The Chit Book Diet

When I was a kid growing up in Wilton, Connecticut my family belonged to a tiny club called the Wilton Riding Club.  It was basically a swim and tennis club with some horses walking around.  We did not have any fancy dining facilities, just a snack bar and a big barn for parties.

The Riding Club was the summer center of our childhood universe.  All my friends had the same summer routine.  Our mothers would drop us off at swim team at 7:30 in the morning and they would go play tennis before it got to hot for adults to be out on the courts.  We would freeze in the morning pool water, which had to make us swim faster for the hour and a half long practice.

After practice the very young kids would go off to day camp on the back half of the club and the older, like twelve-year old kids, would hang around the pool and jump on the trampoline.  Once you had aged out of day camp most of the “regulars” would stay at the club all day.  We had a routine of swimming and eating lunch and then playing tennis around one in the afternoon because no mothers would be on the courts at the height of the sun.

Lunch for the hangout crowd meant a visit to the snack bar.  The choices were limited.  Grilled cheese, Grilled cheese with bacon, hamburgers, cheeseburger and cheeseburgers with bacon, fries, frozen candy bars and ice cream.  Iced tea, lemonade and half and half (tea and lemonade in the days before Arnold Palmer.)  Payment for these items was through the use of “Chits” which were tickets with .25¢, .10¢ and .05¢ printed on them that were sold in books of ten-dollar increments.

Everyday my mother would dole out our allotted chits for the day.  I can remember that .85¢ was the amount of chits I was given for years on end.  It was perfect training to become the head of the budget and management because your choices were severely limited with just .85¢.

Basically I ran a two-day menu plan.  One day I would get the cheapest main dish, the grilled cheese at .45¢ and then a half and half for .25¢, leaving me with .15¢ to carry over the next day.  The second day I could get a cheeseburger for .75¢ and a cup of water and later in the afternoon I would take my carryover money and my dime left from that day and get a frozen Milky Way bar for .25¢.  All the candy bars were frozen, which was a bonus because it took us three times as long to eat them.

The only time I ever had anything with bacon was on a weekend when my father would take us swimming and he had control of a whole chit book or two.  If I were really lucky he would give me the practically spent book with a few nickel tickets still in it because I had a pool bag to carry it in.  He would forget abut those chits and the next Monday I might have enough to get a Cheeseburger and a half and half on the same day.

On weekdays we usually ate lunch around 11:30 because we all were starving from swim practice. Tennis was the perfect thing to do after lunch since we technically had to stay out of the pool for half an hour after eating.  When we got too hot from running around the red clay courts we would all head back to the pool where we would play categories while jumping off the diving board.   Categories involved the lifeguard screaming out a category to the person at the end of the diving board just as they jumped in the air and they would have to give an answer before they went under water.  The lifeguard might say, “Colors” and the jumper would then scream out something like “Red.”  The older we got the harder the questions became.

At the end of the day, usually around six o’clock, my mother would pull her light blue Chevy Impala wagon into the club driveway and honk her horn.  My friends and I got really good at recognizing our mothers’ various car horns and were quick to alert each other when we were being summoned.  The worst thing we could do as a kid was not come to the car when called because that meant that our mothers had to circle the whole club and park and walk down the big hill to the pool to get us.

By six we were ready to go home because first we were starving.  None of us ever had enough chits to get a good snack.  Lots of time I had money from babysitting at the pool for some mother who wanted to play tennis, but money did you no good in our “Chit book” world.  Our gang of kids also needed a break from each other by late afternoon because inevitably someone had hurt feelings from some slight during the day.  We were exhausted from over sun exposure since it was the seventies, the time of the Bain du solie tans and no sunscreen.  But we were right back at the club first thing the next morning ready to do it all over again, chits in hand.