The End of the Free-Range ‘Stand by Me’ Childhood

Last fall I watched the 1986 movie “Stand by Me” with my 12-year-old daughter, on a lark. She is the same age as the film’s characters, four boys who set out on a quest through the Oregon woods in search of a dead body. The soundtrack, a midcentury greatest-hits compilation — ranging from Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” to Ben E. King’s song that gives the film its title — was music of my parents’ generation: They both turned 13 in 1959, the year in which the film is set. The songs were an auditory madeleine of the summer I finished elementary school; I hadn’t thought of the film in years. The layered nostalgia I found in revisiting it as a parent was, predictably, not only for the era that “Stand by Me” depicts but also for the time when the movie premiered.