In the 1960s we lived in the Garden District of New Orleans. Too crowded and my father didn’t want me to talk like I was from that part of New Orleans, so we moved. I was about 6 or 7 when we moved so I don’t have many memories living there. We moved to Metairie (a suburb of NO) where I lived until I went off to college. It was a great place to live. Not nearly as crowded then as it is today. Like most people of my age, you could go anywhere you wanted, but just me home when the street lights came on.
Same as you until junior high, except repalce Illinois River with Kankakee River. Had to be on our way home when the street lights came on or Dad yelled out the front door, whichever came first.
My junior high years were in a housing development a couple hours north of NYC. Wasn’t all that much different, really. Lots more hills, much closer to department stores, and more wooded areas instead of cornfields.
Oh yeah, until junior high the swimming place was a quarry within walking distance. It had been the town’s first business until they hit spring water.
Junior high, it was a lake within bicylcling distance or a walk to the pool, membership dues were required for the latter.
Houston- 1970s-1980s.
I lived in Alief, which is now a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but at the time, it was a solidly middle class suburb. We were about 4-5 miles outside the city limits, and there was literally a farm / cattle ranch separating our subdivision/town from Houston proper. (it ran roughly down the Sam Houston Tollway from just N. of Bellaire to roughly Bissonnet).
All the parents seemed to know each other somehow, and we went out and played in the yards and up at the church on the corner, or the elementary school up the street, or at the subdivision swimming pools 2 streets over.
There were lots of kids in the area- most of my elementary school friends lived within walking distance of my house and the school. We had pickup football, basketball and baseball games in our neighborhood, and as we got older, we’d branch out to other nearby neighborhoods where middle school friends lived.
Pretty fun stuff, although there was a period in the early-mid 1980s when Houston had a sort of economic downturn and the neighborhood changed- a lot of the wealthier families moved farther out- past Highway 6 to new areas, and then their houses got rented to a lot of people who could afford to rent them, but couldn’t actually afford to buy houses in our neighborhood, so the character changed- not so many kids, and those that there were, were of a different sort of upbringing than the rest of us- tougher, more conflict-based. Things went from being a big gang of neighborhood kids to being a series of cliques centered around bullies, almost like I imagine Somali warlord culture being.
Upstate NY. Lived fairly out in the country – dirt road, couldn’t see the next neighbor, 1 mile to the nearest general store (which granted I only knew about cause it sold treats, but I believe they also sold hardware.) Had a stream out back that I would occasionally follow. During the season we could pick wild black raspberries and make completely delicious turnovers. Mom had a job at a center for retarded adults but also tried to farm a bit. We never sold much but could have farmed enough to eat without buying any vegetables if she had mixed up the crops enough instead of going all-pumpkins one year, then all tomatoes, etc.
Every other weekend my brother and I would go to our dad’s in a nearby village where he lived a block from the village center, so it was really a small town existence. Shady trees near the sidewalks, (not to mention – actual sidewalks), many playgrounds within walking distance.
When my dad and his wife had their second child together they upgraded to a larger house a couple block away, on the very edge of the village. The housing density was the same but that location didn’t have trees or sidewalks, so I think of the first house as small town, the latter as suburban.
I grew up in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in the 1960s and early 1970s. I have very fond memories of playing with all the kids in the neighborhood. There was a wooded undeveloped lot that we called “The Jungle” right near my house. We had a ton of fun in there!
I remember that a lot of new stores and strip-mall-style shopping centers sprang up as the population increased beginning in the late 1960s. We were able to walk all over town without adult supervision. Oh, those were good times!
From zero to eleven, we lived “out in the country.” Which wasn’t really all that rural, but it wasn’t exactly suburb either. It was on the road between a small town and a slightly larger small city. Nowhere safe to ride bikes, so we had to get up kickball games or snowball in the front yard or somebody’s backyard. We had woods behind our house and I’d go “hiking” with the neighbor kid. We’d find a stream and play around (not in a sexual way). We also played in an old barn on our neighbor’s property and I climbed any tree I could.
Around age 11, we moved into the slightly larger small city. Really quaint – like any midwestern town. I rode my bike everywhere and had a “come in at dusk” curfew. I was very much a latchkey kid in both homes and pretty much left to my own devices in the summertime. My parents both did shift work and were home by 3:30-4:00ish, so we were not alone after school for long, if at all.
Rural Maryland, there were four working dairy farms within a mile and a half of our house up until I was about ten. That meant lots of room for roaming around. I think growing up in that environment is why I’m pretty comfortable at entertaining myself.
I was sure this post was going to end with you getting in one little fight and your Mom getting scared…
Lute Skywatcher, did you throw anything into it?
We’d moved a lot by the time I was five but then “we” married my step-father (concentrating on good memories now) and “place” opened up like a flower. We lived in a large town that looked like old-time suburbs (the houses were close enough to throw a rock at) but people could keep chickens if they wanted. We raised rabbits and sheep and had a pony there. Our backyard sloped into some woods where all us kids swung on an grapevine but you could climb up the hill to the sidewalk and cross the street to get a Nehi Grape at the corner store. My scooter was my freedom; I bounced down trails to other streets or pushed up past the store to the cemetery (near a friend’s house.)
We lived on the corner and that was our side street. On our front street, you crossed one more over to sort of a main street. Our parents owned a business there, right across from the park. On the walk “home” (to their work) from school my younger brother and I would stop at the bakery for a free cookie, duck into the drugstore and go past the sweatheart chairs to play for awhile in the phone booth in the back (it had a seat and when you closed the door a light would come on) and then on down to check in before running across the street to play in the park until they closed. Or sometimes I played in my favorite alley right up from their place; it was only a few feet wide but it had a wooden gate and I’d drug some cardboard in there.
On some Saturdays my brother and I would ride the bus into town to go to the movies. Our favorite theater looked like a mansion inside and an organ rose up out of the floor to play before the Coming Feature. Other than that, church was a given. Sunday School and church, evening worship, Training Union, Wednesday services, Vacation Bible School…somehow all us kids found time to fight, play, and smoke rabbit tobacco on the sly.
I grew up in rural Idaho, about 5 miles outside of the nearest town (city?) of 45,000. Intensive farm country, so not much in the way of woods – well there weren’t any anyway – it was very much sagebrush desert where it wasn’t irrigated farm land. It was quite sparsely populated, so there weren’t many kids my age around. My brothers and I and the few other kids who lived within a half mile or so would ride our bikes up and down the roads, playing kid games like jousting with cattails and torturing grasshoppers. We rode the motorcycle far and wide after we got one in about 1970 (License? We don’t need no stinking license.) What I remember most about my upbringing is that I often felt lonely and isolated. I longed to live in a big city, with museums and music and restaurants and fun things to do and the hum of commerce and industry 24/7. I left my home town in 1976 and have been back only once.
In the crossroads that I grew up in in late 1940s/1950s in inland Southern California, there were perhaps 6 stores, including the post office, soda shop, and a bar. I expect that somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 - 400 people lived in the surrounding 20 sq miles. We had an orange grove on the east, a neighbor on the west, and a couple of acres to the south where we raised a garden that provided us with veggies, goat milk, eggs and chicken, rabbits and so forth. School was 8 grades all together in a multiroom school. Livestock sometimes shared the playground with us.
Our family home was about 24ft by 32 ft, and held all four of us. In my bedroom we had army surplus bunk beds, a desk, and a dresser. As an adult I could very nearly reach across the room in one direction…it was about 10 long. I raised tropical fish, and scorpions in glass tanks in my room, and had a collection (26) of snakes in the basement - where I also raised rats for the snakes.
After school I would often visit my best friend at his house about 1/2 mile away (You were a great friend, Donald), and in the summer we were free to roam around after we took care of our chores.
Summers were hot; the days were fine, but sleeping was done on the top of sweaty sheets as there was no AC or fans. At christmas time, I got a stocking of nuts and candy…the old ribbon type, and orange slices. Easter was about church mostly, but we still had egg hunts and such. Halloween was a great night of visiting houses and getting apples, pomegranates, popcorn balls, and candy.
In the late summer, we would pile into the car, and drive on Highway 66 into Los Angeles to go to the big Sears store, where there were escalators! I would get a pair of shoes, a couple of pairs of jeans, tidy whities, and socks for the coming school year. We also went before Christmas and ooohed and aaawhed at the decorations; one year I sat on Santa’s lap. On the way home we would go by the decorated homes by the Santa Anita race track.
We had trips to the beach a couple of times in the summer, and visited MT Baldy to play in the snow in the winter.
It was great! I ate fried chicken and okra, homemade ice cream, biscuits and Mom’s gravy, and didn’t have a care in the world looking back. Of course at the time, I wondered if Sandra really liked me (I had a thing for redheads even then), and Dad did insist that I memorize the multiplication tables, and there was that bully named John…
No forest, though I once was startled when I went into a grove of trees where I saw a noose. Probably an animal snare.
Big hill we played on–Concussion Hill–as one of the popular sports was to steal a shopping cart and ride it down without concerns as to whether or not it would tip over. But sometimes we’d just play Battle of Ragnarok and roll down the hill once we all died without the aid of a cart.
Then we went up and down Poop Creek and stepped on broken beer bottles and got infections and had to soak our feet in hot salty water 3 times a day.
But other than that, it was a pretty mild mannered area. Good times, good times.
I lived in a tiny coastal fishing village surrounded by farmland. After about age 8 we had the freedom to wander around unaccompanied, down to the beach or across fields or along to the schoolyard, as long as we told our parents where we were going and came home for lunch and dinner.
We thought it was perfectly safe, with no dodgy characters or crime, and the only dangers were sticky situations we got ourselves into, by falling off our bikes or sliding down hillsides.
-When I was in Kindergarten I rode my bike to and from school by myself.
-My dad built his first house (without any home construction skills)
-We knew everybody on the street.
-When my mom visited her friends they were always cooking something good.
-Our city pool was a pond dug out next to (and fed) by the reservoir.
-The streets were tarred stone and when it was hot it would bubble up and we would pop the bubbles with our bare feet.
-milk was delivered to the house and it was placed in an aluminum box by the front door. The kids fought over who got to lick the cream off the cardboard cap.
-nobody was wealthy but we all seemed to eat really well.
-the church I attended was laid out like a cross. The families sat in the center aisles. The single ladies sat on the left side of the cross and the single guys on the right side. Mass was in Latin.
I lived in a poor neighborhood in Memphis (Treadwell school district if you’re familiar) in the seventies. There were kids everywhere and we all played outside all day and into the night in the summer. The park commission came the the park on the corner and supplied lunches and box hockey, and there was a sprinkler when I was very very young. We all drank Tang and ate peanut butter every day, served by one parent or grandparent or another. We rode our bikes and skateboards and skates down the one driveway in the neighborhood with a good hill and the people who lived there never complained. The adults were always watching out for us, and we felt safe. There was a park with a pool several miles away and even at a very young age I remember riding my bike in my suit, towel thrown over my shoulder, without an adult anywhere. We didn’t really have woods but we did sometimes sneak down into the ditch behind the library and walk for miles in the tunnels.
The quarry was actually three ponds in an upsidedown peace symbol shape. One main pond for swimming; the two connected side ponds were usually stocked with fish (grates were used to keep fish out of the main pond). I may have tossed stuff into the side ponds.
Yes, I got my symbols mixed up. It’s like a variant of the Mercedes-Benz logo with the bottom semicircle bigger than the other two.
I grew up on the north shore of Lake Tahoe (Nevada side) and we had only 1500 people in town and just 3 houses on my street. We wandered through the woods all the time. My best friend lived about a mile away by road and half that if I cut through the woods to the street below. My dad built our house with a group of guys that had build most of the other houses in town too. The town was founded in the mid-late sixties and we moved there in '74.
Everybody seemed to know everybody in town. We got invited to go fishing with a guy who worked the checkout at the only grocery store in town. We still had a traditional hardware store, one movie theater (with one screen) and no fast food places.
Bike riding was difficult because of the hills. We lived at 7000’ and lake level is 6200’. We could ride down there and then my dad would pick us up and throw the bikes on the rack to go home.
I grew up in the Atlanta neighborhood called the West End. Urban residential, with a train station just a few blocks up the road, the interstate just a mile in the other direction, and a bustling business community right around the corner. The area was also steeped in culture and history, which made me proud to live there as a kid.
It was mixed income. There were “nice” streets where we’d ride our bikes and trick-or-treat for Halloween, and a few “scary” streets with boarded up homes and lots of kudzu. There was a “good” park (the one we didn’t like as much) and the “bad” park (the one that we preferred). Across the street from our house was the Korean-owned grocery store, where we kids would purchase candy and soda…and where my father (the oldest teenager in the world) would play the archade game Mr. Doo until the store closed each night. There was also the laundrymat, where we would sometimes do laundry if our washing machine was on the fritz…and where we would try for the high score on Galaga. We had Nintendo at home, but it just wasn’t the same.
I’m sure there were dangers all around us, but they weren’t on my radar. Our house was broken into a couple of times, and yeah, it was frightening. But I just assumed this was the occasional headache that everyone had to deal with. It wasn’t until later that I realized this isn’t the case. But it still doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. My parents now live in a safer suburb, with woods and landscaping and everything. But I much prefer the old house and the old neighborhood. No number of stolen TVs can take away the wonder of living down the street from a Krispy Kreme.