1960s suburbia

 

My family moved to a suburb of San Diego called Kearny Mesa in 1957. There had been scrub brush and canyons there not long before, where the area had been bulldozed and the subdivision built.  Land in Southern California tends to slope up from the ocean, then level off in tablelands (the word “mesa” means table in Spanish).  My dad referred to our house as being “up here on the mesa”

There were 2 basic floorplans that were repeated over and over for blocks as the houses were built, all painted in a limited variety of pastel colors (yellow, blue, pinkish…the occasional white).  Because the houses were built with the same plan but flipped (what is called mirror image) it didn’t occur to me until later that everyone I knew lived in some version of the same house.  It also didn’t occur to me until much later that the neighborhood was confusing.  Perhaps partly because all the houses were alike, perhaps because of the canyons that wound through the neighborhood:  streets curved around, stopped and started, started again with the same or a different name.

In this pastel landscape, the houses, fences, lawns, streets, and sidewalks were brand new.  Nothing was overgrown, cracked, or worn out.  The elementary school was around the corner from my house, with shiny playground equipment and raked playing fields.  There was a small strip mall about a half mile away, anchored with a Mayfair Market grocery store, a “dime store”, a drug store, a dry cleaner and a small coffee shop.  This little strip mall quickly turned out to be a gathering place for the kids of the neighborhood. 

Mayfair!  What a playground this small grocery store was.  We walked or biked there several times a week.  When my friend and I were in kindergarten—5 years old—we walked to “the store” together frequently.  Her mom drove up to find us once, telling us she guessed we had “lost track of time”.  In later years, other friends and I walked the aisles, looking for things like dropped coins.  A neighbor girl once found a folded-up dollar bill on the ground, to my burning envy.  Even later, the pre-teen gaggle of girls I was a part of would walk the aisles and try to get someone close enough to the produce section to squirt each other with the hose that lay along the display case.

There was the occasional small carnival in the parking lot, complete with rides and midway games. 

The Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile made a memorable visit there once, and the “little person” who drove it handed out free whistles that played the Oscar Meyer theme song.  Since the girl next door to me (Bambie, 2 years older, more on her later) assured me that the little person kidnapped children, I found him quite frightening. 

The developers planted one tree in front of each house, and chose the same type of tree down each block.  The ones on my street were jacaranda:  beautiful purple blossoms every year that dropped all over everything, stuck to shoes, made left purple stains on everything. The ones on the street after ours had some kind of small green seed pod on the branches (about the size of a large green olive).  The kids used to climb the trees, pick all the “green beans” (as we called them) and have contests that involved nothing more complicated than throwing them at each other. 

We were families who watched sitcoms called “Leave it to Beaver”, “Make Room for Daddy”, and “The Donna Reed Show” on television.  Wholesome 1950s families – dad works, mom takes care of the house, a couple of cute kids get into mischief.  The actual suburbia was not like the television shows. There was a great deal going on under the surface that seemed accepted as normal by most of us.  I look back at domestic abuse, beating of children, possible hints of sexual abuse; who knew this was not the way life should be?

The block I lived on was T-shaped.  At the top or cross-bar of the T the developers included the brand-new elementary school (Ross Elementary).  That is where I went to kindergarten, and it was easy walking distance with no streets to cross.

The Baby Boomers were still a force to be reckoned with.  That small neighborhood school had 6 kindergartens that Fall. There were three classrooms (K1, K2, and a bungalow or modular classroom brought in a parked at one end of the playground), and each had a morning session and an afternoon session.  The boy who lived next door and a girl from right around the corner and I started school together.  The three of us had the morning session.  According to my mom, the font of all wisdom, the younger kids went in the morning in case they still needed afternoon naps at home.  The older kids – those with earlier birthdays – went in the afternoon.  I have no idea if that was true, but I knew that I got to walk to school every day with my two friends.  Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the girl was in room K1, I was in K2, and the boy was in the bungalow.  I was certain that somehow “they” (whoever that was) planned it that way and separated me from my friends. 

The elementary school was our playground throughout the 60s.  We had no neighborhood parks or recreation centers close.  The school was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, complete with padlocks on the gates on the weekends and after school.  The fence was not difficult to climb, and the gates were often padlocked with a long length of chain that allowed plenty of room for both a kid and a bicycle to slip through.  We played ball, used the exercise equipment, rode bikes and flew kites on that big dirt field.