A Childhood Rite Vanishes

No one knows when the era of the long, free afternoon began to die away in Los Angeles. Partly it depended on where you lived. In Culver City the age of afternoons probably disappeared by the 1960s, whereas in Pasadena it may have lasted until the 1970s. But die it did, almost everywhere.

I’m not talking here about the cocktail hour or drive-time or anything associated with adults. I’m talking about the afternoons of children--schoolchildren, specifically--and that once-dreamy time between the end of school and supper. Most of us, as adults, can remember that particular slice of the day as a singular chunk of freedom in our childhood, the only part of the day that belonged solely to us. We came home, changed clothes, and launched ourselves into the neighborhood, planning various misdemeanors with our cohorts and acting out endless dramas.

A friend of mine who grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1950s tells the story of crawling through a drainpipe that led to the inside of the old Republic Studios lot in Studio City. He and his buddies were 12 years old and they wanted desperately to explore the sound stage where “The Rifleman” was produced. So they planned their crime, snuck onto the sound stage, and escaped just as the night guard caught wind of their caper. My friend remembers it still, as if it made him into a Valley Tom Sawyer. Maybe it did.

Behind that story, and a million others just like it, lay a presumption of safety. Exactly where did the kids spend their afternoons and what did they do? Usually the parents didn’t know because it wasn’t deemed necessary. The world was safe enough to give kids the chance to invent their lives.

And now that world has departed. We don’t know the month or even the year it disappeared because it happened slowly. But it’s gone, utterly vanished. Replaced by swimming lessons, baseball leagues and “play dates,” all carefully orchestrated by adults. These days we know where the kids have gone, who is watching them, what they are doing and how long they will be doing it. We figure out what the kids want, or need, and then we give it to them. No one “invents” anything, much less a whole life. Too dangerous. If, by chance, some parents decided to take the wild risk and let their kid run free, it still wouldn’t work. The kid would find himself out there all alone. No buddies. The others would be at their karate lesson, dressed like miniature kung fu masters. Or at home, staring at the screen, wondering where in the world to find Carmen San Diego.

Another friend of mine has a 12-year-old daughter. When she leaves the house after school, it is planned like a business event. “Diane never goes to a friend’s house unless a phone call has been made first,” she says. “If she goes to see her friend Jessica, she goes to Jessica’s house. They do not meet in the middle. When it’s time to come home, she calls me first so I’ll know she’s coming and how long it’s taking.”

So sad. “I remember,” she says, “when I was growing up, how we would run free all over our neighborhood and how our parents all had different ways of calling us to supper. One of the moms had a cow bell she would ring. Another put some pebbles in a 7 Up can and she would shake it. Mine just yelled.”

That happened in Pennsylvania, not Los Angeles. But the same thing took place all over this city. In a sense, Los Angeles was built to operate that way. Its very allure to the millions of newcomers in the 1950s came from its vast suburban neighborhoods that did not confine or threaten children like the old central cities of the east. All the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, the South Bays and Orange Counties were created to provide the security in which suppertime cowbells could function.

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Are there pockets of that safety still left? Sometimes I drive through the Valley, trying to answer that question. I have a 4-year-old and soon this issue will come crashing down on him. I figure the truest sign of a still-free neighborhood would be a cluster of bikes thrown down on a lawn. If kids are riding bikes in groups, they must have the run of the neighborhood. But I never see them.

Maybe the more interesting question is whether the old world was as safe as our parents assumed. Probably not. Once I ran my bike into a moving car and found myself sprawled across the hood. No one had even heard of helmets back then. Another time, a friend and I built a pipe bomb filled with powder from a hundred or so firecrackers. Being clueless about shrapnel, we took it to a field and blew it up. If we had not ducked behind a tree at the last instant, it would have shredded us.

My parents never knew about that one, just like they never knew about the BB gun wars or the time we almost burned down a neighbor’s house by heating kerosene on a stove. Or the time, when I was 8, that a man I didn’t know stopped a car next to me and asked if I wanted “a ride.”

It’s also possible, of course, that they did know. Perhaps not the exact details but the essential danger that hovers over any kid growing up. In that earlier time, perhaps they accepted those risks more easily than we do today.

In any case, we don’t accept those risks. The free afternoons have gone, and a way of growing up has gone with them. They won’t come back, not in our lifetime, not unless we all move to Iowa and milk cows for a living, in which case Iowa would suddenly become as dangerous as L.A. No, most likely we’re stuck here with our karate lessons and play dates and kids who think a bike is something you haul around on the back of a car. It’s a pity but what the hell. When they grow up we’ll tell ‘em what a real childhood is like. Maybe show ‘em some pictures.