Growing up in Fall River, 1990

It’s 1990 in Fall River. I wake up for school (I’m in 7th grade) and head down to the kitchen for breakfast. There’s no Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. There’s one thing for breakfast: cold cereal. Cracklin’ Oat Bran to be exact. It’s gross but we aren’t allowed to eat the sugary cereals for breakfast in our house, so I take a few pieces of the cereal out of the box, put it in the bowl, pour a little milk in it, and place a spoon inside. I did this for years, tricking my parents into thinking that I actually ate breakfast every morning. I leave the bowl in the sink and start to make my lunch.

There are no hot lunches at Holy Name School where I attended, so you have to bring one from home. I pack a turkey on wheat with a Kudos granola bar and a Fruit Roll Up. We get milk at school, but I won’t drink it. We didn’t have fancy lunch boxes back then, so I throw everything into a brown paper lunch bag.

I head upstairs and put on my uniform. Back in 1992, there were many Catholic schools in the city: Holy Name, St. Peter and Paul, St. Annes, St. Jean DeBaptiste, St. Stan’s, Dominican Academy. Am I forgetting any? Every neighborhood had a Catholic school. Most of the uniforms looked the same, just different colors. I was in the older grades so I could wear a skirt, not just the jumper but we all wore the same navy blue plaid print on the bottom and a yellow shirt with buttons and a collar up top. Boys wore navy blue pants and the yellow shirts, sometime polos.

I was in seventh grade at the time, so I would push my knee socks down to my ankles and then put on my suede bucks in that sand color. We usually got our school shoes from Jamiel’s in Warren. The year before I wore saddle shoes but I was older now and graduated up to the big kid shoes. All our saddle shoes came from John’s Shoe Store on the Ave.

It was all the rage to tease your bangs and spray them with hairspray, but my parents did not allow me to use any hairspray. Best I could do was tease my bangs and use my mom’s Pumping Curls by Loreal Studio to try and get them to stick. The higher the bang the better, back then. One time, after school, I saw a girl spray Aqua Net out of the can and light it on fire but that’s a story for another day. She was from the Flint. Flint girls were always trouble back then.

We could never wear makeup in Catholic school but we tried everything we could to get around it. I remember one day, I wore a tinted lip gloss called Kissing Koolers and my teacher called me up to her desk. She asked if I was wearing lipstick and I told her I was wearing the new lip gloss. “Well take it off because you won’t be kissing anyone!” she scoffed at me. “And while you’re at it, unroll that skirt!” Us girls wanted our skirts to be shorter so we would roll them up at the top until we got yelled at. I walked to the bathroom in shame and took off the pink stain and returned back to class, cheeks red from embarrassment.

My sister got Love’s Baby Soft as her Secret Santa gift earlier that school year and we shared the small bottle between us. One spray each, each morning, that was it. We needed to make it last because we knew that our mom was never going to buy us a new one.

Last thing I needed to add to my look was my favorite Swatch Watch. Swatches were EVERYTHING back then and if you had the plastic guard that went over the face you were so cool. I can’t remember if I had one of those but I will never forget my Swatch. Powder blue with a blue, pink and white face. I thought it was the best one in the class.

My mom worked at the administration building for the Fall River Public Schools back then so she would drive us to school first and then head to work. We would get into her Volvo 240 and some times we would stop at Lil’ Peach on Robeson Street where she would run in and grab a pack of smokes. Then she would drop us off at Holy Name and that was that.

After school, we walked in a patrol home. We lived on Maple Street, all the way at the top of Stetson Street. We would walk in a big group home and would always take our time. We would stop at a friend’s house along the way or wait outside of the Sub Shoppe on New Boston Road (next door to where New Boston Bakery is today) for the one friend with money to go in and buy a chocolate chip cookie. We would keep walking up Stetson Street, which at this point, was a one way down and when we would get to the house with the stone wall, a black and white cat we called, of all things, “Cat” would come running out to greet us. There, I would take out my brown paper bag lunch that I never ate and gave the turkey to Cat. The following year, he stopped coming to meet us and I never knew where he went. To this day I wonder what ever happened to Cat.

The further up Stetson we would get, the less kids there would be, stopping off at their own homes or turning off to their street. My sisters and I were the last ones in our patrol most days and we would get to the top of Stetson and often see our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Stone in their yard.

Back then, we just let ourselves into our house and locked the door behind us. We used the phone in the kitchen to call our mom and work and let her know we were home, and she would always say the same thing: “Lock the doors and set the alarm.” Sometimes, if we were late, we’d walk into the phone ringing, my mother calling frantic asking where we were.

After school, I would make Kool-Aid for my sisters and I, but I probably was taking a swig from my mom’s Crystal Light Pink Grapefruit that she kept in the fridge. I remember one time, in the summer, I took a drink from the Tupperware container she put it in and didn’t realize she had added vodka to it from the trip to the beach the day before. I never did that again.

We went up to our rooms and did our homework, waiting for our mom to get home at 4:15 PM so we could go outside and ride our bikes. As soon as she got there, we were out the door, no phones, nothing. We literally were told to come home when the streetlights came on or more specifically “when it started to get dark.” We would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and meet up with friends inside Oak Grove Cemetery, or “The Cem” as we called it. We’d wait for the boys to come by wearing their Vans and riding their BMX bikes so we could flirt with them and then rush home because we were late.

Getting home, first one in opened the gate to the chain link fence and we would rush to the back of the house. There, we would open the door to our basement, and I can still remember how it felt to push my bike down those four cement steps into the cellar, with the back wheel bouncing as I went down. Last one had to close and lock the bulkhead and it was dark after you did that. And spiders.

We would run upstairs and turn on The Weather Channel and just watch the Local on the 8’s until it was time for dinner. It’s crazy to think about, but this was honestly one of the most entertaining things going on at the time.

At dinner, no matter what it was, we had to drink whole milk and I would drink it all right at the start of my meal because anything less than cold from the fridge was disgusting to me (hence why I never drank it at school). After dinner one of us would clear the table, one would load the dishwasher and the other would vacuum the floor, which was usually me because it was the worst job, and I was an exceptionally slow eater and always finished last.

After dinner chores were over, we would all take turns using the one bathroom to take showers and change into our Esleep sleep shirts and head into the family room to watch tv.

My favorite night of the week would be when The Cosby Show came on, followed by A Different World. This might have been in the fall and not in the spring, but I remember every season waiting for the opening of the Cosby Show and their new dance routine. I don’t remember what season it was, but the one where they all dance with the Apollo in the back is my favorite memory.

After shows were done, we would go to our rooms and go to bed. No phones. No TV. No music. Sometimes a book. The only sounds we would have is what we heard outside our bedroom windows. I used to keep my rosary beads from my first communion on the headboard and I would take those down and say my prayers and then fall asleep.

Looking back, growing up in Fall River in the 90’s was pretty cool. What was it like when you were growing up in Fall River?