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Whatever happened to the old front porch?
(by Ed Flynn - August 13, 2008)
Time was when everyone would try to escape the hot breath of a scorching August evening by lingering outside as long as possible, awaiting the first hint of a cooling nighttime breeze once the sun’s fire had been banked below the horizon.
But today, it’s the reverse; today everyone stays indoors, barricaded from the outside world behind closed windows and doors where the drone of the air conditioner rather than the serenade of the crickets provides the background sound and the glow of a TV screen rather than the glimmer of fireflies provides the flickering light.
When I was a youngster, growing up in Bergenfield in those seemingly less complicated days before World War II, the front porch was where all the families in the neighborhood would gather on a summer night and I remember our porch on Bradley Avenue well.
It would probably be more accurate to call it a stoop. It looked just like most of the others on the street; five concrete steps, leading to a concrete slab that was just about large enough for a welcome mat and the wooden box in which the milkman left his bottles. There was a metal mailbox attached to the wall alongside the front door and two white painted wooden pillars, which I liked to think resembled those Roman columns pictured in my geography books, supported a slanted, protective roof.
I remember so many things about that porch; throwing a rubber ball against those steps and making believe I was some famous Big League pitcher like Carl Hubbell, my grandfather with his drooping, old-fashioned moustache and corn cob pipe sitting there and watching me and the other kids play in the street, my dog Buster jumping up and down at the screen door and barking for attention whenever he saw me coming home.
But most of all on a hot summer night I remember how all the moms and dads would escape from the suffocating, oven-like heat that had built up inside the house all day by retreating to their front porch and gradually, as if by some prearranged schedule, they would tend to take turns gathering at one of the homes. One evening it might be ours, or the Van Aukens who lived next door, or the Brices who lived across the street and as if they knew whose turn it was one of the moms would bring out a large jug of lemonade and one of the men would drive down to the local pub and return with several metal containers they called “schooners” filled with beer. And then, unlike neighbors who hardly seem to know each other these days, they would stand around, or sit on those front porch steps, talking.
I’m not sure what they talked about. We kids were shooed away and told to go play, but I assume the women talked about their children and the men about baseball, just as they do today, and they must have talked about the Depression, which hung over the nation like a dark cloud. While as far as I knew all the dads in our neighborhood had a job and no family was going hungry, the average job paid only $25 a week and times were tough for everyone. So I’m sure they must have discussed, maybe even argued about, whether President Roosevelt was doing a good job or not, particularly since some of them, including my own dad, had voted for Herbert Hoover’s reelection in 1932. And they must have talked about what was going on in Europe where Hitler continued to rave and rant and demand more territory for Germany. But I don’t recall that anyone seemed very worried and I never even heard anyone mention Japan. Besides, there were oceans between us and those distant continents so while our parents chatted we kids continued to play hide-and-seek or catch fireflies to put in a bottle.
Gradually the waning day would fade behind the roof tops and as darkness claimed the night, the children, protesting that it was too hot to sleep, would be ordered inside and sent upstairs to swelter in bed.
The windows would, of course, be open and through them came the sounds of a summer night; the muffled, conversational hum of adults still clustered outside, the whistle of a train puffing its way along the West Shore tracks, conjuring up visions of far-off places. And as the last of the grownups, too, came inside, only the lulling symphony of the crickets would remain, punctuated by the occasional muted bark of a distant dog.
Eventually, the curtain on my bedroom window would shimmer ever so slightly as the night air cooled and with thoughts of tomorrow filling my head I’d drift off to an unworried sleep unlike any I can recapture in the air conditioned comfort of my home today.
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