From the Porch Steps: Back in the Day – Daily Commercial

Todays kids just dont have the same experiences.

My siblings and I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania. My sister Jean and I owned the town. We would leave the house in the morning heading we didn't know where until we got there. Sometimes we played in the woods down the street from our house and sometimes we just played in the street. We didn't have a lot of fancy toys but we did have roller skates, the kind you used a key to clamp them on your shoes.

We had two paved streets in our little town with some connecting secondary streets between them that were also paved. They had names but we just called them the upper new street and the lower new street. This was our own personal skating rink and ball court and bicycle path.

There were very few cars during the day, so in spite of our mother's warnings we roller skated them and bicycled them and played ball on them with little interruption.

Our town was located on a hill between larger hills running down to a river. I would start at the top of the upper new street on my scooter, give a push and literally fly down that street to the bottom and turn and continue down to the lower new street without slowing down.

Our mother gave us the same warnings every morning when we left the house. Be careful of cars, stay off people's lawns, don't get too far away that you can't hear me call you in for lunch. I can hear her now, Jeanie, Ninie, lunch time.

We liked to play in the woods and make pretend houses by pulling up brush and making a roof over our heads. We played Bunker Hill on a vacant lot with a perfect hill on it. The big boys had made a little fort of sorts on top of the hill, so when they weren't around we took over, with pretend guns blazing.

My friend Derose and I liked to play house. We would borrow our mothers old dresses and shoes and hats and dress up, put our dollies in our buggies and walk around the yard, pretending to be movie stars. I was Joan Blondel and Dee was Claudette Colbert.

When it rained and didn't thunder and lightening Jean and I loved to put on our bathing suits and play outside in it. The street in front of our house was an unpaved hill. The borough always put ashes on it in the winter time to keep cars from slipping so when we fell in the street we would mark the spot with a small bit of that black ash embedded in our knees.

Daddy was really good at making toys better than the bought ones. We had mason jar ring guns, sling shots and stilts and barrel stave skies. When the front porch swing broke in two, Daddy took the good parts and made Jean and I a swing just big enough for the two of us and hung it from the rafters in the basement for rainy days.

Our house was built on the side of a hill on a lot that Grandpa had deeded to Daddy. The lower side of the house was two stories up with a small kitchen porch with a railing. Our old mamma cat liked to sleep on the railing in the sun. The railing was only about two to three inches wide, so mamma cat occasionally went to sleep and fell off the railing onto the sidewalk below. She would simply dust herself off and climb back up and go back to sleep.

She had kittens almost every spring. We could tell when she had them because she would be so skinny. She always had her kittens away from home so we would go searching for them and bring them home. She sometimes put them in the dog's house and she and our old hound took turns looking after them. It was funny to see that old hound dog washing those tiny kittens.

If you don't remember the WPA back in the 1930s, we were very familiar with them. The alley behind our house had a ditch in it that was usually full of water. The government in its infinite wisdom decided that it should cover the ditch and build the gully up with large quarry stones and build a road on it.

The WPA took it on as a project, so we had workmen in our back yard for several seasons. The men were friendly family men who liked to watch us play in the dirt and on the cherry trees in our yard. They would sometimes ask us for fruit since we had not only cherry trees but peach and plum trees full of fruit.

If I told you all the fun things we did as children this column would become book length. We had a freedom today's children will never know because the world has become such a scary place. The whole wide world was not available to us as it is to today's children on the Internet, but we learned different lessons, lessons of cooperation and hard work.

Yes, we worked hard helping Mom with her spring and fall house cleaning, scrubbing the coal dust grime off the walls and windows and porches of our house. We helped Daddy pluck chickens for Sunday dinner, hung clothes on lines in the yard and pinned lace curtains to the stretchers for Mom's spring and fall cleaning and pulled weeds out of Mom's vegetable garden.

I could fill the whole newspaper with stories about 10-mile bicycle trips to a swimming hole and to neighboring towns to visit relatives. Obese children were very rare then. We can't go back but we can try to preserve some of the good of those years by giving today's children some room to play freely.

Nina Gilfert is a columnist for the Daily Commercial. Email her at ngporch@gmail.com.

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From the Porch Steps: Back in the Day - Daily Commercial