You are free to move around the neighborhood!

It is no wonder that our generation travelled all around the world when we were older. We learned the meaning of freedom and independence at a very early age in Woodsdale.
My earliest memories of growing up in Woodsdale involve freedom….freedom to move around the neighborhood without difficulty or overt adult supervision. Times were certainly different then…

Every day except Sunday, the streets filled up with kids. My Mother would routinely force me out of the house with the simple command, “Go outside! You need to get some fresh air.” I apparently needed a great deal of “fresh air” because I spent the entire summer outside. If you weren’t out by 8 a.m. or so, your friends would come to the house calling your name to “come out and play!” The only real requirement was that I had to stay within calling distance or “ear-shot”, and to come home by dinnertime. I can still hear my Mother calling me from our back porch when it was time to come home to eat. Dinnertime was 6 O’clock on the dot at my house. Then it was back outside until the street lights came on.

My first real experience with freedom came when I got my first bicycle on my 6th birthday. My older sisters, Helen and Stell, taught me how to ride. My parents devised strict boundaries. “You can only ride on the sidewalk on our side of Poplar and in the alley between Poplar and Edgewood. No crossing any street.” No problem! That was plenty of roaming space for a 6 year-old. There were four or five boys whose houses shared the alleyway. Most of the girls in the neighborhood lived on Lower Poplar, Lower Maple, and Walnut; therefore, “out of sight and mind.” To a six year old boy at the time, that was not necessarily an objectionable limitation.

I remember roaming from backyard to back yard. Amazingly everyone’s back yard was different, so we rarely got bored. If it rained, we moved to the porches, and out came the board and card games. The mothers of the neighborhood had a network of sorts to keep track of where we were at all times. That is the only way I can explain that no matter whose back yard we were playing in at lunchtime, that mom miraculously appeared with lunch prepared for all us. After lunch we went right back to playing dodge ball, red rover, waffle-ball, mumbley-peg, crazy 8’s, and a strange word game that involved guessing cigarette advertising slogans. For example…”LSMFT”: “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco.” Remember, smoking had not yet been declared a killer. Now you try one. “WTGLACS.”

By the time I was in 3rd grade my boundaries had been expanded to include St. John’s Episcopal Church on Heiskell. The adjacent field had become the neighborhood baseball diamond. The field even had a backstop that some of the dad’s had built to protect the neighboring houses from serious damage. The ball field became the gathering place for all the boys in the neighborhood to learn how to play baseball and football. It is also the first time and place that the boys began to notice that there were girls in the neighborhood. The girls would spend hours practicing cheerleading routines. It all seemed quite natural.

In due course we graduated from St. John’s “field of little dreams” to the official Little League baseball park across National Road. From 4th grade to 8th grade I spent most of those long beautiful summer days playing baseball and penny black jack at the baseball field in Pleasanton, home to the infamous Pike Cubs. Eventually, my friends and I could go just about wherever our bikes, energy, and time available would take us. We thought nothing of riding our bikes after a morning of baseball to Wheeling Park to swim. Believe or not we even rode up to Oglebay Park every now and then. It was tough going up the hill, but absolutely exhilarating riding back down.

My well-travelled bicycle ended up in the basement when I got my driver’s license. True to form, my parent’s assigned boundaries. “You may only drive in Wheeling. You may not cross the river.” No problem! That was plenty of roaming space for a 16 year-old.