Different times

This postcard from the 1950s depicts Broad Street looking West from about 8th Street. The State Theater, showing the movie "No Down Payment," is at the near right, and Thalhimers department store is the 6-story building on the left. Downtown was then still a safe place for a kid to explore on his own.

There's been a discussion of the word "playdate" this week on an email list of copyeditors.

It's a fairly new word. I certainly never heard it when I was a kid in the 1940s and 50s. Our parents didn't arrange playdates. We just went outside, found our friends, and played. Often, our parents told us to go outside and play just to get us out from underfoot.

It wasn't unusual for us not to tell our parents where we were going or what we'd be doing -- as long as we promised to be home in time for supper. My friends in those days all lived within a couple of blocks. The neighbors looked out for us. If we misbehaved, some adult would tell us to "stop that this instant!"

We dreaded having a neighbor call our parents to say we'd done something wrong. Unlike today, the adults were believed automatically, without question, and the kids were not. If Mrs. Johnson who lived across the street and down the block, or whoever, said I had done something, there was no question that I had done it. (The same trust applied to teachers. If I messed up at school, I'd be punished once by the teacher and again when I got home.)

The world was a safer place in those days, and the freedom from supervised play that we enjoyed then can only be appreciated in retrospect.

By the time I was 10, my world opened up even more. If I could persuade my mom to give me 30 cents, I could take the bus downtown, by myself, and go to a movie (I became adept at winning free movie tickets on radio quizzes), or explore the State Capitol building's underground tunnels (which were sorta, kinda scary), or wander through Miller & Rhoads or Thalhimers and look at all the things I'd like to buy if only I had the money.

(Persuading my mom to give me 30 cents for the bus wasn't always easy. Back then, 30 cents would buy a carton of Cokes or two loaves of bread.)

We were never totally free of adult supervision. If we got rowdy on the bus, somebody who knew who we were would call our parents, who would be waiting to give us holy hell once we got back home.

Downtown Richmond, just like my East End neighborhood, was safe for a kid. (This is not to say that the blue-haired ladies at the White House of the Confederacy didn't look at me oddly as I explored the exhibits. They did, and I'm certain that they wondered what the heck a 10-year-old was doing wandering around looking at Rebel uniforms with 80-year-old bloodstains on them.)

To be sure, there were times I could have used some adult supervision. When I was about 7, my friend Bobby Johnson and I were playing in a field not far from home when we discovered a pint of gin in the weeds. Stupidly, we drank it. I staggered home drunk as a skunk, and my mother was horrified. She called our family doctor. "What should I do?" she asked him. His advice: "Put him to bed and let him sleep it off."

A couple of years later, another friend and I were out riding our bikes. We were about a mile from home when I tried some stupid stunt, went flying over the handlebars, and broke my arm. A stranger came along in an automobile, picked me up, carried me to his car, put my bike in his trunk, and took me home. I shudder to think what my mom must have thought when she opened the front door to find me in the arms of somebody she didn't know. But she was grateful for his help, as was I. (I have no memory of what my young friend did. I suspect he rode his bike back to his house.)

As I said, the world was a safer place then -- not safe from our own stupidity but safe from people who wanted to hurt us.

Much has changed. Now a parent would be foolhardy to allow a child the freedom we enjoyed and took for granted. Today, parents arrange playdates. Back then, they might have asked "Where are you going?"

And we would have said, "Out."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing."

And that was okay.