About this Blog

These are stories about time and space. The time is the 1940s—the time of my childhood. The space is just a few square miles of Baltimore. It is a space filled with images that bring back the memories that I share with you here.

Don’t Fence Me In

Some images from childhood come back with such strength, and so without warning, that I startle at their sudden appearance. It’s as if a gust of wind has blown 1940 into my face—stinging me with recollection. It begins with the picture of me on a pony. I’m about three years old, and the picture is taken in front of the house that we lived in at that time, at 4015 Oakford Avenue.

There is a section of the stone wall of the house, a little above the pony’s head, that draws my attention. It’s a small portion where several larger stones came together, leaving an odd-shaped space that needed to be filled in with smaller pieces. 

Whenever I come across this photograph, I always look for this special place. I see a triangle, pointed down, with a short horizontal piece of cement through the middle of it, and it seems out of place with the general pattern of the stonework on this wall. You probably would never notice it, or if you did you wouldn’t give it much thought. So you might wonder why it came to my attention at all. Certainly, when I was three years old, I was not noticing geometrical patterns in the world around me, and cataloging them as like or unlike. It reminds me of the visual “intelligence” tests that display five pictures and ask you to pick out which one is different from the other four.

The answer to this mystery has to do with how often I looked at that wall. And that’s part of another mystery: why did we live in so many different places within one block of this house?

The boy on the pony was a popular image in the 1940s, so much so that each summer a photographer would walk the neighborhoods with his (I guess, rented) pony and offer to take pictures of the children. This was an era when people did not travel much, and in my neighborhood this was even more the case because there was no extra money for vacation trips. I think that in putting their children on a pony, the parents could pretend that the family had the mobility that they saw in the movies about other people whose lives were more exciting—more interesting—because they could go on vacations “out West,” or even to South America. Popular songs of that era had titles like “Don’t Fence Me In,” and “I Love the Wide Open Spaces.”

Here’s the beginning of “Don’t Fence Me In”:

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,

Don’t fence me in.

Let me ride through the wide open spaces that I love,

Don’t fence me in.

We didn’t ride wild horses through the wide open spaces. From Oakford Avenue we took the trolley down Garrison Boulevard to Liberty Heights Avenue. And for the first seventeen years of my life, I was fenced inside a very narrow portion of Baltimore. If I take an old map of my neighborhood, and draw the boundaries that I stayed inside of, the map looks like this:

I was born in 1936 in Baltimore  in a house on Fairview Avenue. If you look at the 1935 map above, the number 1 in a circle is at Fairview Avenue. Shortly after my birth, we moved to an apartment at 4006 Oakford Avenue (Number 5). Then it was directly across the street to 4015 Oakford (that’s Number 3). Not long after, we moved around the corner to Number 2, an apartment on Garrison Boulevard, between Oakford and Ridgewood Avenues.

The next stop was 4125 Woodhaven Avenue (number 4), just a few blocks from my birthplace. And then, at the age of four or five, back to Oakford Avenue (4008, next door to 4006) and directly across the street from 4015. So much directly across the street that for the next ten years, when I looked out the front sunparlor window, I faced the house of my pony picture. Yes. We stayed in one place for ten years—a family record.

The commercial center of this neighborhood was the corner of Liberty Heights and Garrison. To give an idea of how confined this region was, I could start at that corner and walk along Garrison Boulevard to either extreme—north to Oakford or south to Woodhaven—in about ten or fifteen minutes.

I began kindergarten at PS 69, and then after sixth grade went three and a half blocks south to PS 42 (Garrison Junior High School) for the next three years. When I finished ninth grade we moved to Windsor Hills (number 6). We stayed there for two years and then moved back to Fairview Avenue (number 7), right across the street from my birthplace. A year later in the summer after my high school graduation, we moved again, not quite back to Oakford Avenue, but close enough (number 8).

The upper (northern) boundary is Ridgewood Avenue, just one block past Oakford. Practically everything I did was below that border. Going down the map from there, my friends and I played games on the fields of the three schools within a few blocks of Oakford Avenue. The red line drawn across the middle is Liberty Heights Avenue. At the left-hand end of Liberty Heights were the movie theatres, the Gwynn and the Ambassador (the purple and green dots), that were our main sources of amusement, especially in the winter months. At the other end, just off the corner of Liberty Heights and Garrison, was the third movie house, the Forest Theatre (the blue dot).

By and large, when I look at this map with the artificial boundaries that I’ve drawn onto it, I am looking at the fenced-in history of the first seventeen years of my life. The first time that I flew on an airplane was not until after we had moved away from this area. During this time I did not ride through the wide open country that I love. I walked about in a narrow neighborhood of Baltimore. But even though I was fenced in geographically, I had an imagination that let me roam wherever I wished to travel.

I did not know that I was confined. Do you wonder how that could be? The answer is: I was very busy. I fought and won a war against Germany and Japan. With my radio I soared with Superman and rode the range with Tom Mix. I listened to the Baltimore Orioles play baseball in exotic places like Buffalo, New York. I studied the life cycles of spiders and ants and butterflies. An entire world opened up to me, and I was so deep inside it—so busy looking and listening—that I could not see any fences. Sixty-five years later, I can draw lines on a map. Sixty-five years ago, there was no map.

The stories that follow tell about what the 1940s in Baltimore were like for me.