Oh, For The Time When Life Was Simple And Hearts Were Big
On a hot August morning in a small town in Ohio shortly after the close of World War II, I listened to my grandfather and one of his neighbors as they sat quietly talking. That sunny day, at the age of 5, I learned a lesson in citizenship and community.
Along side the big, brass, hand-cranked cash register in my grandfather’s general store stood an open tin box holding three dozen or so hand-size tablets arranged in stepped rows. Each contained the handwritten, ongoing account of customers to whom my grandfather extended credit for groceries, gas, feed, shoes, needles, thread, paper, coal, cigars, nails, paint, kerosene, and a thousand more sundries stocked within the store’s three rooms.
Each record of debt was backed only by a promise to repay whenever and however much the customer could afford. This was sufficient because my grandfather knew them as neighbors, as friends, as family.
During those brief, bright years immediately following the last of our patriotic wars, I passed my childhood in a town comprising only four square blocks, but within a community of spirit that has stayed with me across the time and space of five decades. Everyone living along those elm-lined streets was related closely or distantly by blood and by the kinship that comes from living in the same place for generations. I knew all of them well, and I can still bring from memory their faces and names and circumstances even after decades of separation.
The economy of the community depended mostly on the surrounding farms which began where the streets abruptly turned into country roads and corn fields. There were other small towns nearby with their own small mercantiles and also a city two-dozen miles to the north. But many families did not yet own cars and walked to my grandfather’s store for almost everything they needed to serve the material aspects of their lives. Most paid in cash, but when they couldn’t the spillover was written up in their account books. At the end of the week or the end of the month or at harvest time, their credit was squared or carried on.
The store was the hub of social life where people exchanged easy gossip on summer afternoons on wooden benches in the shade of the overreaching elms or sipped coffee around the warmth of the oil stove on winter mornings. The post office was in a single small room in the rear and my grandfather was also the postmaster. So most residents stopped by at least once a day to retrieve a letter or magazine or Sears catalog.
The Johnson family lived in a paint-peeling, crumbling, clapboard house at the town’s southern edge. Mrs. Johnson was a silent, tired woman who looked after her five children in the mostly bare rooms of her home. Mr. Johnson, who came of age during the Depression, barely finished grade school and seemed always unable to find steady work. He would be a bad credit risk in today’s world, but my grandfather never denied the family flour or bacon or shoes, even though their column of debt grew longer and longer.
On that summer morning, sitting face to face on one of the green benches beneath the store’s two wide windows, Carl Johnson was explaining to my grandfather why he could not pay anything on his account. My grandfather listened quietly, glancing occasionally at the small account book in his hand. Finally he closed the cover, put it in his shirt pocket and stood up.
“Let’s go see Lester,” my grandfather said. We walked across the street and around the corner to where the town’s mechanic was lying under a rusting Buick on the greasy ground in front of his ramshackle garage. He rolled out as we approached.
The three of them stood small-talking in the familiar way of lifelong friends and arranged for Carl to work that afternoon at the garage. Then they crossed the street to where Joe, the town’s blacksmith, was heating and hammering plowpoints back to a sharp edge. Joe gave Carl a day’s work.
Later in the day, my grandfather obtained another two days’ work with a farmer who needed a hand baling hay. He gave Carl a fifth day of work behind his store, shoveling coal, cutting weeds and cleaning the outhouse.
By today’s standards, the work wasn’t much, but it gave one of the poorest families in town income for another week and furnished Carl the dignity of earned wages to pay off some part of his debt.
Over the years, I saw this act of community and consideration and mutual respect occur time and again. In that era and in that town and within that society there were no unemployment checks or welfare or food banks or collection agencies or even credit cards. But there was the sustaining structure and strictures of community.
The physical plane of that community held only a few streets and houses and I left it long ago for the wider experiences of a less kind world. The lessons learned from that place and that time and those people remain with me still, not only as a nostalgia for a spirit lost during America’s troubled decades, but also as a hope that the heart and essence of such a community are waiting to be rediscovered within our nation’s collective soul.
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