If you didn’t get a chance to be a part of it, you’d never believe it. But trust me when I tell you that the greatest summertime activity in recorded history took place right here in Shreveport during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At Querbes Park, to be exact.

We needed everything to line up perfectly to full grasp the magnificence of it all and it certainly did. Suffice it to say, it will never happen again.

But that’s not our problem.

These days in the summer months, there are activities of all sorts to keep kids occupied. Camps for this and that, daily and weekly activities and just about anything anyone could dream up. All well supervised and, of course, all fairly costly.

Then there is the summer activity that my generation had the massive good fortune to be a part of that was neither costly or supervised.

During June, July and August (remember, school didn’t start until after Labor Day in those days), Querbes Park did the unthinkable – basically turning part of the course into a golf playground for pre-teens and teenagers on certain days of the week.

The rules and regulations were easy: On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays, the front nine was open until noon (and here’s the punchline) … for free.

Yes, free.

Now, I know you are having a hard time believing that. It boggles the mind to think of something like that happening in these times but believe me, it happened. Three times a week.

If you played your cards right, you could get in 27 holes. Tee off at 6 a.m., when there was just enough light to see the ball head down the fairway on #1. Those nine holes could get done in about 90 minutes.

Next time around, the crowd would pick up, so you hoped to get back on the No. 1 box by 8 o’clock. In that round, you had to start dodging all the lawnmowers on the course, but there was a good chance that you could make it under two hours.

So then it was about 10, which is when the rich kids who slept in and got dropped off by their parents would start showing up. Sure, there’d be multiple groups waiting to tee off on any given hole, but we often managed to get in that final nine for a sweat-soaked 27-hole morning.

There was one hard-and-fast rule – when the siren sounded at noon, that was it. Everybody off. None of this I’ll-just-finish-the-hole business. O-F-F. Don’t be the one who ruins it for the rest of us.

Our tennis shoes would be soaked – mostly from playing in the heavy dew in that 6 a.m. round – but then we’d get on our bicycles and head home. That’s right, bicycles. We weren’t old enough to drive and unless mom or dad were willing to do us a solid at the crack of dawn, we had no other way to get there. So we’d throw the golf bags on our shoulders, cross over Youree Drive and have as much free fun as a boy could have on a summer morning.

Lessons? This was the definition of being self-taught. We just played however we wanted to play without worrying about what our clubhead speed or launch angle was. There was no need to go into the Pro Shop because we just played with the balls we would find on the course.

Nobody ever went to the driving range or the practice green. We just walked to the first tee box and made the most of the available time we had.

Remember, we could only play on the front nine. Since we were prohibited from playing the back nine, that part of the course might as well have been Pebble Beach. We all imagined how great it would be to one day get to play on that sacred ground.

But we knew the front nine like the backs of our wrinkled hands. (That’s why when the re-routing of Querbes’ front nine happened a few years ago, it hurt just a little bit.)

I don’t know when this Kids Golf Nirvana started or when it ended, but I do know I got at least a solid five summers out of it. For me, the summer sports stars aligned perfectly, made even better by having tennis lessons in the afternoon at Querbes Tennis Center next door and then baseball practice/game at night.

But it was always the M-W-F, front nine only free golf that was the headliner.

There are so many reasons why this could never happen again. And just as many reasons why it should.

Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com