Summertime the way it used to be

As time accelerates and instant gratification has been elevated to a right, I swim against the current and try to hold on to time the way it used to be. Summertime was the best time. Days were hot and humid, just like today. They were also long and free-form, an unprogrammed succession of pleasures, boredom, joy, and pain.

I lived on Greenwood Hill in Pottsville when I was a child. Children played outside from morning till night. Early in the day, before temperatures and humidity rose to numbing highs, we walked downtown, a gang of us, paying particular attention when we crossed “the Boulevard.” We had a nickel or a dime for candy or a soda. We were not yet ten, but we window-shopped and entered stores like Woolworth’s or Kresge’s on Pottsville’s Centre Street. We even made purchases, cheap plastic toys you could buy for a dime or less.

After supper, we ran outside to play, literally, in the street. Our favorite games were “kick the wicky” and “tin-can-alley” (I’m sure some readers played those games too). We played them on Edwards Avenue, at the crest of its downwards slope towards Jackson Street. That way, when we kicked the can and ran to hide, the person who was “it” had a long uphill climb before they could go looking for us.

Between morning and evening, during those long, hot afternoons in the days before air-conditioning, we played board games like checkers or parcheesi, Candyland or Clue. When we weren’t playing games, we read. That was one reason why we went downtown. We almost always visited The Pottsville Free Public Library and we all participated in the summer reading contest, nearly every member of “our gang” winning a prize for the number of books we’d read at summer’s end.

Today, I can’t remember many of those books. I’ll admit, our reading habits were similar to work on an assembly line. On a shady porch, we gathered together with our books. We sat down and began reading as fast as we could, and once we finished a book we passed it on to the person sitting next to us. By the end of an afternoon, we’d have skimmed a dozen books or more!

Back in those long-ago 1950’s and early 1960’s days, some homes still had what were called “party lines.” You could pick up your phone and listen in on somebody else’s conversation. In our house, we had a private line, but every once in a while, the phone would revert to its former state and when I picked it up to make a call, I tuned in to a conversation between people I didn’t know.

Our black dial-phone sat on its own special table, where there was also a space reserved for the telephone book. Obviously, the phone was an object of importance, but it didn’t ring very often and we didn’t use it very much. Except when it rang or we made a call, we ignored it, never touching it or glancing its way. If I’d had to make a choice between our black-and-white TV or the telephone, hands-down, I’d have voted for the TV, which brought me “The Little Rascals,” “Laurel and Hardy,” replays of Shirley Temple classics, and in April 1961, the Eichmann trial for Nazi war crimes. I remember lying on the living room floor, alone, as the Holocaust entered our living room.

We also went to “summer playground,” organized at playgrounds throughout the city. Ours was at the Greenwood Hill Fire Company, what we called the “hosie,” a word unknown, I’ve discovered, in other parts of the USA. We made gimp and pipe-cleaner sculptures; we wove potholders with nylon loops. We also played team sports like whiffle ball and volleyball and put on dress-up pageants.

One year, two very ambitious playground supervisors even organized a bike ride to Heisler’s and back—a pack of kids on bikes, most who’d never ridden so far in their lives. Our supervisors were 18 or 19 years old. We were between 8 and 16. Imagine doing that today! The organization might be comparable to the Tour de France, with parents riding in front and rear in SUV’s, one equipped as an emergency first-aid vehicle, the other, filled with water bottles and high-energy bars. And imagine, NO ONE HAD A CELL PHONE! We set off from Greenwood Hill on our bikes. We returned, aching, tired, thirsty, at the end of an unforgettable day. 

Am I simply taking a stroll down memory lane, writing about the “good old days”?  No, because though they are “old,” they weren’t always good. Family strife, poverty, de facto segregation, a reality in Pottsville in those days, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear conflict, all that and more weighed on our lives. Prejudices of all kinds were rife, neighbors didn’t get along, and we kids regularly fought on our way home from Jackson Street or Patterson schools.

Time had a different feel to it though. On a muggy summer afternoon, curled up with a good book (because sometimes I did read for pure pleasure and not for the prize), I could read for hours without a single interruption – no beeps, no rings, no notifications, no urgent texting from friends. Time to be, that’s what I had. And that’s what I miss.

I also miss the sense of community that reigned on Greenwood Hill. After supper, because the house was too hot, everyone came outside and sat on their porch. Walking from my home to the home of the Newtons, where my best-friend Donna lived, I had to say hello to at least 10 people every evening! I thought I’d never make it down the block.

Today, on some streets and in suburban settings, where big houses sit amidst a perfectly manicured lawn, a casual passerby might think the neighborhood was deserted. Where has everyone gone? Do these people know something I don’t know? they might ask.

In most cases, to the first question, the answer is “nowhere.” To the second, a resounding “no.” The houses are not deserted. Inhabitants have simply closed themselves up inside, benefiting from air-conditioning, home cinemas, and the internet, which opens their homes to the world…

But closes them off from their neighbors.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one day a week, we turned off our air conditioning, our computers and our phones and simply sat outside? We’d meet neighbors, talk to strangers, get to know people different from us. This might be the “old-fashioned” way, but it might also be a small step towards more concord in the world.