1960, Leominster was a cross between farm town and city. Most of us were more yokel than yuppie and our lives revolved around church, school and neighborhood...yes we were more Mayberry than Manhattan...there were still farms in operation and plenty of abandoned farm and farmland. Most of us walked a lot or took the buses and downtown Leominster was the commercial center of the city, period. For kids, out of neighborhood communications were rare and our public school determined our friends....and our friends were more likely to be relatives, of the same nationality and religious persuasion. Canadian-French and Italian were common street languages and cultural sophistication took place at the Public Library and in the museum upstairs from the same. Every neighborhood had a church and a school, often two, and a gaggle of mom and pop stores...mom and pop grocery, mom and pop drug store, mom and pop hardware, and bakery, gas station, and tv repair and jewelers....there were few chains but we did have Grants (department store) and Newberrys (Five and Dime) along with an A&P, Red & White and First National (bigger than mom and pop grocers). For the intellectual we had Carberrys News (now Leominster News) and Old Man Carberry carried all the latest comic books and movie magazines and if you asked him he could order the National Geographic. There were diners and luncheonettes and ice cream stands but mostly there was lots of land and lots of people. We were very provincial. Mornings and afternoons the paperboys were out delivering their newspapers and the town had its door to door sales people like Mr Wexler (clothing) the Fuller Brush Man, the ice cream man, and the milk man and bread man (they snuck onto your porch early in the morning and read notes and left food.) We didnt lock our house doors and people would leave money on the porch and not worry about it disappearing. Sledding was popular and skating on ponds, Little League baseball was something new but supervised playgrounds were summertime staples and they were subsidized by the City with plenty of organized games and arts and crafts. We had swimming holes and a Rec Center downtown, the likes of which we never saw again. you could swim there or play ping pong or learn new hobbies, on weekends there were teen dances and everybody went there at one time or another. Church (at least Catholic) services were held everyday, three times every morning from 6 AM until 7:30 and again on Saturday and then 4 big masses on Sunday at least one of which was a Requiem Mass (big stuff).We were Catholics and Congregationalist, Methodist, Jewish, Baptist and Unitarian and most of us Democrats and we all said the pledge of allegiance and a prayer before school began....very naive people, simple people, not too many cars in the driveway people, telephone party line people...we lived near or with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins except for a few who broke away and built new homes on Pleasant Street or its offshoots.....and we celebrated Christmas like it was the reason we worked hard and learned hard all year long. The City draped decorations from one side of downtown sidewalks to the other...bells pealed from the churches and Perry Como sang from the speakers hung all over town. Santa landed downtown in a helicopter and the local, mostly townie run, stores were decked out in their season finest....in schools we sang carols in class and in auditoriums, we cut out construction paper decorations and chose names from a cardboard box, picking the name of a classmate to buy a gift for...usually under a dollar. In church we noticed the season. Baby Jesus lying in his manger appeared near the altar and in places like City Hall....even the police station was jolly and the policemen seemed to be in the spirit, smiling and stopping to talk with the kids while they walked their beats (yes their were beats)...Rockdales and Grants and anywhere there were toys became mandatory places to loiter for kids and Western Auto, a downtown sporting goods store that carried windows full of bicycles, had a noticeable increase in saliva stained windows from little kids like me spending hours staring through the window...and drooling....the local radio stations played mostly Christmas songs and groups of do gooders went Caroling in the evenings at places like Fairlawn Nursing Home or through neighborhoods, cheering the public at large. Hi tech gifts were television sets that received three channels, none of them well, little record players and long playing records (a recent innovation), football games that were electric. you plugged them in and the playing field made of thin metal, vibrated the players around the field and if one accidentally stumbled into the end zone you had a touchdown. Basically we loved any kind of junk toy with a plug....gifts were a big part of the season but not close to as big as it is today...when the Christmas Eve time actually came there would be a lot of visiting in the neighborhood, sampling of goodies and checking out the neighbors Christmas tree.....the buildup to school vacation was incredible..weeks of nothing to do time in which to play with our gifts and engage in winter sports...we were a happy gang of Plastic factory people, mostly poor when compared to todays working class, and on Christmas Eve, the sky was black and we were surrounded by open space and felt like the center of the universe with no connection to the outside world, no internet, no cell phone, no 24/7 news coverage, no nothing except Leominster....peace on Earth and protected by relatives, teachers, police and firemen and well intentioned neighbors.....Christmas 1960, Kennedy had just been elected our president and there was talk of rocket ships to the stars and cures for most sicknesses like Polio and Cancer. The future looked clear and there was nothing to worry about....and nobody was ever going to die or move away or have anything happen to them which would change a kids reality....it was Christmas time 1960 and my mother and father were all knowing and stronger than anyone in the world and Santa was on his way.....https://youtube/watch?v=ZRyYzncc2z4
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 11:11:30 +0000
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