Memories of my old neighborhood

The Inquirer’s observer of Philadelphia’s architecture and related matters, Inga Saffron, recently wrote about the rumblings of redevelopment in Harrowgate, the neighborhood where I was born and my family had lived since before the Civil War.

The neighborhood has declined badly in recent years, and is said to be one of the city’s poorest. It’s good to know that it might make a come-back. A developer has created some dwelling-places there, which might attract some more prosperous residents.

When I was young, it was working class, but mostly of well-paid workers.

I was born six months before the legendary stock market crash (okay, you do the math, age-wise), and both parents made good money.

My father worked on the looms that made ladies’ high fashioned hosiery. My mother worked in the Accounts Payable office at Strawbridges, and operated a Comptometer, a mechanical forerunner of the electronic computer.

My father was occasionally out of work, and my mother took time off to have a couple of kids, but we lived well. We were always able to take two weeks’ vacation at the seashore, and my parents could attend games of the Frankford Yellowjackets, forerunners of the Eagles, with she in her elegant racoon coat.

My parents agreed on most everything except politics. My mother leaned toward the Democrats, while my father leaned the other political way.

This confused the local Republican committeeman. In those days, in that kind of working-class neighborhood, the committeeman was an important figure, and politics was everywhere.

As a very young and innocent boy, I remember standing outside a nearby corner store with a friend and watching the new proprietor stocking his shelves, because we heard he was a Democrat, and were not sure what that was.

Tere were brick sidewalks in neighborhoods like ours, although the city had decreed that all new sidewalks would henceforth be concrete. Every so often, a new family would move in a nearby house, and we would watch and wait.

If soon the brick sidewalk was replaced by concrete, at large expense to the new family, we knew the politicians had identified them as Democrats.

Our local Republican committeeman had, in the backyard of his row house, a lovely fish pond. There was a high wooden fence in the alley, which blocked the pond from view. He frequently allowed neighborhood kids to come in and watch the fish. But only children of Republicans.

There was an evening when my father attended a union meeting, and he and a friend started for home. But on the way home, they stopped in at a taproom for some refreshment.

Proceeding happily onward, they came upon some curbside trash. They got a happy notion.

Removing some long slats from a discarded vegetable crate to use for swords, and trash can lids for shields, they began a noisy duel, like two knights in a movie. A spoilsport nearby resident called the cops.

My mother received a sheepish phone call from my father for help. She did what any Philadelphian would do; she called the committeeman. He drove her to the police station, and got my father out with a traditional “copy of the charge.”

I imagine that politics is (or is it “are?”) more sophisticated these days.