Good whatever time it is, daughters, when you read this.
If
you noticed my most recent blog post, you will know that I want to
catch up on some things that I regret not sharing with you in your
younger days.
First on the list, what it was like growing up in the particular manner that I did, in the particular environment that was mine.
Parkway Place in the 1950s was part working class, part white
collar. I remember widows living with their spinster daughters. I
remember a retired policeman. For the most part, watch an old "Leave It To Beaver" and you'll get the idea of the kind of street it was. Parkway Place was heaven.
Our home was at
2399 Parkway Place in Memphis in the middle of a long block that runs from East Parkway
almost to Hollywood. Through traffic was not possible, so it was pretty
quiet traffic wise.
Our house is what is usually referred to as an airplane bungalow with a first floor and a second perched on the back of the house. Until renovating the upstairs several years after we moved in, there were only two bedrooms. The front room was for my parents; the back room was for the children. There was a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and one bathroom. Considering that the two of you spent your lives (for the most part) having your own room, you need to imagine what the sleeping arrangements were like after Mawmaw had Uncle Andy and Uncle Steve. It was when she was pregnant with your Uncle Richard, that they decided we needed more room.
Truthfully, around the time I was thirteen or fourteen, they renovated the upstairs and gave it to me as my bedroom. It had a built in desk, built in shelves and drawers for my clothes. Best of all, I had my own bathroom.
Around the same time, Pawpaw tore down an old decrepit rotting garage and replaced it with more of a storeroom for equipment he had to sell. It sat up on a concrete bed, about two feet high, and, therefore, could never be used as a garage. The raised platform was ideal for me when I was learning how to throw a baseball, although the metal door on the front of the storeroom probably still shows dents where I threw too high.
We had tried to put a basketball rim on the old garage, but it didn't work out. It was a first effort for both Pawpaw and me.
When we got the new building, I asked Pawpaw if I could remount the rim on the new building. He told me if I could make a backboard and attach the rim so that it would not come off, we would put it on the building. I learned a lot about countersinking screws so the boards would not come out. I did it with an old fashioned, manual drill that looked like this
(except that it was really old and had belonged to my grandfather) and it took me the better part of a week to build it.
There
was an opening in a fence at the end of the street which gave us a
short cut walking or on bikes to the post office or to school.
School
was only six to eight blocks away, depending on the route you took.
(This was before Sam Cooper cut through the area. Imagine there not
being a Sam Cooper.)
I
received my first bicycle when I was six years old. It was a 22"
Schwinn. I learned to ride with that bicycle. It was easy to learn on
such a quiet street and you could learn to balance by riding right next
to the curb.
Once I learned to ride, I would ride to a friend's house on Forrest Avenue, a block away.
There were other kids on the street. The Kaminskys were a Jewish family who lived a few houses down and across the street. There were three boys, the youngest of which made a deal with your grandmother: he would teach her Hebrew if she would teach him to bake cream puffs. This should come as no surprise to you.
Charles and Alan Wilson lived down the street close to East Parkway. Charles was about three years older and Alan was about my age. Charles was the boy who received a catcher's mitt as a gift when he was about thirteen and I was ten. This is the same catcher's mitt that figures into the disaster in which I caught a baseball on my nose.
This injury sent me to the emergency room and led, eventually, to three surgeries of my nose and throat as an adult.
I still have a scar on the back of my leg from playing in Alan's back yard one day. We must have been playing soldiers or cops and robbers. Alan "shot" me and I fell to the ground. When I got up, blood was streaming down my leg; I had cut it on a broken bottle.
Our next door neighbors were the Eillerts. Mr. Eillert worked at the old Press Scimitar, the afternoon newspaper which probably went out of business before you were born.
Mr. Eillert taught me how to tie my shoes. I haven't any idea why your grandparents did not. Perhaps Mr. Eillert just beat them to the punch.
The Eillerts had two sons, both older than me, Bobby and Jimmy. They attended the Church of Christ, but still were good neighbors to us.
Jimmy was another cream puff fan and hung around whenever your grandmother experimented with baking. He also spent a lot of time with me because he enjoyed sports, but I don't think he was ever good enough to play for his school. He taught me how to throw a football. He would play catch with me when he came home from school.
Jimmy is also remembered for picking your Uncle Andy up when he was about a year old. While playing with the baby, he lifted him up quickly over his head. Unfortunately, he was standing under a door jam. I'm not sure Uncle Andy was ever the same after that.
Our street was so quiet that we could play touch football in the middle of it and rarely have to stop to let a car pass.
We could also play a game known as cork ball. It was played with a large cork (bigger than a wine cork), wrapped in adhesive tape. A sawed off broom handle was used as a bat. Imagine how hard you might find it to hit a wine cork with a broom handle. You could have any number of defensive players in the "field" (i.e., street).
There's a certain technique to "throwing" the cork. I'd love to show my grandsons some day.
If you hit the cork and it was caught on the fly, you were out. Otherwise, you were awarded a base hit. There were no bases and no running.
We had to be careful about playing in front of Mrs. Lancaster's house. She kept a lookout for any kid who stepped in her yard. Her lawn was immaculate and, by God, she was going to keep it that way. Of course, her house was in the middle of the block, right where it was most convenient for us to play. Also, of course, stray cork balls, baseballs, and footballs would make their way to her yard. We would beg her forgiveness to get the balls back. She was a terror, but her yard was immaculate, nary a weed ever dared show its face.
All of the yards on our side of the street were higher than those on the other side. One of my greatest pleasures was taking that little Schwinn bicycle, pedal into sufficient speed to ride up the slope of the yard and "jump" the bicycle. I'm sure I never achieved anything like kids of your generation with the fancy equipment installed in modern parks.
Our yards were also great for playing tackle football. We played without pads or helmets. There was an older boy who lived across the street, Don Holt. Don was a good athlete but, I think, was somewhat of a hypochondriac. He was always going down with one suspicious injury or another.
Don had an older sister, Blanche. She babysat your Aunt Barbara, Uncle Andy, and me on Friday nights when your grandparents would take dancing lessons at a friend's house. I fell in love with Blanche. You know that was going to work out. I was in the sixth grade, she was a senior in high school. She would come over and when the younger children were in bed we would do our weekend homework together. Blanche, unfortunately, did not reciprocate my ardor, married right out of high school, and moved away.
At the open end of the street was East Parkway and Overton Park with its zoo, ball fields, and old growth forest.
When I was in the fourth grade, I received my first 26" bicycle. Your grandparents bought it at the Western Auto store on the corner of Cleveland and Poplar. It was really too big for me to handle, but I slowly managed. My parents now allowed me to ride to school and back. I had outgrown the little Schwinn so much that my knees were hitting the handle bars when I rode.
I really wanted an "English racer", a bike with gears and, I thought, the ability to fly. Still, I had my new bike. I tried all kinds of things to make it look like a racing bike. I turned the handlebars upside down so that I was bent over them like the ones I'd seen racing on television.
One of my "friends" toward the east end of the street was Patricia. We were the same age and we played together. She was, however, an only child. She and her divorced mother lived with Patricia's grandmother. Her grandmother nicknamed her "Tissa". I can still hear her grandmother shrieking her name out the front door when she wanted Patricia to come home. "Tissa! Tissa! Tissa!"
Patricia was large for her age and could turn playtime into bullying in about thirty seconds. I recall playing a lot of hopscotch with her and arguing over some of the rules. Eventually, she would become president of a local Beatles fan club.
I went to high school with Alan Chambers who would visit his grandparents on occasion. He became a fairly well known lawyer in town.
It was really fun living so close to Overton Park. When I was in the Boy Scouts, several of us would meet in the old growth forest. We would cut vines away from the old trees and swing on them. Have you ever swung on an actual vine? Of course, we would also pretend to be Tarzan, but we lacked the acrobatic skills.
What was different about Parkway Place and the era from the places and era in which you were raised?
We had not laid eyes on our first personal computer. We learned addition and multiplication rules by rote and were tested and drilled on them constantly.
Unless the weather interfered, we rode bikes or the bus if we needed to get somewhere. Our parents would drive us (sometimes) to ball games and the like. I would ride the bus downtown to take swimming lessons at the old YMCA. In your day, we rarely let you ride your bikes out of our sight and, as for the bus, forget it. My parents were less afraid for the safety of their children than your mother and I were. Of course our parents' perception was of a safer environment. Whether it was really safer or not, I don't know.
Another clue to this difference is how we were allowed to play outside with neighbor kids until the street lights came on. We would ride bikes all over the neighborhood, into Overton Park, and no one thought a thing about it.
Your grandfather had his business in the basement of our house for a while. It was nice to have him so close and I loved to learn to use his typewriter and adding machine.
He also had a business phone line that we could answer by twisting a dial on the home phone. This was useful when his secretary would have lunch with your grandmother during the day. A big difference is that I knew many of the people with whom your grandfather worked, whereas you grew up knowing very few of my associates.
Your grandfather discovered that "factory men" from manufacturers he represented were happier eating your grandmother's cooking at our home than going out to a restaurant.
His longest term employee, Billie Bush, started as a secretary, but eventually learned to be more involved in developing and pricing the various construction jobs to which Pawpaw hope to sell heating and air conditioning equipment.
Billie would usually take her lunch upstairs with your grandmother, watching a variety show on television. The
Mike Douglas show sticks in my memory.
Evenings, after homework was done and baths were taken, we were allowed to watch television.
Leave It To Beaver,
Twilight Zone,
Gunsmoke,
Dragnet,
Peter Gunn are all shows that I remember.
I may say more about homework when I write about the school I attended, but suffice it to say that your grandparents insisted that homework always came first. Oh, I could go out and play football or cork ball or play hide and seek with neighborhood children, but there was never any question whether I could pass on homework.
