PHILLY-ROOTS-L Archives

From: Ann Rickard <>
Subject: FU: Nostalgia
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 17:15:02 -0500

Well, you PHILLY-ROOTS people, I'm a little late putting in my 2 cents
on "growing up in Philadelphia", but what I'm reading about "Nostalgia"
is distressing and NOT AT ALL MY EXPERIENCE! My neighborhood was the
Crescentville area of North Philly, between Olney and Lawndale. A really
great place to grow up in the 40's and 50's! This was a "good" area then,
nothing like what I've been reading of Kensington and Fishtown. The
mothers in my neighborhood watched out for all of us, they would tell us
if it was getting dark that "the lights are coming on, it's time to go
home." And those lights! Lit by the lamplighter (gas), as we sat on the
lower steps of those row houses playing cards. How about the skating?
There were hardly any cars due to gas rationing during the War (II), and
the whole neighborhood congregated on my street (wide and smooth) to
skate playing "whip" with sometimes 20 kids across the street holding
hands in a circle; oh how fast we had to skate if we were on the end!.
How about Robin Hood Dell in Fairmount Park - Ormandy conducting the
orchestra. How about riding a bike to Cheltenham Park, quite a distance.
How about "The Fighting Phils" and the 1950 pennant race; that song,
"Fight, fight fighting Phils'" was played in my Olney High School cafeteria.
And how about those great hot lunches in high school; I know now we were
a "test site" for the "School Lunch Program" which is still around,
everywhere in the USA plus sometimes breakfast. And how about that great
teaching in school? I've carried with me through the years wherever I've
lived an understanding of the liberties this great country was founded
on, taught by my teachers at Franklin Elementary. How about walking on
rocks to cross Tacony Creek? How about riding the open trolley to the
amusement park, Willow Grove? How about walking from Penn and Drexel over to
the Art Museum over the bridge over the Schuylkill River before the West River
Drive was taken over by the Schuylkill Expressway?
I could go on and on. Not a month has gone by since I left the city in the
mid-60's that I haven't rejoiced in my good fortune to have been a "city
kid" and Philadelphia at that! We had nothing in my neighborhood such has
been described by others. We had no drunks walking the streets, no shrew-
wifes screaming, no bullys in school; but even in those days, we as kids
were made aware that Philadelphia had some "bad neighborhoods" and those
we stayed away from even as we became older.
Ann
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DATE:2/5/98 12:03 AM

RE:Nostalgia

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From: Eugene Stackhouse <>
Subject: Nostalgia
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I have read with interest many of the nostalgia messages. It is nice to
look back on one's childhood and remember the many things we did, stick
ball, the Mummers, trips down the Delaware and to amusement parks, shopping
downtown, etc, etc.

Now, I don't want to rain on anybody's parade but I look at many things
from my childhood through a different perspective.

However, don't come back looking for many of the things that were there.
Kensington Ave and Frankford Ave are one large brothel, poverty,
degradation, hopelessness, and misery are everywhere along the streets.
Children roam around stoned, dazed, drunk, sick, dying.

However, from where I lived in Kensington, my most vivid memory is the
miserable, stinking heat radiating from the brick houses and streets
during summer heat waves, the stench, the grinding poverty, the violence,
the incredible boredom, fighting while going to school in the morning and
home again in the afternoon, standing on the street corner for hours on end
looking for trouble, stealing, drinking, smoking, running from the police,
etc. etc. Gangs. I remember the men from the neighborhood going from work
to the bars on Friday night to drink away ther pay and their wives and
children going after them before they blew the food and rent money. Men
beating their wives. Wives retaliating. Child abuse: physical, sexual, and
psychological. The men prowling the neighborhood looking for boys. Underage
drinking. (There was bar at "C" and Allegheny, the Bucket, which served
beer to boys from Stetson Jr. High School). All pervasive police
corruption and abuse. The cops routinely accepted bribes (mandatory
Christmas gifts from bar owners). Huge, castle or prison-like schools,
frought with danger and vice, filled with uncaring teachers and bored,
angry children. I escaped by going into the US Army Infantry (a bigger
gang).

And before my time? My father was sent to Camp Happy because of
malnutrition. When he was a boy, he and one of his brothers used to get
coal to heat their house
by picking it up off railroad tracks along Trenton Ave.
My mathernal grandmother gave birth to a stillborn in a bucket in her
kitchen in South Philadephia. My grandfather, when he wasn't drunk or
beating my grandmother, earned money by being an enforcer for loan sharks.

All in all, though, it is worse now than it was then, especially for the
children.

I am better off than I was, mostly because my mother forced me to become
educated, although she herself wasn't.

I would never go back.

Maybe it is good to look at the past through rose colored glasses, but I
can't.
I still see it all here, in the present.

Have a nice day.

Gene in Philadelphia

This thread:

• FU: Nostalgia by Ann Rickard <>