My Personal History
There is a moment in every childhood when the last time happens, quietly and without ceremony. The last time you and your friends stand together, unaware that the chapter is closing. No goodbyes. No markers. Just the slow turning of time.
That thought has stayed with me for years, tied closely to a place that shaped my youth: Assembly Park in Delavan, Wisconsin.
My family’s connection to Assembly Park began in the 1950s, long before I was born, and lasted until the late 1980s. By the time I was growing up there in the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, the park had become more than a seasonal retreat. It was our world. A contained universe along the shores of Lake Delavan, where childhood blurred quickly into something more complex and more complicated.
We grew up fast in Assembly Park, my friends and I. Too fast. Innocence faded early, replaced by bravado, curiosity, and a restless need to test limits. The days of games gave way to nights filled with mischief, pranks, and alcohol scavenged wherever we could find it. The Big Park, the merry-go-round, the beach, the diving board, the lifeguard chair, and docked boats. These were not just landmarks. They were stages where our stories played out.
We learned the park’s geography intimately, inside and out. North Shore Drive. Gene and Wally’s Little Store. Lake Lawn Lodge across the bay. The Indian Mounds. The Inn Between. Hogan’s Goat. The tavern near the old go-kart track. Assembly Park did not feel large, but it felt complete to us. Everything we needed existed within those boundaries.
Winter brought its own version of freedom. We raced our snowmobiles through the park, launching off the Indian Mounds, dodging trees and rocks we knew by heart. We started bonfires that burned on the frozen surface of Lake Delavan while we drank stolen liquor and laughed loudly into the cold night. Sparks flew from our sled blades as we barreled down the hill at the park’s lower entrance, sometimes skidding onto North Shore Drive before pulling ourselves up and doing it again.
Summer nights felt endless. Fireflies, mosquitoes, music drifting from open windows. My friends arriving from Illinois on Friday nights, Don’s Pizza boxes stacked on kitchen counters, our parents heading out to supper clubs, while the park quietly (or not so quietly) became ours. Sundays were heavy with the knowledge that we would soon leave, cars pointed back toward Illinois, the park growing quieter by the hour. The best summers were the ones where Sunday simply became another day for us, and the outside world felt distant and unreal.
Our friendships became everything. They defined us more than school, more than family, more than anything beyond the park. Looking back, I don’t know if we appreciated those friendships fully while we were living them. Time moves differently when you’re young. You assume it will always be there.
And we made mistakes! Plenty of them. But regret is not the emotion that surfaces now. Experience is a hard teacher, and every mistake carried a lesson that only time could reveal. Wisdom, if it exists at all, came from us living through things we didn’t yet understand.
And then there was my first love.
My memories of her are inseparable from Assembly Park. We discovered each other there, clumsily and intensely, in stolen moments that felt monumental at the time. We made promises to each other with complete sincerity, spoken while looking out over a moonlit Lake Delavan, believing fully that nothing could ever change. We had the kind of certainty only the very young can hold.
But change always comes. And it came to us. To me.
By the mid-1980s, through a spat of her infidelity, a loss of trust, and an insanely broken heart of mine, it was clear that our paths were moving elsewhere.
Assembly Park had been the place where the edge of adolescence to adulthood lived, but it could not hold our futures. Leaving was inevitable. When I eventually headed west, a final visit and a last embrace closed the door on that chapter and allowed me to move forward.
I realized growing up happens quickly. One moment, I belonged entirely to a place called Assembly Park on Lake Delavan, and the next, I was carrying the memories with me, quietly, for the rest of my life.
My mind drifts back to Assembly Park at times. I wonder who is walking those roads today. Who is falling in love near the merry-go-round as I did, or sitting quietly at the beach, making promises. I imagine the park at night, snow falling softly, or summer stars reflecting off Lake Delavan’s surface. I wonder which cottages are dark midweek, waiting to come alive on the weekend. The park holds every generation’s memories, layered one over another, never quite disappearing.
If we had known which night was the last time we would all stand together as friends in Assembly Park, perhaps we would have paused. Maybe we would have taken one more walk down the roads that raised us. Tossed a football in the Big Park. Spun the merry-go-round slowly. Looked out across Lake Delavan and tried to memorize the feeling.
We didn’t know. I didn’t know. And that is how it always is. Time doesn’t give us a warning.
Assembly Park, Delavan, Wisconsin, gave us our youth. And even now, all these years later, I still look back at that place with amazement. How did it all become so distant yet stay so real?