Biddies is definitely the correct spelling. Cite.
As for the origins of Stranger Danger? I don’t know about everyone else, but I can tell you almost exactly when it began in my house: Autumn, 1980, probably October.
I was born in 1969, grew up mostly in the country - no worries about strangers there, because no one was a stranger. Our neighbors were all relatives in some form. Our relatives’ neighbors were more distant relatives. Their neighbors were related by marriage. (I’m really not exaggerating.) We kids could roam a pretty far distance, and played in the woods and the creek - between our place, Grandmother’s, Granny’s, Uncle Johnny’s, Aunt Carrie’s, and Uncle Ralph’s, we could range over about 1500 acres (minus the livestock pens, tobacco barns, and the mechanical shop.)
We moved into town when I was 7, but it was and is a small and stagnant town - everyone knew everyone, had known everyone for decades and generations. As it turns out, my mother was a little more protective than most of the other moms in our neighborhood - we could roam about 1/4 of a mile in any direction, but the boundaries made sense (railroad track, busy highway, busy highway, woods that belonged to a commercial timber operation.)
We moved to another town a year later - I was 8, my brother 9. We walked to and from school (I just mapped it - 1.1 miles each way.) We walked to the corner store, to the park, and maybe once we sneaked into a vacant house just to see what inside a vacant house looked like.
Two years later, we moved back to the farm. We still had the same boundaries, but by then, my brother was 11. He wanted to push the boundaries. So one afternoon, after school, my brother rode his bicycle to his friend Ricky’s house. (This wasn’t allowed, because Ricky’s driveway was on a blind curve on the main road - Mr. L had been hit several times while turning into his own driveway, when a speeding driver came around that curve. A kid on a bicycle wouldn’t have stood a chance.) My little sister - then aged 6 - followed, probably on the basis of “if you don’t let me I’ll go tattle.”
When my mother realized that she couldn’t find her eldest nor her youngest, she freaked the hell out. She put me by the phone, in case anyone called with a report, and she went looking. And when she found them? She beat the tar out of both of them. Seriously.
This was the last autumn of the Atlanta Child Murders, a few months before Wayne Williams was arrested. Never mind that we lived 200 miles away from Atlanta, never mind that neither of my mom’s missing kids fit the profile of the kids disappearing in the state capital. My mother’s immediate fear was that someone had taken her babies.
And that’s how we learned about Stranger Danger in my household.
