While on a birthday call with my friend Howie—we’ve known each other since 1968—I learned that he and his wife Patti have broken ground on a house by the water in Beaufort, South Carolina. Howie, a doctor, is now semi-retired at 69, and as I’ve never known anyone as captivated by the water—lifeguard at Brown’s Beach in Huntington, New York as a teen, later scuba diving and boating—it’s a well-earned reward for the upcoming years. He told me that the dwelling is tentatively scheduled for completion in eight months—they must be using non-union workers—although he’s a little dubious about the deadline. Then again, it’s not a federal project with Mayor Pete nominally in charge, so they might be lazing on a hammock and swimming by the time he turns 70 next June.
The picture above is of the split-level in Huntington where I lived for almost 17 years, under construction on the new LaRue Dr., a Levittown-style development that cleared away the woods and finished with 14 identical houses, although the more ambitious of our neighbors tried to jazz up their property. (I visited LaRue last October with my two sons, on a road trip, and after decades it was more lush, although still middle class. I was peeved that the Initial Tree, at the top of the cul-de-sac, where we played touch football in the 1960s, had vanished. So much for the 100-year-old oak!)
Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 song “Little Boxes” (popularized by Pete Seeger in 1963 and more recently as the theme to the TV show Weeds) was a funny, if heavy-handed satire of tract-housing like where I lived, but it didn’t accurately capture our neighborhood. These lyrics are way off: “And they all play on the golf course/And drink their martinis dry/And they all have pretty children/And the children go to school/And the children go to summer camp/And then to the university/Where they are put in boxes/And they all come out the same.”
In reality, our “little boxes” were filled with (mostly) well-meaning people, but not all the children were “pretty,” not all went to “the university” and definitely didn’t come out the same. The more apt comparison is a low-level Peyton Place: the WWII vet who lived next to us was a Pearl Harbor survivor (with his sword hanging in the unkempt living room) and a sullen, unemployed drunk; a family of Christian Scientists—although really friendly—were firm in their beliefs and the four children were a combination of druggies, “easy” girls and the oldest was disfigured by a treatable disease if they… went to a doctor. A divorced German man was mostly shunned, and several of the boys either enlisted or were drafted for the Vietnam War. I’d guess there was some hanky-panky in the neighborhood, but I never got wind of it.
Granted, a lot of this was whispered about by parents at cocktail parties—plenty of booze, frozen Chun King appetizers out of the oven, cubes of cheese with toothpicks —and didn’t filter down to the kids, a lot of them my friends, until they reached the mid-teens. But I was lucky to have a wonderful childhood: riding bikes, taking the bus or walking to Southdown Elementary School, no locked doors (until 1968 or so), getting to skip church if it snowed, riding sleds down the steep hill, and seeing the neighborhood lit up at Christmas; even the several Jewish families had nifty Hanukah displays, and there were plenty of ways to make money. I shoveled driveways for older “empty-nesters,” mowed lawns and as a teenager made significant cash babysitting (bonus: raiding liquor cabinet).
I’ve no idea how long it was before my parents and four brothers could move into the house (I wasn’t born yet), but it really doesn’t look so different from when it was sold in 1972 for a mere $19,000, just $500 more than the purchase price. It was a beat-up place by then—five boys will take a toll—and was on the market for over a year.
As it happened, we had, and played the Pete Seeger LP that included “Little Boxes” and never thought it was aimed at families like ours. In retrospect, Reynolds’ song was smug, giving the impression that all of suburbia was Cheever/Updike land, a generalization that even if partly tongue-in-cheek, was taken as gospel by that era’s cognoscenti.
Look at the clues to figure out the year: in England, the House of Lords approves the government’s proposals for commercial TV; Winston Churchill (no favoritism!) wins the Nobel Literature prize; Laura Ashley sells her first printed fabrics; Frankie Laine owns the British pop music charts; Robin Hood debuts on BBC TV; the Boston Braves move to Milwaukee; John Huston takes it easy on the Amalfi Coast filming Beat the Devil; Ben Hogan win three major golf championships; Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has first performance, in Paris; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible opens on Broadway; Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is published; Robert Taft is Senate Majority Leader; Playboy debuts, at 50 cents per copy; Tony Shalhoub is born and Dooley Wilson dies; 20th Century Fox releases Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; and assembly of first Chevrolet Corvette is completed in now-wasteland Flint, MI.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023