COEUR d'ALENE - Don Pischner looked on as a pair of demolition workers stripped the last bits of wood from inside the building that had been his home for a decade, many decades ago.

In a couple of hours, a track-hoe would rip the roof off, tearing away the 80 ceiling joists Pischner had sawed by hand 60 years ago, when he was only 12 years old.

As he watched, waiting, across the street in the parking lot of the baseball field where he and his friends played regularly, the early-morning rain fell steadily, and now and then he turned on the engine of his S-10 pickup to defrost the windshield and wipe away the raindrops, and worked his way through the memories of a different time on that very spot.

But he would not admit to even the slightest bit of regret.

"I have very great memories," Pischner said. "I had my own 15-acre yard."

Best he can remember, it was about 1950 when he and his dad moved the old tarpaper snack shack named Summertime up to Third Street, and set about building a more permanent place to live and work.

"Dad and I laid every concrete block," he said. "That's why some are a bit crooked. I still have the saw I used to cut those rafters."

At 10 a.m. Wednesday, the track-hoe bit into the bond beam across the top of what had most recently been Parkside Bistro, the little tavern and sandwich shop that had served several generations of Coeur d'Alene residents and visitors until it closed for the last time in mid-April.

The bond beam, blocks connected with lengths of cable to hold the building together, did its job until the last, holding its own against the inevitable surrender to time as the jaw of the hoe tore it apart.

In the 1940s, Pischner and his single father, Irvin, lived just about a block away, behind what was at the time the Kootenai County jail near the corner of Northwest Boulevard and Government Way.

"We had a jersey cow in the field," Pischner said.

When Avery Shadduck went off to war, Irvin got the job as superintendent of City Park.

"I was about 7 or 8, and hung out at the concession stand," Pischner said. "Lillian took a shine to the little boy that was hanging out there."

Lillian Adolphson ran Summertime, and also took a shine to Irvin. After about a year, they got married, and dad and son set about rebuilding what would be Pischner's home and summer workplace for most of the next decade.

"It was kind of tight quarters," Pischner said.

And different times. Irvin put his son to work with a template for the 2-by-8 crown-up roof joists that arched just enough to support the nearly flat roof.

"I had to saw straight up and down," he said. "My dad was strict about that."

After the hard work of rebuilding Summertime came the job of running it. Soda pop - bottled only a few blocks away by Ralph's Bottling, and sold for 5 cents plus 3 cents deposit on the bottle, later 13 cents as inflation set in - plus ice cream and a few other snacks, were the mainstay, and part of the youngster's job was to keep the product stocked, and to carry it to Memorial Field for sale at the ball games.

"I learned a lot here as a young boy, about entrepreneurship," Pischner said. "We provided a service, and I learned about buying things and selling them."

In those days, the neighborhood was a hub of activity that included gas stations, several train lines, bulk stations for Husky fuels, a coal and tar depot and an incineration plant for the Fort Grounds neighborhood.

"That was a long time ago for me," Pischner said. "There is a new vision now. We had a cow, for crying out loud."

And a dog named Fritz, who would head from the snack shack up to an arched bridge around Wallace Avenue and wait for Pischner to head back from Roosevelt School. One day he took a different route home, and later in the day when the dog was still not home, Irving ask his son where Fritz was.

"He asked me if I came home a different way and ditched the dog," Pischner said. "I got a huge whipping."

The baseball field and the beach were a big part of growing up in the neighborhood, and dad was too busy and a bit rough-cut to watch the kid all day.

"He took me to the beach and threw me in," Pischner said. "He told me, 'You're not going to drown. You're going to learn to swim.' I splashed around and sputtered, and he threw me in again. You'd get arrested for that today."

A railroad gang was camped out across the street for a while, and one of the guys came and got Pischner to play baseball every day- another thing that would raise eyebrows today, he said.

Names familiar to old-timers in the city were his regular pals, Al Gittel, Archie McGregor, Bobby Schini and Donna Hamlet (Runge) among them.

"We played at the park," said Runge, whose father owned the Lake-view Court, later sold to McGregor. And for all those years, Summertime, later Beehive, Sunshine Trader and in its final days Parkside Bistro, and a few other names through its history, was a regular stop for countless visitors to the city center.

Razed because the city could no longer lease it out for use as a private business since the railroad abandoned the property, the miniscule parcel will become just another small plot of grass in the park.

Like many who spent time there in their youth but not so much in recent years, Runge was disappointed to learn of Parkside's fate.

"That's so sad," she said. "I think a restaurant there was a good thing."

Another former owner agrees.

"It will be strange not to be able to see it when we come into town," said Gordon Ormesher of Cocolalla, who with his dad named it Beehive after buying it from Irvin Pischner. Then the owners of Paul Bunyan, they turned it into a hamburger stand, still with soda and ice cream, but no alcohol.

"We enjoyed it," he said. "It was fun during that era. It was a different world. It was a summertime, have fun kind of thing."