ALAN writes:

Much of our lives in the 1950s took place in the city block where we lived in south St. Louis.

I had three girlfriends. One of them lived in a house on the corner of our block.  Another corner was occupied by a grocery store, and there was a tavern on a third corner. Our church and my school were across the street from the corner market. At age 5, my world was largely bounded by those outposts.

On some days during kindergarten and first grade, the Catholic nuns allowed pupils to purchase penny candy and soft pretzels from cardboard boxes in our classroom.

I remember the vivid colors — red, blue, silver, purple, green, and black — on 78-rpm records of Big Band music that my mother kept from the 1940s and allowed me to play if I didn’t break too many of them. In 1953 my aunts and uncles teased me about my fondness for Patti Page’s recording “(How Much is That) Doggie in the Window?”  At age 3, I was appalled:  There they were — my own family — poking fun at my dead-serious concern for that little puppy.

Summer days were filled with adventures that took place in our back yard and in the metaphysical realm of imagination:  Playing Cowboys and Indians, apprehending outlaws with our cap-guns, sailing ships across the waves in our tiny wading pool, swinging for hours on our swing set, watching men tuck-pointing the house next door, and listening to the grown-ups talk when they sat outside on summer evenings.  Sometimes we played dominoes or worked on jigsaw puzzles.

My grandmother’s sister would come to visit from her house across the alley.  They would spend summer days talking about relatives or memories or aches and pains, matters wholly incomprehensible to me at an age when toys or other concretes occupied most of my awareness. I am now at the age they were then.

In the evenings, my grandmother held me on her lap as we watched the comical adventures of “Our Miss Brooks” and the heroic “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” on our black-and-white television; it was so primitive that somebody had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel or adjust the picture.  John Cameron Swayze and the “Camel News Caravan” came into our home via NBC TV.  In 1956 we watched TV news coverage of the sinking of the Andrea Doria.  My grandmother did not live to see color television, the Space Age, or the atrocious 1960s.

The presence of a television set in our home meant that my grandmother and mother would never again walk to the nearby Princess Theater, as they did many times in the 1930s-‘40s.  It closed in 1951.

Notable events for a little boy in the 1950s included visiting aunts and uncles, going to a park for Sunday afternoon picnics, riding on streetcars, wrestling with my father, and riding in my uncle’s machine to “go to the show” at drive-in theaters in St. Louis County, where we saw “Rear Window” and “The Long, Long Trailer” in or about 1954.

One evening my father took me to the Melba Theater on South Grand Avenue to see the western movie “Shane”.  The theater was named after the opera singer Nellie Melba.  It was in a beaux-arts style building with a number of retail shops and offices.  The building is still there today, having been vacant for the last 25 years, and is now a monument to diversity, vandalism, cultural decay, and moral cowardice.

On Saturday afternoons we — along with hundreds of other neighborhood residents — walked to the dime stores and specialty stores on Cherokee Street.  To a little boy, it was a series of adventures among crowds of people in Woolworth’s, J.C. Penney’s, clothing stores, shoe stores, bakeries, the D & W Diner, and Morris Variety Store with its creaky wooden floors, aisles jam-packed with merchandise, and staircase at the back, leading to the toy department on the second floor.  We never failed to walk back home with a brown paper bag filled with soft pretzels from “the pretzel man” outside the Woolworth dime store.

There was no electronic entertainment at our birthday parties, only games, music, cake, milk, and candy apples.  In 1957, I made the tactical mistake of inviting two of my girlfriends to my birthday party.  See how dumb I was?

“Mind your own business” is a phrase I heard directed at me many times in the 1950s.  But I had a terrible disadvantage:  I had no handheld gadgets or screens or tweets to keep me informed of problems all across the nation and the world and to encourage me to imagine that my business included everybody else’s business and to  believe I was qualified to offer my comments and solutions to any or all of those things.  If only those things had been available to me, I might have become a young Hot-Shot like so many children in today’s hip generation, who of course know more than anybody ever did.

When my elders instructed me to do something or not to do it, they never ended their statement with the preposterous question “Okay?”, as if they imagined I might possess veto power. In contrast, listen to parents in public places today who invariably say “Okay?” to their children whenever they attempt to uphold rules or preserve civility.  I could never decide which is worse:  The word “Okay?” or the tone in which it is spoken. Both are nauseating.

One day after classes ended and when I was 9 or 10 years old, I stepped aboard a red city bus, alone.  I asked the driver to tell me when we reached the Statler Hotel downtown.  It was a 6-mile ride.  My mother instructed me to meet her there, and we would then dine at a cafeteria and go to an auto show at the Kiel Auditorium, where I sat in a sparkling new car called the Edsel.

It was the simplest thing in the world:  A white boy riding alone on a city bus, unmolested by the white passengers and guided to his destination by the white man driving the bus.  Unescorted children could do that in those years.  Boys and girls 8 years old rode alone on buses in Chicago in the 1940s.  [Hadley Arkes, The Lost Structures of Civility]

When he was a boy in the 1950s-’60s, Paul Nachman rode alone on the El trains in Chicago.  [“Subways: Canaries in America’s Civilizational Coal Mine”, V-Dare, Dec. 15, 2014]

He was as safe in those years as I was in St. Louis, and for the same reasons.

On evenings in the late 1950s, my mother played card games or board games with me, including Parcheesi and Monopoly.  I had no understanding of real estate or the business world, but Monopoly was always an enjoyable game.  We played Rummy and Old Maid.  In later years we played Canasta with aunts, uncles, and friends.  Most of all, I enjoyed playing Scrabble, a game that required imagination and creativity.  We kept a dictionary close at hand.

Those evenings were not loud or “exciting”.  There was no background commotion or radio or TV.  We played such games in the quiet of our living room.  At my age then, it never occurred to me that it could or should have been “enlivened” in any way.  It was always just fine as it was.  We spent many such quiet, uneventful evenings at home.

But don’t you regret growing up without 24-hour TV, hundreds of TV channels, DVDs, CDs, little screens, little phones, plastic cards, codes, passwords galore, the Internet, “instant communication”, and being “connected” to all the ants in the international ant colony?

Ha, ha, ha, har-har-hardee-har-har. The questions fools will ask.

Compared with how parents today allow their children to spend evenings, give me the 1950s every time.

And there they are:  A handful of simple pleasures recalled from a moral-philosophical-cultural setting that now seems as distant as ancient Greece and Rome.

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