Communists In Our Yard...And In Other Places
We had a yard in the back of our house: not much of a yard by the standard of suburban property limits today. But behind our rowhouses everybody got enough of a greenpatch to need to own a lawn mower and shears. Along the fences that separated every other house moms like mine who had green-thumbs planted flower gardens. When they went up to the American Store for groceries they might pick up a few packets of Atlee-Burpee seeds. Bees had a smorgasbord in the yards in our block. My mom must have planted about thirty different kinds of flowers out back. A lot of them ended up in vases on the dining room table and in the living room. The bees stayed outside.
Each yard was a little world populated by bugs, ants, worms and crawlers that clung to undersides of rocks. Adults generally ignore much of the activities of nature's world unless it annoys them. Alerts go out when Japanese Beetles or caterpillars appear. They're pests. They're in a league with termites and cockroaches and flies and moths, species that will eat houses and spread germs and drive residents into unwilling nudity. Mothers took precautionary measures to keep the villains at bay: camphor moth balls, fly paper (and a swatter), roach powder, other specialized chemicals to keep down populations of particular species. See the boxes marked with skull and cross-bones. Mice, greatly feared by women, were killed by mouse-traps (neck-breakers) and by cats, who the ladies thought were cute except when they murdered the pretty song-birds that caught their eye.
We were content to watch all God's critters without much prejudice except wasps and hornets and yellow-jackets. These were cousins of bees and they were up to no-good. They were aggressive and might attack anyone. Their stings were painful and could be relieved by an application of mud.
Kids on farms are likely to see the birth of calves and foals and kids and piglets and chicks. In our little portion some would watch pups and kittens arrive. The closest I got to the miracle of birth was to visit the nursery in Heffner's yard where flies incubated thousands of maggots in the garbage pail. No matter how disgusting things are, there's still a level of fascination that draws us in to watch, even to hornets and wasps. Or to flies having lunch on horse-shit. Soon they will be hiking across the plums and peaches and grapes on the kitchen table. Heffner's mulberry tree had caterpillar tents high up in the crotches of upper branches. We'd climb up and peer into the milky mass at the tiny soon-to-be leaf eaters and maybe poke a hole in their nest.
Adults were less inclined to let nature alone. Afterall, grown-ups know about germs and filth and inconvenience and other things that had to be dealt with. So the maggots were drowned and we were saved from the plague and the caterpillars were destroyed by smoke-pots and the Heffner's still had a shady tree in their yard. Cats were spared because they didn't eat things that were bigger than themselves.
Spiders were really scary. They carried poison so they were a menace. We heard ugly stories about black widows and tarantulas. But, when we saw spiders' magnificent webs we saw them as architects and artists. They trapped and killed wasps and flies so they couldn't be all bad.
Honey Bees lived in hives in trees. In the mornings the workers came out to work in flower gardens. Without the bees we wouldn't have any flowers in our yard. They were monarchists, ruled by a queen. End of nature lesson about bees except to say that when their base got too big frightened citizens would call the authorities who would send a bee-keeper over to get rid of them.
Ants were easier for us to watch. They were seen in several sizes and a few colors. They built their cities down in the earth, under our lawns or in the cracks on the sidewalk. A very simple observation revealed how complex their society was. Workers could lift a million times their own weight. They carried loads over designated highways to predetermined places.
Some were aggressive. They were ferocious in battle. Armies marched and they mangled their foes. I hear that they took prisoners. We were told these things but I never witnessed the carnage and couldn't identify forced marches.
For a while I thought the little ants were the babies of the big ones. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen the babies of either the big ones or the little ones.
When I studied them moving about I became a god of sorts, looking down from Olympus. I could destroy them if I was not pleased. Or, I could single certain ones out and squash them. Much more often I would just look at them. Entrepreneurs knew boys spent a lot of time watching ants so ant-farms were sold commercially. I don't know if a colony between two glass slabs was a fair imitation of natural environment. Probably not! But it was the best way to observe them underground. It was, though, at the expense of wider movement on the surface. That inhibition made the whole idea phony, like zoos.
I look at the ants. They're oblivious to my watching. At a whim I could squash them, crush them underfoot or maybe drown them by a pail of water or the garden hose. Moms had deliberate plans. When they saw a few thousand little ants on the sidewalk they'd dispatch them with a pot of hot water. Most of the time I was content to be an observer of their movement. An ant farm was out of the question in our house. My mother feared a mass-escape and the possibility of them colonizing her bed. Moms worry.
The ants were communists. Our yard was their collective in an Outer-Mongolia in back of Mayland Street.
The Second World War ended in the summer of 1945. That's the kind of title that makes you think the world was at war only once before. When World War One was over no-one identified it as World War One. It was The Great War which really meant it was a terrible war. The Terrible War should have had a number: The Terrible War Seventy One Thousand Two Hundred and Four (or whatever). Gee! World War Two seemed to imply that eventually there would be a World War Three. Publicists got busy and in time made the thought so unattractive that they predicted that there would be nothing left for World War Four. That's as good deterrent as any. It certainly got a lot of fiction writers and seers a lot of book material.
Those who lost were in the dock and they were going to pay a hard price for being mean to a lot people. With their elimination, the world that I was going to grow-up into would be swell, kind of an open National Geographic Society and the Grosvenor Boys could trot around everywhere with their cameras. Every month they would invite us into remote, exotic, friendly places. Sometimes we would be looking at the cradles of our heritage. Things would have to be cleaned-up first. The victors would open a cooperative called The United Nations. They all went to San Francisco to make nice the things they dreamed about in Casablanca, Yalta and Potsdam.
Philadelphia put in a bid to be the permanent home of the United Nations. It was a logical site. Afterall the world's second democracy was forged there, and Philadelphia was in better condition than Athens. Anyway, to anyone with perspective these were the only sites worthy of consideration. Philadelphia was located between New York and Washington: another plus.
Building sites were discussed. The Art Museum could be torn down and the U.N. could sit on the plateau facing the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Champs Elysees of the New World. If cultural patricians got selfish and vetoed the museum site, a good alternative would be the Centennial Fairground in Fairmount Park. The Park Commission were in no mood to surrender one leaf to intruders. They were jealous guardians of the world's largest municipal park who would not be bought-out. Those in charge in Philadelphia didn't have the savvy, influence, imagination and bucks needed and they couldn't compete with John D. Rockefeller who lured all the ambassadors to glitzy New York where they could properly party after work. New York was not yet compared equal with Calcutta.
If Winston Churchill was killed in the blitz, no-one would have gone to Fulton, Missouri, to announce an iron curtain had descended across Europe. That speech scared the hell out of a lot of people. The press put the phrase to work and it became a rallying cry for the preservation of the free-world. If Francisco Franco read the same script in Albuquerque it would have been dismissed.
Success might be noted as "What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine." Churchill followed that in reminding the faithful that he did not become the King's First Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. The notion of independence was a threat to this ideal but there was competition to face up to as well. The soviets were up to no good in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and the rest of the Balkans. Communists were agitating elsewhere, particularly in France and Italy. Wherever there was rabble there would be foment. We didn't have much rabble in The United States, so we were safe.
As long as we were the sole manufacturers of atomic bombs communists were viewed by Americans as no more a threat than the ants of Outer Mongolian remoteness in our yard and others. If the commies got too snotty, we'd rattle the nuclear saber much like our moms did with the kettles of boiling water to remove similar problems.
We who were kids didn't fear communists. We didn't despise them with the same intensity that we felt about The Axis. I suppose that was; a.) because we had the bomb and had already used it. b.) because the commies were in far-away places that we had no interest in and c.) because we weren't at war with them. Days of real and imminent danger had passed when we had expected the Luftwaffe to bomb our house (bad) and our school (not the worst thing if we weren't there) and when U-boats lurked off of the New Jersey coast and probably in Mrs. Cassidy's cellar. Nazi spies were rumored to be everywhere. Now, they were all gone and Russian ones hadn't been seen, yet. We didn't know any Russians. Tension was reported in far-away places. It was getting serious because the Grosvenors weren't allowed to take pictures. Russia eventually got the bomb and that scared the hell out of everyone.
I don't think we ever played goodies and commies at the lots. We played goodies and Japs. We played and goodies and Nazis. Before that we played cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers. Indians were an anomalous bunch, not definably all bad. We noted their visages on pennies and nickels. We saw pictures of them hanging around the pilgrims and William Penn's friends. We liked Tonto and Little Beaver. Stories of Indians scalping white-men-and women and kids-and massacring George Custer and his goodie troops at Little Big Horn weren't going to prevent us from playing Indians or dressing up, making bows and wearing pheasant feathered bonnets. No one wore an SS uniform in Germantown.
If kids ever played goodies and commies, the roles of the baddies would be ambiguous. What would they wear? Communists were always depicted as little guys in beards who wore glasses. They weren't soldiers; they were subversives. How can you play a cerebral game like goodies (us) and subversives?
We didn't hear much ideology near home. The dutiful working class were happy with the choices of their fathers who were Republicans and Democrats. They voted twice a year <@145>though not on the same day. Republicans in power in Philadelphia sometimes abused that and snuck in a few votes for people whose names were on tombstones. They shared the ground with the ants who were ineligible to vote even though they were alive.
There were stories, never chronicled by proper historians, about people unimpressed by the virtues of Republican or Democrat party lines. One, Mrs. Cassidy, was a radical Irish Nationalist. Anyone on friendly terms with the British was her enemy. Another, Father Napoti, was the pastor of the Italian church on Haines Street. He went back to Italy to retire after the war. A lawyer who lived nearby was said to be a communist. His lifestyle didn't reflect that; he had a stable of sportscars that wouldn't make it in Moscow unless he was a commissar.
I got a peek at his collection of pamphlets. His father shrugged off these leftward leanings. In time the radical would evolve into a conservative. One of our teachers would be fingered at a later time for membership in a communist front youth club when he might have thought about utopia and before he settled with teaching algebra. In the McCarthy-era hunts his long cold activities were exposed. He was fired. Many years later he would be exonerated and get a fat compensation. Capitalism prevailed.
When people are threatened, anyone who's not on the bandwagon of national patriotism is a menace. In time of war concert is essential. Pacifists and conscientious objectors might be in for prosecution along with those professing nasty ideologies. Ancient Athens practiced internal terror in the same manner as Cromwell did in England's Commonwealth and the Thought Police would do in Japan. Your blood and your intellect had to pass muster here, even here. The blood-line alone was sufficient cause when Roosevelt disenfranchised Japanese-Americans and threw them into camps.
Ideology meant little to us. We were kids in the time when adults preferred us to act like kids and do things that kids did and not do most of the things adults did. Grown-ups didn't play at being children because they didn't want to. They didn't wear kids clothes. Tee-shirts weren't a fashion statement then, but if kids had shirts with Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck or Popeye emblazoned on the front, by the time they were about twelve they would go to the dump with the lunch-pails with matching figures. Adults today wear shirts with Goofy or Bart printed on them. You can see them today in places like Northern Ireland and South Africa and in Palestinian centers. They get their kids involved in ideological arguments. It's good for the cause if a few (of the kids) get murdered.
"The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands;
we should only spoil it by trying to explain it."
Richard B. Sheridan
If we were going to do battle, it wouldn't be over the differences between our fathers. Bill Pira and Billy Sandrow and I had Republican fathers. George Haas and Jimmy Evans and Dave Wagner were sons of Democrats. My pop and Mister Evans were pals.
Billy Fleming and Tommy Nethery went to Catholic school dedicated to Saint Teresa of the Little Flower. That's a tough name for boys to repeat. Jimmy Evans and I attended a public school named for another woman, one Eleanor Cope Emlen. None of our crowd knew who she was. We all, in common, had greater loyalties to each other, not school.
On the weekends Dino Borghi and Tommy Hornsby went to Mass. Danny Webster and Dave Terry went to Sunday School. Larry Wallen and Howard Glickman went to Synagogue. I don't know what Fred Jervis did. Or Joe Nasif. Or Danny Ring.
Our "differences" didn't matter to us. Our daddies weren't lunatics who prohibited friendships over crap that in other places might tempt "intellectuals" to pit brunettes against blonds. We could get stirred up over more serious stuff: things like finding out a pal stole something from our house or seeing a friend bullied or having our moms insulted. You're in for it for those things.
If Mike Gorbachev and Eddie Shevardnadze lived on our block, chances are they would have been in our crowd. The system that we knew was never in danger.
All of the communists were in the yard. If someone got sloppy and dropped crumbs in the house, they'd come inside to get them. If the house was clean they had no need or desire to come in. But if they came in we'd win the war.
It would seem unlikely that communism would make any inroads in our neighborhood. We didn't have chips on our shoulders about issues that had died with their perpetrators. Ain't it easy? Besides, no one played goodies and commies, not even with the ants from Outer Mongolia.
