In Good Ol’ Days, Respect Taught At Home

Talk these days centers around family values, but none of it sounds like my definition: old-school ways and home training.

Those phrases don’t mean much to a lot of people. But put into context, the meanings become clearer.

I grew up old-school - in the days when a neighborhood helped raise a child right along with the parents.

I grew up in small-town America, a little place outside Pittsburgh where steel was king. I was raised by my parents and my grandmother. And by Mrs. Baker, Miss Myrtle, Miss Irene, Miss Rosalie, Mr. Glover, Mrs. Tipper, Miss Pearl and her husband Mr. Booker T., Mrs. Pitts, Miss Edmonia, Mr. and Mrs. Sims, Mr. Glenn, Mr. and Mrs. Byrd.

They were all surrogate parents.

We - my brothers, cousins and I - were raised not only by an extended immediate family but also by neighbors and family friends. And Lord help you if you got home from school and the teacher had called or, worse, if you had done something on Griffith Street that Miss Gussie had told you not to do. You were crying before you got home, just the next street over, because Gram or Mom or an uncle already had heard about it and was waiting for you.

Summers were best when we played kickball in the street. Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tyler, fussed if our ball landed in her flowers. Somehow, she always knew someone had been in those flower beds - even when we were very, very careful.

Mr. Abbadu - I guess that’s how he spelled his name; we never asked - would drive down our street in a beat-up truck. In a drawl, he’d call out “Aab-baa-doo, waa-ter-melon.” Mr. Abbadu sold fresh fruit and vegetables from his truck, and nothing from a store tasted as good.

We could play or ride our bikes all through the neighborhood. But we knew one thing: We had to be back on our street when the street lights came on.

We talked about dreams and the future when we were down at the swimming pool; we played jacks on the porch, picked blackberries in the woods and jumped from apple trees in the back yard. To this day, the only pears I’ll eat grow on the pear tree in my grandmother’s back yard.

My friends and I walked to school, and sometimes, if we were lucky, Mrs. Sims would be driving up Monaca Road and would give us a ride up the hill.

Mr. Chester paid a quarter if you ran over to King Martin’s store to buy him 100 pieces of peppermint. The peppermint was a penny a piece. Aunt Cootsie liked chili dogs and Pepsi from King Martin’s store.

“Yes, ma’am,” and “No, sir” weren’t sarcastic replies but what you had better say unless you wanted a switch across the back of your legs. Gram always had a supply of fresh switches because when it was your time, you had to go strip one from a tree or bush. There wasn’t any child abuse. There was discipline. You knew - and expected - that a whopping was coming for talking back or not doing chores or rolling your eyes.

Respect and manners were taught not at school but at the dining room table or while snapping green beans in an apron or while combing Gram’s long gray hair.

My grandmother died in 1977, but I still can hear her voice advising me, grooming me, chastising me when it was deserved, telling me she loved me.

It’s pretty easy to determine which young people today have had some home training. Most likely they were raised old-school - in ways that reflect respect in manner, in bearing, in personal relationships.

The men and women from the old school are older now, tired. Some are gone. The old-school ways have faded and, in most regards, have been replaced by suspicion and calls to social services.

But some of us remember. And in a way that has nothing to do with today’s partisan definition of family values, we long for the good old days.

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