Before very many people had cars, and w-a-y before gasoline spiked to $3.09 a gallon, running into people, sometimes literally, was unavoidable. Often the run-ins provoked challenges, or at least posturing, sometimes one of us having to yield sidewalk space to someone we met. Too often the encounters weren’t friendly. There were many challenges.

     Sometimes, the only crime we’d committed was attending a parochial school; or having been born “Mexican” (often preceded by “dirty.”) Sometimes the crime was purely geographical: “So you’re one of those Railroad guys, huh?”
     Bullies we already knew were a worry, but at least we knew what to expect. Main bully Gibber always gave us an option: “Would you like one lump or two?” It was the strangers we worried about the most, those who resented us solely because we lived by the tracks or spoke differently or went to a different church.
     A particularly obstreperous challenger once questioned my wheritage, and I responded, “I live on Tuff Street. Going up the hill, each house gets a little tougher than the one below. And I live in the last house.” The bluff must have worked, as I never was bothered by her again.
     Mercifully, most confrontations ended with threats, not violence, and probable was the appearance of a relative who would guarantee that any injuries from fighting would be a walk in the park compared to the woe-is-me fate of a walk to the wood shed if Mom or Dad learned of anything that would disgrace the family.
     My first words were, “But I don’t want to wear an undershirt, shirt, wool sweater, heavy coat and wool cap; after all, Mom, it’s July.” Mom’s first words must have been, “Que dira la gente.” Oh yes, “What will people say?” Nothing fazed Mom more than appearances.
     Once she and Dad lectured us. “We don’t go around creating a spectacle, like those people,” they would say as they gesticulated, pointing to particular homes in the area (and here one or both identified some of “those people,” who got into trouble and caused “la gente” to gossip.
     Squabbles in the neighborhood were common, and in an age before television, exciting. Several of us neighbor kids reacted one Friday night to the sound of breaking glass. We ran a block to take in the fireworks, courtesy of newlyweds. Lacking only popcorn, we sat on a wall in front of their property.
     It seems the bride, who worked at a soda fountain, had failed to provide her groom with the proper reception when he entered the store that day. “I told you, I want you to smi-ile when I come in,” he kept repeating. The broken glass came when she transferred a heavy ceramic ashtray from the table of their Tuff Street apartment to his face and ultimately out one of the windows.
     We spectators marveled at how few words, though much repeated, constitute a quarrel. He: “I told you to smi-ile.” She: “Take your dirty cigarettes and . . .”
     Informed, entertained and oh-so virtuous, we returned home to tell about the Friday Night Fight.
     A child eager to please runs through an internal monologue. I chose the right words with which to announce what a good boy I was, certainly not one of “those people.” What I’d hoped to say was, “Mom, remember some of Å’those people’ you were telling us about? Well, we sat on their tapia and watched them get into a big fight.”
     The clincher was to be, “Aren’t you proud of us for not being like them? But what are the chances my words would register when Mom had bigger fish to fry?
     She asked, “And what were you doing watching this fight? ¿Que dira la gente?”
     “But Mom, I just watched, I wasn’t in the fight?”
     “They probably wouldn’t have fought if you and” (here she inserted a practically memorized list of my buddies, all of whom who been ringside with me) “hadn’t been staring like monkeys.”
     She had a point, but it was the flat end of the belt I really feared. And though we hadn’t thrown cigarette lighters or insisted people smi-ile, we’d been even more guilty for having allowed ourselves to be entertained in a way that brings shame to the family.
     In the Å’40s, parents had ways of getting the news faster than today’s internet or text-messaging. How else would Mom have been able to recite the names of every spectator in my circle? We had no phone at the time. She named two Freds, Paul, Waldron, Leroy, Johnny, Vangie and Geraldine. Some day some historian will figure out what tool, what device, what means of communication made moms aware of everything their kids were up to, before the kids got back home, and often even before the kids’ thoughts became punishable deeds.
     It’s moments like this when children intuit exactly what’s on the mind of their siblings. I had no doubt that any one of them would have been happy to join me at ringside, had they known about the “smi-ile” scenario. But once the probability of a punishment aimed at my posterior was palpable, it’s amazing how sanctimonious and supportive of righteous condemnation my brother and sisters became.
     One of them grimaced, and with the skill of a prosecutor, told Mom how shocked she was “that Arthur would humiliate the family so.”
     Another effected a countenance of revulsion and shock. It’s as if the more facial contortions my sibling could manage, the more severe my punishment should be. And that would give all of them a shot at being spectators themselves of my Friday Night Frights. I learned that night how easy it was for siblings to turn from would-be co-conspirators/spectators to patron saints of Tuff Street.
     I was bugged at their treason. But what the heck — at age 9 I probably would have done the same thing.
     I got spared the belt that night and got sent to bed without supper. But it didn’t end too badly: while I was being delivered from evil, my brother and sisters were made to divide up my portion of the liver Mom served for supper that night.
     Serves them right.