Carroll Lutheran Village residents Bob Coen, Jim Parker, Frances Kane and Hazel Rectanus share childhood stories of how they were raised.
by Jeffrey B. Roth, photography by Walter P. Calahan
Few memories are sweeter than those of childhood.
As playwright Tom Stoppard said: “If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”
When four residents of Carroll Lutheran Village, ages 70s and 80s, shared memories from their childhoods during the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, their faces warmed with smiles and their eyes sparkled with a mixture of laughter and mischief.
“There were about six families who worked the 500-acre farm,” said Bob Coen, 74, a retired federal employee from Aberdeen Proving Grounds who spent his childhood on My Lady’s Manor in rural Harford County. He remembers riding everywhere on “an old Hawthorne” balloon-tire bicycle bought at a Montgomery Ward store in the 1930s.
“We played baseball in the spring and summer, and football in the fall,” Coen sid. “There were eight of us kids who, in the fall, would clean up hay bales in the hay mound and put up a basketball hoop inside. It was just awesome.”
Building forts, roaming the fields and woods, playing with friends and using his imagination constituted Coen’s childhood. In the summer he would swim in a Great Gatsby-style, pentagonal-shaped pool fed by a stream on the property.
“I think that when everything is at kids’ fingertips today, they don’t have to think about entertaining themselves,” Coen said. “Using their imagination to create a different reality is a skill I think kids have lost. It’s a shame.”
Hazel Rectanus, 82, a former physical education teacher, grew up in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a row home in Northern Philadelphia where she had total freedom to wander around her neighborhood with friends.
“My dad died when I was a little kid,” Rectanus, said. “My mom and I were forced to move from the suburbs of Willow Grove to Philadelphia to live with an aunt and uncle. As children, we would leave in the morning and be gone all day — we were totally free.”
As a teen, Rectanus and her friends would often pay a dime to ride the subway to Wanamaker’s in downtown Philadelphia. Once a week, they would walk to the library.
Rectanus was given her first bicycle when she was 12 and, along with her girlfriends, rode thousands of miles all around their neighborhood.
“We just rode and rode and rode,” she said.
Rectanus and other neighborhood children would spend most of their free time playing at Hunting Park. In the summer, the park offered a free camp-type program, provided free lunches and sponsored craft activities.
“There really was no supervised anything,” Rectanus said. “My girlfriends and I would walk around Hunting Park, on a Sunday, all dressed up of course, probably trying to attract the boys, which we really didn’t. We thought we were the cat’s pajamas.”
Frances C. Kane, 87, a retired RN, grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts but has lived in Maryland for 50 or 60 years. Growing up, she lived on a short street with about 20 houses where everybody knew everybody else.
“At the end of our street the B&M Railroad, the Boston & Maine Railroad, went by,” Kane said. “Sometimes hobos would jump off the train, come to our back door and my mother would fix them a hot meal, and sometimes they would do a chore for her or my father. Many people, at that time, survived only because of the kindness of strangers.”
The presence of hobos and other strangers was not a source of fear, Kane, said. People watched out for the children.
“It was the Great Depression time, but we never knew we were poor,” said Kane, whose father worked as a special police officer at Boston Harbor, and whose mother was a teacher and an RN. “I remember I had two skirts and two sweaters when I went to high school and I thought I was the cat’s meow.”
Kane and her friends skied, played red rover, hide and go seek, marbles and other games. With no family car, Kane was comfortable riding public transportation to Lowell’s downtown.
“I had free run to go out and play, but I knew I had to be home by dinner,” Kane said. “You would hear people go out on their porches and whistle, each with their own sound, to call their children.”
Jim Parker, a retired service manager for an automobile dealer who turned 85 on May 10, is from a family of four boys and four girls. Born in Huntington, West Virginia his family moved to Ironton, Ohio after his father was furloughed from his job with the West Virginia State Road Commission in 1931. In 1936 they moved to Roanoke, Virginia.
“In Roanoke, we lived in two small neighborhoods until 1940, when we moved to a large neighborhood,” Parker said. “My father was a traveling salesman and was on the road a lot.”
Parker’s first job was working as a helper walking a newspaper route. Later, he was given his own route. Instead of walking, he rode a bike to deliver 175 newspapers over a five-mile, hilly route.
“Growing up, we had to help mother take care of our younger brothers and sisters,” Parker said. “There was a 100-acre plot of wooded land owned by the Shriners across from our house where we built tree houses, put tents up and had picnics. We’d play up until 8 to 10 o’clock at night.”
In “grammar school,” Parker would ride a bus for the six-mile trip. In junior high he walked three miles to and from the school.
“In winter time, we had a long steep hill, which the city would block off when we had snow,” Parker said. “They would build fires in 55-gallon drums and you could sleigh ride from 6 to 10 o’clock in the evening.”
Coen said he often hears parents say they want to make a better life for their children.
“But you know,” he said, “you’re not always doing them a favor by making life better for them. If you have to dig and scratch, sometimes that builds character.”
