Reflecting on Reflections

I just reread the Reflections that I posted earlier, and maybe I painted a gloomier picture than what life was really like. It’s true enough that we had few conveniences like we have today, and my folks never had the opportunity to enjoy retirement like I have, but life back then wasn’t all bad.

We knew our neighbors in a much better way. The neighborhood was a closely knit friendly community, and folks helped each other. Without air-conditioning, everyone spent a lot of time outside. The windows of the house were always open, so neighborhood sounds were always with us. Doors were seldom locked, and Miz Florrie Allen, who lived right across the street, just came in without knocking whenever she pleased, calling, "Is anybody home?" She’d come over to borrow something or just to visit. I think that most of the other neighbors at least knocked first.

There was a sense of duty among friends - a duty to look out for each other. There was a beggar in the neighborhood who slept in a cardboard box on a vacant lot. He made the rounds of the neighborhood about once a week, asking for handouts of food or discarded clothing. He was always courteous and never caused any concern about stealing things. He was just there. I guess things like duty, and honor, and honesty were just taken for granted, but they existed then to a much greater degree than nowadays.

There were terrible things going on in the world. Hitler was committing atrocities in Europe big time in the 1930s, but we were insulated from that. Maybe not having round-the-clock, 24/7 news on TV was a plus to life in a sense. Tampa had its share of crime and corruption. The mafia was known to exist, and there were occasional gangster style killings that never got solved, but the news of such activity was not a part of everyday life. Drug addiction was almost unknown. I think I heard about marijuana in high school, but I never knew anyone who actually used it, much less the harder stuff.

So, in retrospect, those growing up years in the 1930s and 1940s were not all bad. Some of our modern conveniences have just made us lazy, and there were a lot of good times spent with family and friends.