Growing up in the 1950’s, was an unusual time I think. World War 2 required so much from our country and its’ citizens. I think the memory of it made people appreciate one another more. People were willing to be involved with each other in a way that we do not see today. I know this was true in our neighborhood.
My neighborhood was just a street with houses on both sides. Most people had an acre or two of property although some folks had more. A lot of the neighbors were related to one another which sometimes made for interesting dynamics. Two families with small farms gave property to their children as they married. That meant sisters and their husbands or brothers and their wives were also neighbors. My dad’s nephew was our neighbor. It was a close little community for a good while.
When i think ‘neighbor’ the lady who lived in the house next to us comes to mind. Her name was Aggie and she was old enough to be my mother’s mother. Every morning at as close to 10:00 am as circumstances would permit, Aggie would knock on our back door while opening it at the same time. These actions were accompanied by her hollering, “Yoo Hoo!”. She did not wait to be invited in, she knew she was welcome. My mother would stop whatever she was doing and the two of them would share a cup of coffee and visit. Looking back on it she must have been a great help to my mother. I’m sure she shared her own experiences on running a house and raising children. The visit between these neighbors was quick, only long enough to drink a cup of coffee. The amazing thing is the very next morning around 10 it would happen all over again. Every day of the week (except Saturday and Sunday) we would hear the “Yoo Hoo!” and there would be Aggie to visit for a few minutes.
Our neighbors helped each other. My mother became the neighborhood beautician when I was around 5. I guess the other mothers were afraid to cut their daughter’s hair. Mine was not. My mother was well acquainted and very comfortable with scissors. My bangs were the shortest on any girls forehead on the North American continent. I cried myself to sleep more than once after my mother cut my bangs. She would use four fingers from my eyebrows to measure where they should end and then she would clip away. I warned my friends about the bang debacle. Goodness they could look at me and see it. But my mother did hair cuts for free and how could their mothers resist that. So all the girls in my neighborhood had the same hairstyle, with bangs 3 inches off the forehead. If my mother cut your hair it was the style of her choosing you went home with. No one cared when they were really young and so she was always clipping away at some body’s head. Once the girls got older they didn’t want the four finger bang and went elsewhere or cut their own hair. I on the other hand had an exposed forehead for many years! In spite of my dire warnings, my mother saved our neighbors a lot of money.
Children were a big part of the life and activity on our street. We were always in each others yards or houses. My parents never left us home alone but T]that wasn’t true for some of the other folks on the street. Sometimes the kids from across the street would be locked out of their house in the evenings while their parents were gone. When this happened my dad would go over to their house, crawl through a window and unlock the door for them. He would turn on the lights and make sure the kids were okay. Nothing was ever said by anyone but everyone knew that my dad would watch out for those kids.
I spent hours and hours with Aggie’s daughter. She was about 15 years older than I was and I thought I was so important when I was with her. As a married couple, her and her husband asked me to be their very first dinner guest. I had to sit on Sears Roebuck catalogs to reach the table but I didn’t think of myself as a little kid at that dinner. This gal treated all the neighborhood kids special and we loved her for it. In the summer we would all pile in her car and go to Twin Lakes to swim. She would pack a picnic supper and off we’d go. In the winter she’d take me ice-skating. I hung out with her while she ironed and dusted for her because I wanted to. We were neighbors and friends.
I know there has to be some neighborhoods today that would rival the one I grew up in, I just haven’t seen one myself since I was a little kid.