A STORY WORTH TELLING
“The shortest distance between home and growing up was that morning walk to school.”
— Author unknown
I loved those long-ago crisp autumn mornings at South Ward Elementary School in Mount Pleasant. They didn’t begin with Mom cinching a five-point seat harness, however. Or navigating the perils of a long student dropoff lane.
For me, they started with grabbing my Roy Rogers lunchbox and my book satchel, then hitting the street in my Keds high tops as Mom reminded again, “Quit letting that screen door slam shut.”
Back then, walking a few hundred yards from our Redbud Street home to school wasn’t considered a daring feat of survival. It was just what you did if you possessed working legs and the tornado siren wasn’t going off.
To a 9-year-old in the Eisenhower era, those few blocks were a vast, wondrous world to explore. Armed with nothing but a nickel for a carton of Borden’s milk and a profound lack of adult supervision, we stepped out into the world of walking to school.
The journey required navigating some neighborhood checkpoints. One was the ditch at the playtime meeting spot we called “shade trees,” where the drainage culvert yielded frogs to slip into my book satchel. Another was the hound dog at the house where I cut across the vacant lot that demanded a pat through the chain-link fence.
These morning journeys operated under the unwritten law of the neighborhood safety net. If you tripped and skinned your knee, you didn’t dial 911 or sue anybody.
Bless your heart, you just wandered onto the nearest porch where a mom was sending youngsters off to school. Any of them would sigh, brush the dirt off, slap on a Band-Aid and send you on your way so you wouldn’t be late for the bell.
The neighborhood was a volunteer committee of surrogate parents.
On city streets today, seeing a grade-schooler navigating to class unescorted would likely trigger an immediate, communitywide panic with screaming social-media posts.
Social services would be dispatched to investigate the parents who let a minor go on a morning outdoor adventure without a designated adult chaperone.
At the same time, other parents sit in idling, two-ton SUVs for 45 minutes, inching forward in a line stretching from the drop-off lane down to the end of the street. All this just to transport a child a distance that easily could be covered on foot in six minutes.
Granted, defenders of this modern shift present valid concerns. Traffic has multiplied, sidewalks have vanished and 24-hour news cycles have convinced us a supervillain lurks behind every crepe myrtle bush.
It’s sad when looking back at my youth: An era when mid-century kids walked to school, every day, uphill both ways, in the snow, lacking any tracking device, but with absolute certainty they could handle a stray dog or a missing sneaker lace all by their lonesome. One can’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia.
Parents today can argue they are saving children from perils and the elements by transporting today’s students like cargo, all safely buckled into the back seat, watching a world through a tinted window—a world they are rarely permitted to touch.
Sadly, this delays a kid’s first taste of genuine independence like we had when walking to school was an adventure, when growing up meant skinning a knee, trusting a neighbor and keeping a frog in your book satchel.
Just in case you needed one.
Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
