***
A couple of times I've watched the musical "Meet Me in St. Louis" a movie set in the year leading up to the 1904 World's Fair, centering around the wealthy Smith family. They live in a mansion which has running water and indoor plumbing, but also along side the standard faucet is an old-fashioned hand pump for water supply in the kitchen, where the older sisters have to heat water to shampoo their hair. The house has electricity, but uses mostly gas for lighting. The Smiths also have one of the early telephones in the dining room. I assume this arrangement in homes of the well-to-do is historically accurate. However, I've never researched it.
There is one part of the movie, when first viewed, quite surprised me. It's the evening October 31, when the two younger Smith sisters, aged 5 and 10-ish, costumed as "drunken ghosts," go out to join the area children for a bonfire and the pranking of neighbors. They carry bags of wheat flour, that their mother cautions them to use care not to throw in the victims' eyes, while their grandfather urges them to "wet" the flour, so it will stick better to the prey. Apparently they partake only in the "trick," not the 'treat" part of Halloween.
The neighborhood children, between the ages of five and thirteen, have somehow gotten a huge bonfire going into which they throw discarded wooden furniture, some of which is left out by adult in the area specifically for the purpose of having the children burn the trash. There is not a single adult around to supervise this blaze. Five-year-old Tootie begs for her own piece of debris to toss into the flames that tower over her head. She shortly earns that privilege, along with the coveted title, "The Most Horrible," by rapping on the door of the feared Mr. Braukoff, whom the children claim beats "his wife with a red hot poker... and has empty whiskey bottles in his cellar." When he answers the door she throws flour at him, shouting "I hate you!" The children call this act "killing" someone. These children had very good imaginations. It was't necessary to actually carry out a "dirty deed." They'd only needed to imagine that it occurred for them to be satisfied.
Later that same evening Tootie stuffs a dress and throws it on the tracks in front of a moving trolley. Her neighbor, John, sees her and drags her out of the way so she will not be injured or caught by the police. Somehow she sustains a cut to the inside of her lip, requiring stitches. When asked about her injury the imaginative Tootie claims dramatically that John, "...tried to kill me."
These kids were unsupervised imps. And they were the ones who came from "good" families and lived in the "nicest" of neighborhoods. I can't imagine what the kids from the bad side of town were doing. Was this type of activity among young children historically accurate? Of that I am certain.
***
It's 1957 or '58 and I am, like Tootie, five years old, though I live in Chicago, not St. Louis. A couple of blocks from our modest middle-class home, over on the east side of Broadway and just south of Argyle, there is a bowling alley. Last night it burned to the ground. We could hear the fire engines wailing in the dark. My older sister and I quickly eat breakfast and rush over to see the ruins. There we join a group of neighborhood kids who comb through the ashes. There are no wooden horses or caution tape to cordons off this dangerous area of charred beams and a partially missing roof, nothing in the way of signs to warn us to stay out. There are no adults to supervise our exploit. We are careful where we walk, as some embers are still hot to the touch and emitting curls of smoke. Like scavenger raccoons we, opportunistic children, scour through the remains. We are here and, as such, we earn the right to claim any number of the remaining bowling balls and pins as our arms can carry. We open machines designed to vend candy, gum, soda and cigarettes, machines from which the locks have melted from the searing heat, machines from which we rightfully claim the contents including loose change. There is a machine that is still locked and younger kids at the urging of bigger kids, shove their arms up inside. "Come on! Look how thin your arms are. You can reach up in there." Never mind the razor thin sheet metal slots inside those machines. We walk home with our treasures, eating now cooled but misshapen blobs that were once rectangular chocolate bars. We set up our claimed pins behind our home and laugh at the fact that we now have a "real" bowling alley.
***
We enjoyed the sheer pleasure of freedom, afforded to urban kids in the 1960s, '50s and earlier. Once your filial and scholastic chores and duties were complete you were allowed to roam as you wished, take normal childlike risks, provided you showed up for evening dinner.
"Where are you going?" "To the beach" or "To the park" or, "Out with my friends" was an appropriate answer; to which a parent would reply, "Be home for dinner!"
Sometimes there were planned parish, library or park district activities, but more often it was left to our imaginations to find an activity, like empty lot pickup games, or jumping from one garage roof to another, or diving/jumping "off the rocks" and into chilly Lake Michigan, an activity which though strongly discouraged by city officials, was a common pastime of children and adults.
Visits to my cousins in rural Wisconsin proved that they were also imaginatively blessed. When they were not doing farm chores, picking wild berries or fishing, they were manufacturing their own wooden rubber band guns, a bit less harmful than a slingshot, which were used on bulls-eye targets, the occasional bird or squirrel, or turned on each other in an all-out war. They were crude, handmade and to be hit by the rubber band "bullet" stung like heck. The older kids would shimmy up a huge tree to hang a heavy rope from a strong limb over the Wolf River, which we youngsters would then run, grab hold of the rope as best we could and swing across, in hopes we wouldn't lose our grip and fall into the (now rated a class 2 or 3 rapids) shallow but swift-flowing river.
How did we survive? I wonder.
***
I read my blog to Faithful Husband and he comments, "You know, now that I think about it, my parents, nor any of my friends' parents ever asked us where we got those bowling balls and pins." Yes, Faithful Husband was there among the embers that very day as my sister and I scoured through the remains. We discovered this fact through an exchange of childhood experiences, sometime after we'd met (me, "drunk and in the gutter") as young adults. We'd grown up no more than a half mile from each other.
***
Last month we celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary. Oh, and I was supposed to tell you about how we met, now wasn't I? You know, how he found me "drunk in the gutter." Sorry, but I've already exceeded my self-imposed 1,000 word limit, so some other time.
