Cruising the GAP!

Cruising the GAP!

In those days, we all jumped into a car and drove around town looking for adventure.

I grew up in a small town on the west coast of the US. In those days, the population of Grants Pass was somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 people. Today there are somewhere around 40,000 people. Some things have changed, but many things remain the same.

In the early 1970s, before cell phones, iPods, or any small portable device beyond a simple transistor radio, this ritual happened every Friday and Saturday night. We called it Cruising the GAP.

I don't remember who came up with the term, but it came directly from our age group as we grew through the rite of passage called High School. As I understood it, the GAP was short for Grants Pass. We learned at that age that the unofficial name for our town would forever be the GAP.

This was the teenage ritual practiced in our little town, part social experiment, part mating ritual, part escape from the small-town boredom infecting our generation long before any e-toys had been invented.

We cruised the GAP from one end of town to the other over and over and over again.

Much like a scene out of the movie American Graffiti, cruising the GAP was a real experience. The town was set up on a North/South axis, with a split off to an east/west portion at the south end.

We only had a few options in those days. There was the Bowling alley known as Caveman Bowl -- Caveman was the town mascot, the idea we all rallied behind as a sports name for Football, Basketball, Track, etc. It gave us some sense of identity, belonging, school spirit, etc.

Then there was the nearby Rollerdrome, a multipurpose roller skating rink and dance hall where local bands could play, and teens could get together for some fun, maybe even some smooching or cigarettes in what was known as the make-out room. It was always dark in there, no matter what happened on the big floor.

Our band frequently played at the local roller skating rink called the Rollerdrome.

Aside from that, there was either the local walk-in movie theater or the drive-in theater. We only had one choice, so the variety could have been much better. Most people didn't have cable television in those days, so there were only two TV channels, and radio reception was also minimal due to the surrounding mountains. We had two primary radio stations. One was more or less a country and middle-of-the-road standards from Hollywood style, an easy listening station, and the other mainly played TOP 40 and news programming.

To make a long story short, our options were limited, so the one thing we could do was Cruise the GAP. Several of us, usually with our closest friends, would pile into one car or another, pool our coins, and drive from one end of town to the other, which consisted of an approximate six or seven-mile loop, more or less. At the top end were a few restaurants, like a Denny's Restaurant or some other chain of national eateries. We often congregated for a late plate of fries or something more substantial, depending on what we could afford, before we called it a night and headed home.

Small-town social groups were vital to us, as important as our daily schooling. While Cruising the GAP, we learned some of our most important life lessons. But that really is a longer story. It will have to be part of an upcoming book at some point.

Indeed a million stories across the country and worldwide were similar to Cruising the GAP. What was your experience?