Our Town

           Our Town

                                                   (Click on link to hear Iris DeMent)

Strange to me now are the forms I meet

      When I visit the dear old town;

But the native air is pure and sweet,

And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,

      As they balance up and down,

            Are singing the beautiful song,

            Are sighing and whispering still:

      "A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

                                                      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

                  My Lost Youth

Camp Hill, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 60s presented to the casual visitor a Leave It to Beaver veneer while Peyton Place roiled just beneath the surface.  It was a village of Donna Reeds and Dr. Stones surrounded by Green Acres.  A neighboring borough’s resentful fire chief famously dubbed Camp Hill “a town of ten-cent millionaires”.  Eighty-five hundred residents living in 350 households lined a crosshatch of streets situated on a two square-mile tract.  A “bedroom community,” which meant people slept there but went somewhere else each morning to earn their daily packet.  It was also a “dry town” - no bars or taverns, but a person of age only needed to drive a few minutes out of town to get to one.  White, Protestant-Christian, a few Catholics, and if there were any Jews, I didn’t know them.  I did know a few blacks - they cleaned our house and waited on my parents at the country club.  None actually lived in the borough, for God’s sakes.  I grew up naively thinking, when I gave it any thought at all, that this was just the way the marbles sorted by chance when they rolled out of the can.   

Certain geographical features conspired with serendipitous ramifications of the town’s history and development to render Camp Hill a doozy of a place for this white boy to come of age.  Just above the northern border of town, the dramatically meandering Conodoguinet Creek snakes its way west to east.  Nestled between its oxbows, in the days of my youth, lay undeveloped woodlands, meadows, and craggy mounds where an inquisitive boy could lose a day to unhindered exploration and discovery.  Just below the southern boundary of town, the Yellow Breeches, replete with rocky bluffs and, in those days, native trout, cascades, like the Conodoguinet, toward the Susquehanna River to the east.  Spangler’s Mill, with its accompanying dam and swimming hole, was a favorite bike-hike destination on this waterway.  

The town itself was one of the earliest suburbs in the burgeoning northeastern U.S of the mid-twentieth century.  Mature hardwoods lined its quiet streets and created a shady canopy in summer and an enchanting winter wonderland after snowfalls.  Neat homes stood side-by-side along those byways. Auto traffic was slow and quiet rendering safe streets for unsupervised children.  What’s more, superimposed upon many of the main thoroughfares lay a network of narrow alleys behind many homes that created clandestine passageways and cunning shortcuts for scampering youngsters up to devilry or simply in a bit of a hurry.  When surrounding school boards were hustling toward consolidation in the 1950s and 60s, Camp Hill stubbornly resisted.  My chums and I enjoyed the incalculable social benefits of a pedestrian commute over not-so-mean streets to and from school each day.  On the other hand, we were denied exposure to off-white cultures that, well, wouldna hurt me any.  The effect of that trade-off is something that I ponder to this day, six decades later. 

My family came to Camp Hill from Cincinnati in 1951, a year before I was born.  My father, brimming with ambition, had caught on as a salesman with a company called Aircraft-Marine Products.  Founded in 1941, they made a simple item - a small metal thingie that could be crimped on the end of a wire by means of a proprietary tool.  This “terminal” allowed easy attachment to another electrical component, no need for cumbersome solder with its muss and fuss.  Aircraft-Marine connectors were easy-peasy, reliable, and very necessary in planes and boats, which the military had lots of.  A war was on …  the astute reader sees where this is heading … the company flourished.  When the war ended, Aircraft-Marine Products adeptly pivoted to focus sales on companies catering to a public increasingly enthralled by electric gizmos.  A decade later, under the new name, AMP, inc., it went public with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.   The history of AMP is fascinating and not without glitches, and when the company plunked its headquarters in Harrisburg, many of its young management team took up residence in nearby Camp Hill.  One of them was my dad.  As these men (always men) progressed up the company ladder, their wealth grew, as did their influence on their bedroom community.  Camp Hill became a neighborhood of choice for white professionals and upwardly mobile businessmen, who, it might be said, shaped a town in their own image. 

As the sixties turned into the seventies the wave of infrastructure expansion that followed WWII gained momentum and the Cumberland Valley was not ignored by entrepreneurs.  Narrow, two-lane tendrillar roadways that connected towns like Camp Hill, Mechanicsburg, and Carlisle swelled to four-lane stalks sprouting franchise businesses that squeezed out those encompassing meadows and woodlands, pushing concrete and macadam up against brooks and creeks.  An insidious alchemy converted whole-food farmland to fast-food dispensaries garishly looming astride broadening highways, billboards, bright lights, and congested traffic.  Vegetable stands became burger barns. Family-owned businesses that reflected human personalities and emanated the familiar odors of the vendors and their wares gave way to boxy, glass-covered, insipid buildings - professional offices, realties, and suburban department stores.  

Today, no ten year old boy would clamber onto his bike on a Saturday morning to venture into the wilds beyond the confines of the town-proper for they no longer exist. Meadows of goldenrod, campion, and Joe Pye Weed pervaded by leaf hoppers, spittlebugs, garter snakes, and spider webs are long gone.  Stone-laden banks and shallow waters along the Conodoguinet, where I used to turn over rocks to find salamanders and crayfish, are now someone’s backyard.  Mixed woodlands of oak, maple, birch, sycamores, and conifers that echoed with the songs of the ovenbird and wood thrush have been replaced by houses, offices, and parking lots.  

There is no longer any impetus for that boy to hunt nightcrawlers in his backyard of an evening, collect them in a can of dirt, and tote them to the creek early the following morning to catch rock bass, sunnies, and occasionally a fish of some merit.  His journey would be blocked by whizzing traffic, chain-link fences, private property, and, more than anything else, a complete transformation of parental/societal attitudes.  I set out on many such adventures with complete nonchalance and no reservations when I was that ten year old boy.  Today’s parents would be labeled negligent at best and criminal at worst for allowing such a foray.  They are unlikely to be faced with that prospect, though, for not only has the destination been obliterated, but today’s youngsters, under the enchantment of electronic devices and perhaps ignorant that such options ever existed, have no desire to pedal a bicycle out to the countryside to go fishing.    

I was part of the generation that came of age before the great expansion.  In those days Polk’s soda shop and Reams’ candy store served us kids everything we thought we needed, nutritionwise.  Pogo sticks and Hula-Hoops were must-have toys.  Running through the lawn sprinkler in the afternoon, catching lightning bugs in the evening and telling ghost stories at night rounded out a summer day.  Outside of school, for much of each day, children were in charge of their own affairs.  Pick-up games of wiffle ball, touch football, kick-the-can, monkey-in-the-middle, or contests invented on the spot, required no adult supervision.  We defined the boundaries, codified our own rules, and adjudicated all grievances with no oversight.  Kids hauled other kids on bikes even though our parents told us not to.  Baseball card exchanges were proposed, considered, and often transacted.  Sleepover plans were hatched, organized, i’s dotted and t’s crossed, prior to submission for final approval, usually a nod from Mom.  

This was our town; from Nob Hill to College Park, from Three Gables to Murphy’s Bargain Basement, we roamed with impunity.  Each day, all year, new drama unfolded with triumphs and travails, valor and cowardice, laughter and laments.  Summer afternoons of heavy air and droning cicadas; slanted rays of autumn days when evening came on early and crisp, carrying the scent of burning leaves; still winter nights when brilliant moonlight shone on fresh, deep snow, and a casual conversation rang clear in one’s ears from a block away; springtime and its fever, pussywillows, and soft breezes wafted the dizzying fragrances of honeysuckle and love.  All of these swirl, dream-like, in my mind - memories, receding ever more distant as I grow older.  

This and following essays are my attempt to hang on to, reflect and, perhaps, even magically rekindle these memories.  I will venture to put some of them on display, for all who have interest, to judge on their own.  In so doing I might reveal a few secrets whose statute of limitations has long-since expired.  To friends and acquaintances who happen upon these lines, greetings!  I wish you well and welcome your comments.  I now live far away, but nostalgia is an elixir, and that town … that goddam town … is in my blood.  It won’t leave me alone … or I can’t leave it alone.  

There are things of which I may not speak;

      There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

      And a mist before the eye.

            And the words of that fatal song

            Come over me like a chill:

      "A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

                         Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

                        My Lost Youth