“What can ever equal the memory of being young together?” ― Michael Stein, In the Age of Love
Perhaps it’s because it’s the day after Halloween and the sight of all those delighted kids in costumes, maybe it’s due to social media and the TBT (Throw Back Thursdays) photos on Facebook. It may also be prompted by friends and family who are amateur historians and family genealogists, or maybe it’s simply because I’m at the age and I’ve become that older person who likes to reminisce about the past. I remember the past as being a simpler time. As a memoir writer I can also edit my stories, edit my past, and remember the glory days. Some days it’s comforting to remember just the good times.
As a baby boomer born in 1950 in the Midwestern United States, I can truly say I’m blessed (or in my case, the agnostic equivalent). When at the age of six, I moved with my parents and younger sister Roz, into the first and only home my folks purchased and that we lived in on Hayes Ave. in Racine, Wisconsin. I knew immediately I was a lucky girl, as soon as I looked down the block and saw kids, at least a baker’s dozen playing outside. Each kid was within a year or two of my age. I had landed in a boomer’s playground.
First day of Kindergarten, 1955
Our family had moved into this post-war, FHA-financed neighborhood with starter homes for returning vets and young families. Nearly identical Cape Cod-style houses lined each side of the street for blocks, as far as one could see. The square boxes were only distinguished by minor embellishments. Some had dormer windows like our house; others had a bay window in the living room, some floor to ceiling windows in the front façade with shutters, exterior colors varied, white or hopeful pastel shades of pink, yellow, green and blue, yet each house was sited identically, side by side. From a distance it looked like a freight train with square box cars. The land beneath the homes was flat; no variation in terrain, subdivided by green grass, concrete sidewalks, and the street; yards and boulevards adorned simply with newly planted trees and shrubs which grew taller as we did over the years.
Until we moved into our new home my only friends were my sister Roz, a collection of adult relatives, my parent’s friends, plus Marge, the young woman who lived behind us on Racine Street. I quickly applied the social skills I learned as an eldest child, and a child accustomed to being around adults. Soon, I was one of the neighborhood ringleaders, able to instantly recruit a gang of kids for backyard games, rough and tumble horseplay, make believe, or to put on a backyard carnival.
My family possessed the prime real estate of the neighborhood, the corner house with a side yard and no garage. Everyone congregated there. It provided the largest unencumbered space for playing Red Rover, Spud, Statue-Maker, Captain, May I?, Yes, No or in the Barrel, and of course the mainstay, Tag in all of its variations.
We’d adapt playground games too, Four Squares became Two with sidewalk squares delineating the boundaries, Hop Scotch morphed into a sidewalk board game, players became life size tokens while chalked instructions told us to move ahead one square, back two, miss a turn, tell a joke or sing a silly song, until someone finally reached the end, or we got bored, had a fight, or someone got called home for supper. At night when cars approached our house driving down the street, we’d dance in the headlights that projected our shadows against the side of my house making our own rudimentary moving pictures.
Summers, my sister and I became neighborhood impresarios, producing backyard carnivals with the help of our mother. We’d pitch a tent using blankets and quilts over the clothesline in the yard like seasoned roustabouts, set up a table for refreshments Mom made including: Kool-Aid, chocolate chip cookies, fudge brownies, and popcorn.
We’d enlist friends from the neighborhood to sell tickets, post signs on telephone poles and within an hour have a backyard full of kids. Word of mouth is how we communicated back then. It was the baby boom, and our neighborhood was busting at the seams with elementary-aged children looking to find Disneyland and become a Mousketeer in their own backyard.
Roz and I would stage a sideshow featuring magic tricks and display weird bugs and furry caterpillars in jelly jars. I was the featured act in our big top, the blanket hoisted tall in the middle of the clotheslines using wooden poles to lift it higher. I performed comedy routines, adaptations from Mad or Cracked magazines or original stories featuring a character I created, a combination of Lucille Ball and Charlie Chaplin, named Linda Binda.
Winters, Roz and I would turn our snowy side yard into a four room house, building walls and furniture, packing down the floors until they became icy rinks. Neighbors would drive by to look and the kids would congregate in our backyard in their snow pants and hooded coats with scarves tightly wound around their necks, covering their mouths while their breath escaped through the wool, and mittens and snow boots protecting extremities. We’d play until dark when we were called inside. Mom would always comment on her beautiful girls with their rosy cheeks, ask us if we wanted cocoa, and park us in front of the heat register as she’d stoke the coal furnace.
Our parents seldom worried about us. We knew our boundaries, one square block and two sides of the street, always in earshot, so a parent could open a door, yell out our name and we’d would run home immediately, or suffer a consequence depending on the family’s preference for spanking, taking away allowance, assigning additional chores, or the worst, being “grounded” or losing privileges.
If we wanted to play inside, parents would talk on the phone and give approval. Inside play was special, reserved for rainy days or special events, like birthday parties or the occasional sleepover.
Around the corner from our house lived Phillip and his older brothers. Phillip had a sandbox and all the Tonka trucks a boy, or girl, could dream about. His mother would hose down the sand which made it easier for us to build and create. Phil’s older brother built a fort in the rafters of the garage.
One day I got in trouble when my mom called me home and it took me a while to get back, even though I was two doors away. His brother, a boy scout, was practicing his knots, literally tying me up. When we heard my mom calling, he untied me and I ran home. When she demanded an explanation of why it took so long, my answer made her both angry and upset. That day I learned to never let a boy, even if he’s a boy scout and a neighbor, tie me up.
Three doors down the street on the other side of our house Kevin resided. He was an only child; his father built a scaled replica of their house for him. Yes, a boy with a playhouse. Kevin was different, whip smart with an incredible imagination and the largest collection of Cracker Jack prizes I believed existed in the world.
When I wanted to explore imaginary worlds, Kevin was the tour guide and I his sidekick. We’d slip out his back gate into the field behind our houses, one square block of an open field, the yet un-built phase two of our housing development. There we built time-travel machines and space ships out of scraps of wood and metal we’d salvage, or climb a dirt pile and play war games, like Hamburger Hill, pelting clods of dirt at my sister Roz and Phillip. When bored, we’d pick milkweed plants, tear open the pods, blow and disperse their silken contents into the wind.
On the other side of the street lived the Hudek’s. Dad once dated Mrs. Hudek before he married mom. On the rare occasion when you were invited into their home you couldn’t go in the living room. It was an adults-only space; my parents said it was her showcase living room.
Down the block was the Brandt family. Like mine, there’s was a Roman Catholic family raising a brood of kids. All their girls started out with “J” names, Jane, Joan, Jackie until the first boy, Chuckie was born. Once they broke the pattern the remaining kids’ names began with different letters of the alphabet.
At the end of the block lived the Jamieson’s who had three children, Christine, Carol, Larry and the neighborhood mascot, a liver-colored English Springer-Spaniel named Freckles. Mrs. Jamieson would drive us to school sometimes in the winter. She’d never scrape the ice completely off the windshield instead she’d take her fingernails and chip away two peep holes. Needless to say it was always a scary ride, but at least we were warm.
Once she ran over my red Schwinn two-wheeler bike which was parked at the edge of the driveway, the front wheel forever misaligned as a result. Carol introduced me to Barbie Dolls and was the first girl in the neighborhood to “develop” and grow to resemble Barbie.
Back on my side of the street, across from the Jamieson’s house, lived Debbie Mickleson, the sweetest, blondest, blue-eyed Danish girl and probably my first girl crush. When at the age of seven her family moved back to Denmark, I was crushed. Where in the world was Denmark? Was it a city, or a state, could I visit her?
This experience prompted my first geography lesson and awareness of just how big this world was that I lived in, far bigger than the square block, and two sides of the street where I played growing up.
When I look back, my neighborhood and my first friends took me places I never imagined I could go and were the best and the brightest memories of my young life in boomer’s playground.
