Saturdays in the City

Saturday mornings were special in our South Broadway neighborhood in Little Rock back in the 1970s. The afternoons waited for more anguish in renovating homes, but mornings were a time for a soft, gentle re-entry into life.

Our neo-hippie neighbor across the alley would start things about the time the last family started moving about. Majestic tones of a symphony would drift through the area, something beautiful but largely unknown, like the piece composed by Edward Elgar for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. That’s when you knew he had coffee ground for visitors, deep, dark, rich coffee he ordered specially brewed from a small, obscure, company in Seattle called Starbucks. The thought of it would draw one like a tractor beam.

Weekends were also a prime time for discarding unwanted junk. You just put it in the alley and the city would haul it off come the new week. Unless …

Unless our neighborhood scavengers saw it and deemed someone’s else’s junk could be a treasure to a person possessed of high degree of imagination. Brenda and a resident of the last house to the south were the pilferes très excellent. They would meet in the alley to inspect the discarded items that each had placed in the alley and those of other neighbors as well. Sometimes their chatter mixed in the air with the sounds of Mahler.

“Why, the metal in it alone is worth keeping,” one would say.

“It has to be good for something,” the other would say.

“You want it?”

“Yeah, but you can keep it.”

“You can have the next one.”

They were courteous hoarders, these two. During a recent visit nearly 40 years later, a spouse and I agreed that both families still stored items rescued from destruction in that old alley.

Back to Saturdays, sometimes the lady at 22^nd and Broadway would stroll by in her Sunday best, white gloves and all. In all likelihood, she would hand you a present that she had just prepared that morning. It might be an empty chewing gum package wrapped in yarning twine, a tree’s twig with a ribbon, or something equally imaginative. All her gifts were assembled from items picked up during her morning walks. She’d hand it to you, smile with pride, and move on.

Another alley resident was true free-spirit, a nonconformist who, had she thought in those terms, might have considered herself an early feminist. She’s a grandmother now, and writes editorials for a statewide newspaper in what may be the most conservative state in America, no doubt causing waves that reach tsunami level. Good for her.

A couple from down the street might walk by and nod. I’m not sure what the younger did, but his partner was, for a tragically short period of time, the first openly-gay music director at one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious churches. We never knew where they went after the congregation of Christians voted to terminate him after hearing the news.

At the end of the block, north, was a brick apartment building built behind the house facing Broadway. It was government-subsidized and boasted a diversified group, including a family who spent weekends travelling, with their young children, to far away churches where they spread their form of Christianity. The upper-floor occupants were more transient and sometimes deposited products of their weekend euphoria-spells in the alley. They never bothered anyone, though. “Like Mack and boys,” they tended to their own adventures.

That describes our life pretty well. We had our own little “Cannery Row,” which was nothing more than an obscure alley in a neglected part of town in a City that had been cruelly treated by those who create history. We were simply trying to preserve some of the better remnants of its history.

We’d start back at it just after lunch.

You know there's a dead
rat under the kitchen.
Ain't historic preservation fun?

My Redacted Life: Chapter 32

As I waited for August of 1972 to arrive, the firm was humming with activity. We were about to break ground on our first subdivision. It was a small, but elegant thing, based on the current thinking.

Urban planners had decided, for example, that such frivolities as sidewalks didn’t deserve a place in modern America. Who walked anymore? Where would one walk? Neighborhoods would no longer be connected. That might lead to the mingling of social classes and other urban ills.

The disappearance of neighborhood schools was making the motoring of kids more important than ever. Planners spent their leisure hours contemplating how, in the future, they would configure ways to make automobile travel more seamless, even if it meant sacrificing the pedestrian.

Then there was the growing preference for dead-end streets, called cul-de-sacs. Homeowners seemed to like them as they helped keep strangers off their street. Police weren’t so sure because it made patrolling neighborhoods more difficult. Firefighters worried about entire streets being stranded by downed trees or power lines. In large developments, property owners had to carry maps with them to navigate the development.

We called it progress and moved on.

There was also a new generation of home buyers entering the market, the so-called “Baby Boomers,” or those born in the post-World War Two procreation frenzy between 1946 and 1964, much of that time free from the nighttime distraction of television. At any rate, they represented some 20 percent of America’s population, the largest identifiable population cohort in America’s history, also one of the most spoiled, pampered, and selfish. They would impact the economy of the Untied States for decades.

To call them a schizophrenic would fall way short of the mark. As a measurable group, they supported the Vietnam War, but as that same measurable group, they chose, rather pointedly, not to participate in it. 

Their parents, the generation that had survived both the Great Depression and the Second World War, knew full well the meaning of sacrifice. To their credit, and perhaps our country’s detriment, they harbored the hope of protecting their children from trials such as they had endured. The fact that America enjoyed the only fully functioning economy among developed nations, made this possible.

Consequently, the Boomers were neither accustomed to, nor fond of, privation. The so-called “Greatest Generation” had rushed by the millions to purchase modest homes of 800 square feet or less, often in developments labelled as “splintervilles” or some such demeaning term by later wags.

The Boomers, on the other hand, demanded an entry-level purchase of a three-bedroom two-bath brick home, well beyond their level of purchasing power.

Because of such old-fashioned habits of saving and parsimony, parents of the Boomers stood on hand to help their kids purchase their dream homes, often larger and more expensive than those of the parents.

The GI Bill had helped World War Two veterans, who were of Caucasian descent, purchase decent, safe, and sanitary housing in areas where the housing was marketable, if not luxurious. Other veterans did the best they could. That’s where housing stood in my early career. A family’s home was destined to become, for the Boomers, the single greatest portion of their net worth. Choices of location were important, for those who could make them, a distant dream for those who couldn’t.

How did this all affect someone like me? We shall see.

Some neighborhoods were
more desirable than others.