My Park Hill: Growing up in the Baby Boom
Three-year-old Vicki (McCaa) Reynolds sits on her front porch on the 2800 block of Birch Street circa 1946 with her dog Teddy. Her Park Hill is wonderful memories of an idyllic childhood. She offers a poignant perspective on the many modern changes and how the important things – like neighborliness – have stayed the same.
By, Vicki Reynolds
My son and his family recently purchased a home in Park Hill. Every time I visit them, a flood of happy memories overwhelm me. I was born and raised in Park Hill.
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, our neighborhood was evolving. Few homes had been built north of 32nd Avenue (later renamed Martin Luther King), where we flew our kids and learned to drive. New homes were slowly being constructed east of Monaco. Noise pollution wasn’t a problem from planes landing at Stapleton because there were few of them, and they all had propellors. We could hear animals roaring at City Park and smell the circus when they had a parade from the circus train to the stock show buildings.
There were still vacant lots in each block shared by the neighborhood children for forts and by gardeners raising vegetables. Most homes had front porches where neighbors congregated after dinner for lemonade or during the day for use by the kids for plays, dress ups, jacks tournaments or games. The majority of houses were on a telephone party line. When you got bored, you’d eavesdrop on other conversations. Park Hill phone numbers had only 4 digits. Long distance calls went through an operator. The only time you’d see a car parked at the curb was if someone had company. All the families had one car, and it was always parked in the garage when dad got home from work. That pretty much left the street open for bicycle acrobatics, sledding, kickball and leaf forts.
All kids lived within walking distance of school; there were no school buses except for field trips. You had one hour to go home for lunch. The faster you ate, the more time you had to roller skate, play on the rings, the jungle gym or the monkey bars.
There were two things that every child did who lived in the neighborhood. They rode their bikes to Sportland Swimming Pool every day (except Saturday) during summer vacation. On Saturday afternoons, everybody was at the Tower Theater on Kearney (it has since been coverted to a church) for the double feature plus five cartoons. The Tower was unique; it had a crying room for mothers and babies to watch the movie from. It was sound proofed and had a glass wall so the moms could see the screen. It probably was not a stellar movie experience for the moms. The rest of us were eating Fire Stix or Big Hunks and lost in the African jungles with Tarzan.
Life was simple and uncomplicated. What could be better that sipping a cherry coke at the Park Hill Drugstore soda fountain? I wish the same kind of memories on my granddaughter.
My Park Hill is a new GPHN section featuring the local’s point of view. How do you see the neighborhood? Why do you live here? What makes Park Hill feel like home? Submit your essays to evanderberg@greaterparkhill.org.