anarkhos

When I was a child, I had a surprising amount of freedom. I could do things that would cause parents today to shudder in fear. This freedom gave me the confidence to do a lot of things later in life. I wonder what kind of world we are creating by denying our children the freedom we once enjoyed.

For starters, before I was in the first grade, my mother would give me money and a list of items to buy. I would walk, all by myself, several blocks through suburban streets (and even across a small creek) to go to a little store called "Downsies". Downsies was an old wooden structure. It was jam packed with stuff, everything from hardware to groceries, candy to toys, magazines to comic books. I would pull out the list and give it to the owner/clerk and he would get the items I needed, ring it up, and hand me the change. I'd lug the items back home with me. Back then, you could even send a kid to a store to buy cigarettes.

Sometimes, random people along the way would give me money as I walked to the store, asking me to pick up an item or two for them. As I returned, I gave them their stuff and their change. I always refused a quarter or whatever they offered me for the service. In fact, I didn't understand why anyone would pay me to do something I enjoyed so much.

Now, this might sound irresponsible, but it was the way things were back then. It was my mother's way of teaching me responsibility. All of the neighbors knew each other and everyone knew that in an emergency a kid could knock on any door and get help.

Speaking of knocking, we didn't knock on the door. Indeed, most doors didn't even have doorbells. We "hollered" for our friends. There was a way of singing a kid's name and when you wanted your friend to come out, you'd sing, in a shouting voice, his or her name followed by "come out and play!" For example, if I wanted to play with Alfred, I'd stand in front of his house and holler (in a singing voice) "Alllllll-Freeeeeeeeeed, come out and play-ay!" Sure enough, if he was home, he'd come out and play, and if he wasn't, his mother would open the door and tell me what time he would be home.

Kids were everywhere. We played in the street - right in the middle of the street - kids of all ages, as a matter of fact. Teenagers would teach us songs that would get our parents all riled up. For example, there was that song, "Marijuana, Marijuana, LSD, LSD, Scientists make it, Teachers take it, why can't we? Why can't we?"

There was land that no one owned (imagine that). Within that land was a swamp and we'd play "Vietnam War." The swamp was our jungle and the Korean family a block away was "the enemy." The white kids would surround their backyard and aim their toy guns at the beautiful Korean girls playing in the backyard. I agree that this is horrible and when I think back on it, I feel terrible, but we were living in a different time and place. For me, it is amazing how far we've come since then. We've regressed in freedom but we've progressed in our struggle against racism - far more than most young people of today realize. I grew up watching racist parents of inner city kids throwing rocks at school buses on television because they didn't like the race of the children being bused into their neighborhoods. It was a very different world.

In our swamp, we built a tree-house. It was a work of art. It was huge!

Unfortunately (or fortunately), many of us had engineers for parents and these parents (mine included) condemned the tree hut and down it came.

One time my brother and I were playing "Vietnam War" in the swamp. We were crossing a muddy creek using a dead tree which had fallen across it as a bridge. I slipped on the muddy tree and into the creek where I got stuck up to my neck (by the way, we didn't use the word "creek", we used the word "brook"). I couldn't move and it was taking all my energy not to slip deeper into the water. I had to scream for my life. A power company worker (for Edison Electric) came rushing to my rescue and saved me from drowning. The story got in Edison Electric's newsletter. I remember that his name was Jake. He wore a hard hat.

You learn a lot of things when you're free to run around. At the end of our small street were rails that carried trains from Boston to New York City. We'd put pennies on the tracks, wait for a train, and after it passed, fetch our flattened pennies. Next to the tracks and behind our street, at the back of a factory, there was a small pond where my brother and I would go fishing and spy on snapping turtles. We'd walk between the factories which were separated by alleys wide enough for children to pass through and collect all kinds of things, like discarded metal, deadly chemicals, wire, electrical components, and things we didn't even know the name of.

Behind one backyard was an abandoned car from the 1920s. We'd sit in the car and pretend to drive it. We'd also take parts out of it and try to figure out what they were for. Further up the tracks was a train switching yard with abandoned wooden shack-sized offices. We'd make houses out of them for the day and hide out.

One very stark memory is of a very strange occurrence. It now has a dream like quality. My friends and I were playing ball in the street when an old pickup truck, the back of which was made of wood, slowly drove up and down the streets of our neighborhood. There was a loud-speaker in the back and a man was announcing "Beware of the warehouse, beware of the warehouse!" We hadn't heard of a warehouse before (we were kids) and some of us thought he was saying "Beware of the werewolf". We even had an argument about this. At the time, there were labor/management problems at the Stop & Shop warehouse across the tracks from our street. The man stopped and said, "Hey kids, don't play near the warehouse, ya understand?" We all told our parents about this, but they laughed and told us there were no "werewolves."

That night I was awakened by people shouting things like "Oh shit! My God!" and so on. Outside you could see a strange red glow coming from all directions. We went to my sister's room where, out the window, we could see what looked like an enormous fountain of flames stretching into the sky. The entire warehouse complex had burst into flames. We could feel the heat from many blocks away. It took all night to control the fire. Someone had burned "the warehouse" down. Back then, people cared enough about life to warn kids before burning down the neighborhood.

People were naive too. I remember when my brother and his "girl friend" Rhonda found a $20.00 bill on the side walk of a nearby main street. They didn't know what to do with it, so they took it to Rhonda's mother. Her mother, aghast at how much money they found, told them that whoever owned it would surely be back looking for it, so they were to go back to where they found it and put it back on the ground. Now, $20.00 back then was worth more than $100.00 now. Nevertheless, that is how they handled something like that. In fact, I don't remember people steeling anything from anyone. No one did that kind of thing.

Playing "Vietnam War" came to an end, at least for me. One day a neighbor kid and I went off to play "Vietnam War." I decided to be "look out", so I shimmied up this nearly dead tree with few branches remaining. I climbed up about 20 feet and took a rest by jamming my foot into a branch stub. The stub broke and I came falling down. It was like slow motion to me. I ended up plowing into the Earth head first, with my right arm extended to protect my head. That arm collapsed into a zig-zag of broken bone. In fact, bones stuck through my skin in two places.

I lay there, convinced I was going to die. My friend was known to be a liar and he went from house to house trying to get help, but no one would believe him. After a half hour, his uncle came home and rushed to my aid. An ambulance came and took me away. I spent the next month in a hospital bed with my arm in traction and the next year learning how to use my arm again.

You learn a lot when you're a free child.