First and Cedar: Where I come from

I recently stayed with my parents a couple of days while my mother (now age 91) recovered from cornea transplant surgery in one eye.

My mom and dad still live in the same house that my dad (now age 94) built by himself in 1963-1964 with the help of his brother and father.

While we routinely visit my parents for a day every other weekend, this prolonged visitation allowed me to explore the old neighborhood that I grew up in like I had not done in many years. 

The experience demonstrated to me that some people, like me, can still go home again, despite what Thomas Wolfe wrote to the contrary in his novel.

In my exploration of the old neighborhood, I walked around the block where my parents live at the corner of First Avenue and Cedar Street.

My first observation was that the trees have all grown so much taller than they used to be in my youth.

A tree that I planted in my parents’ yard in the 1970s, for example, now towers over their north lawn.

In some cases, the long limbs and branches of trees on the block now shade and hide strategic places where us neighborhood kids used to play 60 years ago or more.

I grew up at a time when telephones were mostly mounted on the walls of kitchens and computers were mostly seen as props in science fiction movies.

Kids my age mostly grew up outside. The only reasons to stay inside in those days were illness or outside temperatures of below zero.

If you wanted to know what was going on in the neighborhood, you had to go outside to find out. You didn’t use the phone to call your friends. You went and found them.

Neighbors looked out for each other and everyone looked out for the kids. If a kid roamed too far from the neighborhood, you could count on some adult to tell them to turn around and go home.

The Powls family home where I grew up has been kept up and maintained nicely over all these years and I’m sure any of the neighborhood kids who visited the old neighborhood today would say the same thing.

Across the alley to the south of my folks is where the elderly Mrs. MacInerney used to live by herself when I was a kid. Hers was one of the yards that I mowed. The big two-story house she lived in looks much the same as it did 48 years ago when I moved away and went to college.

The house next to Mrs. MacInerney’s is still there, too. I can’t remember the elderly lady’s name who lived there in that small, cracker-box house when I was a kid but I mowed her yard, too.

There is a nice duplex where the next old house used to be. That was where the elderly Mrs. Fink lived. I mowed her yard, too, but she insisted that I used her mower -  a reel push mower.

The barn in the back of Mrs. Fink’s home is gone. That is where me and other neighborhood kids looked in one of the barn’s windows and thought we saw a flying saucer on a big table. 

We were scared of that place for a long time until we learned that Mr. Fink liked to give the neighbors a scare by attaching balloons to the UFO-looking flying saucer and fly it overhead on special occasions.

The Ralph and Martha Sheern house is still there, but the Sheern family is long gone. My sister Patty’s best friend was Chris Sheern, so my sister spent a lot of time there. 

Next on the block was Horn’s yard and Mrs. Horn’s house. She was an elderly lady also, who allowed us neighborhood kids to play football and baseball games in her yard in all kinds of weather. Mrs. Horn’s house is gone and her yard needs to be mowed.

The O’Malley family home on the corner is still there but it needs a lot of work and the yard needs to be mowed. 

Our neighbor to the east was Mrs. Cowan, another elderly lady. Her old home is still there. It has metal siding now. It used to look like a forest in her back yard when I was a kid but now it is completely tree-less.

The Croan family house is still here and looks about the same but the Kratzberg lady’s home is gone. The Croan family had four kids about my age.

The Eden family home is still there and it looks about the same but all of their trees got very tall and now the front and back yards are completely shaded, almost hidden from view. 

When I was a kid, if I was not at home, I was likely at the Eden’s place where four boys about my age lived or at Horn’s yard.

The Gibson family home across the street from Eden’s is gone and now the land there is part of another home to the east. There’s a new curb and gutter along the front of where the Gibsons and their four girls about my age used to live, so now you can’t see where their driveway used to be. I still know where it was because of the big tree that used to be in their front yard is still there.

These locations were the highlights of my walk around the block.

The cool air of the August evening was reminiscent of the more than 5,400 just like it that I experienced as a child growing up there. 

Train whistles were another familiar sound on the evenings of my walks around the neighborhood. Trains still travel through the town just three blocks away from our neighborthood like they used to every day when I was a kid.

At journalism school in college, we read about William Allen White, the well-known newspaper man of Emporia. I preferred the biography of Arthur Capper.

Capper, the first Kansas-born governor of the state, long-time state and U.S. senator, and longtime owner of the Topeka Capital newspaper and Capper’s Weekly magazine, was born and raised three blocks south of my neighborhood along the train tracks in Garnett.

Of the 60 or so people I considered part of our neighborhood in the 1960s, half of them are now deceased, including my sister, and all the others have moved away - except for my parents.

I consider myself lucky to have grown up at First and Cedar at the time I did.