It is easier for me to go down memory lane than for many whose childhood homes are gone. The house I was born in, on the 900 block of Railroad, now shelters my niece and her children.
Returning to that area brings nostalgia. The bubbling of life up and down the street is gone. In the 40s and 50s, the neighborhood was teeming with people. It was impossible to avoid bumping into someone on the sidewalk. Rather than staying inside, we took to the sidewalks. Girls loved to play hopscotch and jump rope. Boys, their pockets bulging with agates, devoted their young lives to playing marbles.
We’d see groups of boys and girls in a circle following the latest, possibly dangerous, craze. The person who was “it” would need to squat, exhale fully and then try to inflate a balloon. What it got the person was a dizzy sensation, a near loss of consciousness, and a lot of laughter from his or her peers.
I tried it once. I don’t remember its effects, only having my friends telling me a few minutes later about how “lost” and pale I looked as I came close to passing out.
Some of the safer antics in our boys-will-be-boys activities included waiting until the girls reached the red-hot-pepper stage of jump rope and riding our bikes through the center of the activity. Invariably, the rope got tangled in our chains, and only a jack-knife could retrieve it. Alfred, the instigator, owned the sleekest Hiawatha bicycle in the neighborhood. He’d ask the girls, “What are you complaining about? The rope’s all there,” as he handed them four shredded pieces. The last antic caused Alfred to break a number of spokes, and it served him right.
Money, and its lack thereof, was a preoccupation. One hot summer afternoon, with the sidewalk full of kids, I noticed a wadded up dollar bill, carefully dismounted my rented bike, and picked it up, as casually as possible, as if I’d gone after a piece of paper or a bottle cap. Nobody appeared to have lost it. And I knew what would have happened if I’d asked, “Did anyone lose this?”
Needing a cohort in my discovery, I told Alfred about it. Naturally, he explained that he too had seen it and was merely turning his bike around when I beat him to it. Generously, he said we could share. He saved his half dollar; my share helped enrich the corner store.
In the neighborhood lived Jimmy and Clyde, the only boys with a basketball and goal. Clyde allowed all to use them at any time, provided the ball remained in the yard. Many neighborhood kids doubtless fantasized about absconding with the ball, but no one ever did. Besides, where would they use it, except in Clyde’s back yard?
It’s remarkable that the basketball, such a scarce commodity in those days, was never stolen. Today’s plenitude of “stuff,” owned by most kids in America, has been devalued; a missing basketball now is no big deal.
One day I went to Marquez Grocery on the corner for a popsicle. I paid for it, went home and soon realized the confection wasn’t anywhere around. Back at the store, I explained to the all-knowing grocer that I had forgotten the slightly melted popsicle the first time.
Naturally, that omission became fodder for the East Side gossip mill. It was like the game of “Gossip,” in which a fact undergoes countless permutations as it’s whispered from person to person. By the time the neighborhood got wind of my brain freeze, the event had taken on epic proportions; the story became that I’d taken a popsicle without paying for it.
Naturally, my trying to explain what really happened (as I’m trying now), was met with suspicion and derision and a lot of judgment-passing: “Why didn’t you ask me for a nickel if you were so desperate?” or “I still like you even though …” or “I sure hope my daughter doesn’t marry a person like you.”
I earned the moniker “Jamba,” (pronounced Hamba), slang for someone who swipes things. Had I held up a bank and made off with zillions, my neighborhood reputation wouldn’t have been any worse. Though the shelf life of my nickname was only about six months (except for the fact that I’m resurrecting it a half century later), it became public domain in our neighborhood. At least one youngster, who never knew my given name, thought “Jamba” was what I was Christened with.
Like any other neighborhood, we had our family feuds, fracases, fisticuffs and fun. Though we often engaged in what seemed like internecine warfare, we defended one another against all outsiders (and that included anyone east of the tracks and west of Grand Avenue. We were ever under the watchful eye of grownups who may not have been related by blood but at least by territory.
Most of the mothers stayed at home; a surprising number of the fathers lived close to and walked to work. In that era, we were astonished at how anything untoward got reported so rapidly.
One bit of information we rough-housing boys learned–and something that forced us to be kinder and gentler to the girls–was the realization that every mother in that neighborhood was able to see around corners, and a surprising number had eyes in the back of their heads.
To belong, as I did, to a neighborhood, a people, an area, a street and a town was a restricting but welcome sense of identity which my children never knew nor will they ever know.
I think it’s a gift from above to know from where we come, from whom we come and who we are.