This isn’t just an attack of nostalgia. It illustrates the differences between the lives of children then and now.
The changing seasons determined our activities. On a warm day of Spring, Wanda Frazier and I would get out our steel, ball-bearing sidewalk skates, and use a key that we wore on a string around our necks to tighten the clamps that fastened them to our shoes and buckle the straps around our ankles. Sometimes a skate came loose, and we got banged-up knees from falling. I can still hear in my mind’s ear the whir-clash-clatter of skate wheels.
After school let out in late May, around 8:00 o’clock in the morning, Wanda would knock on our door: “Mrs. Gard, can Rose Mary come out?” Other times, I knocked on her door. There being no TV, fancy phones, computers or air conditioning, we lived outside, going home for noon dinner, back out again till suppertime, and out again till dusk. When it rained we played on our porches. Our parents weren’t helicopter parents. Mostly they left us alone. We even used Daddy’s hatchet for various projects, and never cut ourselves.
We played dress-up in Wanda’s garage where her mother kept a box of dresses and climbed the plum tree in her back yard. Wanda’s cousin, Priscilla, fell — or was pushed? — out of the tree and broke her arm.
My parents didn’t have a car, so we used our garage as a clubhouse. One summer Wanda, Suzie Scudder and I started a book club to which I took my father’s copy of The Iliad. Wanda brought some heavy tome, but Suzie showed up with a new Nancy Drew mystery. We promptly changed our name to “The Nancy Drew Mystery Club.” Is there a woman our age who didn’t love Nancy Drew mysteries?
Our parents gave us 20 cents for the Sunday matinee at the Alhambra Theater and popcorn from Flory’s. One Sunday we stupidly ran home during the worst downpour in years. Carey St. was so flooded that my uncle, Nolan Kelly, floated along in his homemade kayak. Wanda and I put on our bathing suits and played in the street until Mother saw black slime on us. “Good Lord! The sewer’s backed up!” She dragged me to the shower and scrubbed me with Fels Naptha.
There being no swimming pool, we soaked in a wash tub and sprayed each other with the hose. In August Mother paid us a nickel for each of her hundred or more canning jars that we washed in the laundry tub. We promptly blew our income on pop from Conways’ little grocery.
Our days were brimful with things to do. We played in the vacant lot behind our house and used its falling down fence as a trampoline until I fell, gashed my knee and had to have stitches and shots. We used to climb a tree and dare each other to swing down and balance — no hands — on the eight-foot-high fence pole that was about six inches in diameter. Mother caught us and put an end to that.
We spent hours in a tree house that Mother fixed for us. We stuck hollyhock blossoms on tooth picks to make little dolls dressed in antebellum garb. The neighborhood kids played statues and Chinese tag in Mrs. Gertrude Scovel’s yard and tappy-on-the-icebox, a kind of hide and seek. Best of all was kick-the-can with home base located out on Carey Street. Our neighbors didn’t mind if we hid in their yards if we kept out of their flowers. In the evening we played bicycle slips, a form of hide and seek, where we raced through the alleys at dusk. Helmets didn’t exist, but we never got hurt. After dark I sat on the porch swing with my parents. I don’t remember ever saying, “I’m bored.” wclarke@comcast.net