The Banana Seat Squad

Hey Shaggheads! Thanks for stopping by the CurtisTucker.com blog. This is another post about what’s going on at Shaggy Duck Studio here in the Great Plains of America in Enid, Oklahoma. You can listen to the audio podcast of this post below or on all of the major podcasting apps. The exact content will differ a bit between this post and the podcast. You can even go to YouTube.com/@CurtisTucker and watch me on video.

If you’ve been listening to my podcast at all, or listening to the other podcasts that I do, you know that my goal is to write a book. The book is about me and my four buddies growing up in Enid in the seventies and how much fun we had. Much of the book will be based on things that we did as kids with a bit of embellishment added for movie purposes.

The current working title of the book is The Banana Seat Squad. I have created a Facebook page, parked a website and have the logo done. I’ve even got a t-shirt design ready to go. At this time I only plan on writing one book on this subject so there will be a bit more content in one book which differs from what I say on the podcast about possibly writing two books.

The Banana Seat Squad is a fictional tale of five friends that all lived on a street called West Broadway in the 1970s. In the seventies you basically hung out with the kids that were in your school and lived within a short biking or walking distance. All of our gang lived within seven blocks of each other on the exact same street which was also the street our school was located on.

Everything changed for me in 1974 when we moved to a bigger house down the street but in a slightly different corner of the neighborhood. That was the summer before my sixth grade year. The set of friends I had though most of elementary school lived closer to my old address. In sixth grade I got separated from my best friend at the time.

Our elementary school had two sixth grade classes and they split all of the students into the two classes. I became split from all of the guys that I had hung out with before, and they all ended up in the opposite sixth grade class. I ended up with guys from different parts of the neighborhood in my class.

Several of the boys in my new sixth grade class all lived on West Broadway but further down the street to the east. The new house that my mom was renting was just a block west of the elementary school. Once the school year began I immediately met Stayton, who was the kid that had a trampoline and was the new kid in town. Nobody we knew had a trampoline and that was pretty intriguing.

My house was the furthest west of everyone on Broadway and the only house west of our school. Stayton lived one block east of the elementary school, and then a block east of him was Brendon. All three of us lived on West Broadway and were in class together. We quickly started hanging out together after school and I was spending lots of time at Stayton’s on the trampoline. Eventually I stopped hanging out with the other guys who lived near my old address and were together in the other sixth grade class.

Brendon’s parents had purchased an older mansion on West Broadway because they had gotten a really good deal on it. They weren’t mega rich and we never felt like we were in some upper class home. They were just a regular family that just happened to buy a used mansion. On the same block that they lived on there was another mansion next to theirs so there were only two homes on that entire half of the block.

Directly across the street from Brendan was the block that we spent almost all of our time playing on. David lived in the middle of that block with a small church on the corner. I think his block was so popular because of the area around the church and the fact that we never saw anyone there. So we had free reign to use the sidewalk, stairs and bushes for our games.

One more block to the east, on David’s side of the street was Jason’s house. David and Jason were two years younger than us and in fourth grade. Because we lived so close and were always out being active we just hung out together.

A big part of why we hung out together was an outdoor game that we played called Musklins. The five of us were the core group that always played but we relied on other neighborhood kids to make the game more exciting. The game was based on Kick-The-Can with a few neighborhood variations to it. It required at least five players to make it worth playing. We were out every weekend and then every night in the summer playing Musklins, Murder-in-the-Dark or pulling pranks on people.

We all traveled on our skateboards or our banana seat bikes. During the day we would ride all across town and our parents had no clue as to where we were. We would go into pawn shops and buy throw Chinese throwing stars and comic books. We’d also go down the water drainage tunnels under parts of the city and hang out underground.

There was almost total freedom in the summertime in Enid, Oklahoma. Cicadas were so loud in the summer sometimes we couldn’t even hear ourselves talk. Our local creek was called Boggy Creek, which was where we hunted tadpoles, salamanders and turtles. It was such a cool time period. We were riding our banana seat bikes all over town with no supervision, no phones and not a care in the world.

Stayton moved to Enid in the summer of 1974 right before sixth grade. We became fast friends and have been best friends ever since. Jason also moved to Enid around that time and didn’t have many friends. Brendan and I had actually both gone to McKinley Elementary for years but because we were in different parts of the neighborhood we never hung out together. Brendan and David knew each other because they lived right across the street from each other and they both had slightly older sisters.

Stayton, Brendan and I began hanging out together in class as did David and Jason in their class at Mckinley. Eventually we all began running around the area at Brendan’s house where we formed our little five man gang. This was also when we began playing Muscalins across the street at David’s. His block worked great due to the church being there and us not having to deal with grumpy homeowners or jumping fences.

Although we spent time playing on the weekends throughout the school year and had many sleepovers it was the summer of 1975 that was really big for us. It was the first time we were able to spend weekday nights out late playing games in the neighborhood. We had three great summers together before things started to change. As we got older our banana seat bikes became less appealing, playing outside on weekends was not in vogue and a distance was starting to form between many of us.

The Banana Seat Squad will be about one great summer when we had adventure after adventure. I’m going to the magic from the summers of 75, 76 and 77 and combine that into one great story. The summer of 1977 was our last summer of fun as a tight group so that’s the year I’m most likely use. Eventually Brendan moved away while Stayton and I had formed new friendships with kids we had in class. We talked less and less with Jason and David until one day we were just acquaintances passing in the halls.

Four of us went on to graduate from Enid High School and then went off to college. I’m the only one out of the group of five that moved back to Enid. As of this writing I am currently still in Enid. I get to relive those memories every time I drive down West Broadway and see our old houses. I pass by the church, the yards and the fences at least once every week as I drive downtown running my errands.

Stayton and I always stayed in close contact and saw each other couple of times every year even though he had moved to Texas. I lost contact with Brendan, Jason and David after high school. I moved away from Enid before returning after several years. Brendan and I eventually got in contact with each other and he came to Enid to visit a few times. With the popularity of social media we’ve been able to stay in close contact.

Jason and I also connected on social media and we stayed in touch. One weekend I met Stayton in OKC for a dinner with our wives and surprised him with a visit from Jason. We all ate, drank and told stories about the good old days. I’ve stayed in constant contact with those three for a few years now. I have not seen or spoken to David since high school. He and Jason talk every now and then but David does not visit Enid.

This book will be the story of us five boys growing up in Oklahoma in the seventies, spending a lot of time on our banana seat bikes and skateboards riding all over town. The Banana Seat Squad is an imaginary club I’ve made up for the story as we never had an official club in the seventies. To be in the squad in the book there will be a set of adventures or dares that everyone has to do. I want to keep the story based on things that actually might have happened or did happen to us. There’s also going to be some type of a mystery or twist that the squad is trying to solve.

I’m going to incorporate lots of seventies references throughout the book including pop culture fads, things we had in our rooms, songs that we listened to, retro snacks and much more. I want people to take a trip down memory lane while they are reading the book. Readers that did not grow up in the greatest decade known to man will learn how cool it really was. I hope it becomes a great nostalgic snapshot of life in the 1970s for kids our age.

I’ve always had a passion for the seventies and the dream would be to have the book turned into a screenplay and then have the screenplay turned into a feature film. The book and movie will have a mix of the Goonies and Stand By Me with just a little bit of Lost Boys or Super 8.

It would be great to get all five of us together one day. It would make for an awesome podcast episode to talk about those carefree times. We had a blast sitting under the streetlight telling ghost stories, snacking on a Space Food Sticks and listening to Boston on the radio.

I don’t know that any photo exists with all five of us together. If it does I have not seen it as of 2023. Unbelievably a color video of all together appeared just a few years ago. One of the non-regular guys from the neighborhood had filmed a day playing in front of the church. I had completely forgotten that it had ever been recorded and he found it in his parents things as he was going through their belongings. It is pure gold and has all five of us in addition to Bruce, Troy, Mike and Tommy.

Here is the video from 1977: https://youtu.be/XHCjp9HHCXA

Here is my longer podcast version of this post: