patriotism or the solemn reverence of Memorial Day, but a sense of one thing ending and another beginning. For students of my era, Labor Day was really New Year’s Day. Our extended family, including my brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, always had a big end-of-summer cookout, often at East Harbor State Park, but occasionally at Catawba State Park or City Park in Port Clinton. My father, who could not stand things to be undercooked, would incinerate burgers, hot dogs or chicken. My mother would make macaroni salad and orange fluff. The year my brother had a boat – it was a short-lived hobby – we took a boat ride, but usually we just played horseshoes or lawn darts, admired each other’s big blocks, and shot the bull.
When we got home from the cookout, usually around seven, it was time to lay out the school clothes and pack up the pencils and crayons and Goldenrod tablets and Elmer’s school glue and Prang watercolors for the next day. Backpacks wouldn’t become a thing for another decade, so we packed it into geeky little pseudo-briefcases, or in the later years, a gym bag.
I didn’t hate going back to school the way some kids do. For the most part, I was excited to get back and see my friends and teachers and do cool stuff like making a stained-glass window from wax paper, string and crayon shavings. But there was a part of me that lamented the loss of possibilities the last day of summer represented – the ability to wander the woods or the lakeshore or lose yourself for a full day building an airplane from a cardboard box and a pair of toy pinwheels. There was an order to school, a cadence, that one part of me found comforting, and another found limiting. For me, that was always the tradeoff of the last day of summer.