Hometown of my Heart: Swept up in the Mid-Century of Change

AGE  7️⃣

1️⃣9️⃣5️⃣1️⃣ to 1️⃣9️⃣5️⃣2️⃣

My favorite childhood poem was Now We Are Six by the British author A. A. Milne. That was just fine, until I turned seven. What was supposed to happen then? This is what happened to me.

THE VACANT LOT

Every day after school, I quickly changed into shorts or corduroys for a long afternoon of playing with the boys and girls on my street.

A vacant lot occupied an entire rectangular block across from our house. The neighborhood kids referred to the twelve-foot wide crater in the center as “The Fort” and we congregated there — the pioneers — to strategize our defense against the “Indian” tribes.

We collected sticks and rocks to build an arsenal of rifles, pistols, and cannons. We galloped on “horses” through the hills to escape or attack, hiding under piles of leaves or behind a rise. If I was assigned a Native-American role (a term not used back then), I pretended to be Pocahontas.

The scraggly brush and tufts of wild grass, the overgrown milkweed and powdery anthills, all looked pretty much like a Western prairie, especially when the setting sun shed an orange glow over our territory. It seemed like a distant fire.

The occasional garter snake appeared in the brush, a rabbit hopped up a hill into the woods, fireflies eluded capture in the wide open spaces. We enjoyed an instinctive connection with our surroundings and an unspoken loyalty to each other. We urgently warned all newcomers to stay away from the danger in the poison ivy patch.

When my brother and I came home, our mother ushered us straight to the bathtub and the waiting “99–44/100 percent pure” Ivory Soap bar.

🌱     🌾     🌱     🌾     🌱

Linden, New Jersey wasn’t yet completely suburbanized in the early 1950s, but it would only be a matter of time before a developer made it to this end of town to buy vacant lots for a song.

I felt the biggest shock of my young life when I stepped off the school bus one afternoon, looked across the street, and saw — NOTHING! I froze in disbelief, feeling my heart pounding furiously at the sight of the severely flattened lot, dark red and clawed, wounded.

Through my child’s eyes, the earth had suffered destruction on a biblical scale.

Bulldozers must have leveled the lot during the day while we were at school. I imagined armies of machinery rolling over the ground and pushing everything above sea level — piles of dirt, boulders, broken bottles, even snakes and rabbits — into The Fort, filling it up in a matter of minutes.

“No Trespassing” signs guarded the perimeters. I knew exactly what that meant — Kids Keep Out. Our armed pioneers, even the resourceful Indian tribes, were no match for the march of progress.

Looking back, I see it as the first real betrayal in my life. I think I grew up that day into an “old little soul.” I sensed without quite understanding why that I had to make my own life from now on, and keep out of the sights of heartless adults who plowed over our terrain — and our ties to it — at will.

I needed to be brave, like the pioneers or Pocahontas.

🏡      🏡     🏡     🏡

We settled for playing in the connected backyards behind the four brick houses on my block, three of which were occupied by three sisters and their families. Their developer father had built them for his daughters; my family landed the fourth.

Soon after, as the post-war economy boomed and family businesses prospered, they constructed picket fences between the yards and installed decorative shrubs like pink azaleas, all obstacles to playing freely—again. My grandfather, a union brick mason, built a pink cement patio where we roller-skated or played hopscotch, adapting to our confined spaces until outdoor life finally lost the big-skied sense of freedom we had once tasted.

We plucked Japanese beetles off the rose bushes in the afternoon and captured fireflies in mason jars before dusk,  but knew to let them back into the yard or they’d all be dead by morning.

Even so, a new development of cookie cutter capes or ranch houses didn’t spring up across the street. It turned out that the lot was city property and the town fathers planned to build a branch library on one end of it.

Later on, I spent many happy hours there, doing my homework, exploring the plasticine-covered books confined in tight rows by metal book ends, and leafing through new issues of magazines like Life, Holiday, Collier’s, American Girl, and The Saturday Review.

As for the rest of the lot, it was planted with acres of grass that did not thrive in the absence of shade and a water source. The harmonious balance between the plants, the animals, the weather conditions, the seasons, and the young people who made the land their own no longer existed.

The ease of relationships between the children was compromised as the pace of economic and social development transformed the community into individual units. The new television set in the den and the shiny Oldsmobile in the driveway became primary objects of desire in the race to status — and conformity.

🚘    📺     🛋     📺     🚘

At the far end of the block from the library, the City Recreation Department installed a baby slide and seesaw, a tall metal slide too burning hot to use in the summer, monkey bars where we hung in opposumly positions by the backs of our knees, and the piece-de-resistance, a tetherball pole.

We pedaled our two-wheelers on the smooth new sidewalks neatly defining the previously wild “badlands.” This was our reconstituted outdoors, designed without our consent, a world apart from the natural setting where we scraped our knees and dug in the dirt.

THE GIRL AT THE PLAYGROUND

The junior high schoolers in the neighborhood congregated around the pole, the boys showing off their strength and accuracy, the girls wearing lipstick, hoping to catch the attention of the high-spirited boys. We little kids ran across the street after dinner to watch the competition, noticing one girl in particular with the look and stature of a Hollywood star.

Taking her turn, she swung her wrist with strength and artistry both. The tether quickly wrapped around the steel pole with each whack until it caught tight, then unwound at a slower velocity as we stood, mesmerized. We watched in awe at this stunning show of female grace and power. A mature teen, she dressed the part in tight pink capris and sleek flats, coral lips, flushed cheeks, shaped brows, ready to be a woman.

From the vantage point of age seven, becoming a grownup like her seemed impossibly beyond my reach.

I didn’t know her name but guessed it was most likely a pretty one, like Elaine or Cheryl Anne, not a boy’s name…..like Barrie. Ignoring me and the gang of little kids watching her, satisfied with her ten minutes of ascendance, she simply dropped the paddle and strode off the pavement with her posse, across the street, around the block, GONE.

Another sudden loss, for no reason a seven-year old could figure out — just like the disappearance of “The Lot.”