Last night while scrolling thru Facebook, there was a Reel about Johnny Carson revisiting his home town, Norfolk Nebraska. It was filmed in 1982 and was in black and white.
Johnny walked, drove, and bicycled thru this documentary. The car he was driving in was the actual car his dad owned in the early forties! He stopped at various places that he frequented as a child back in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He talked with elderly people he knew as a young boy, toured his boyhood home, toured the grade school he went to, and went thru the theater where he once ushered.
While watching this forty-seven minute documentary, I caught myself smiling thru most of it because I absolutely love that era he grew up in. When things were simple.
I grew up in the late fifties and sixties in a small farming community about thirty minutes from where I currently live. As a child this little community was home. I felt safe and secure. I don’t recall hearing about crime of any kind. We didn’t lock our doors, or for that matter, we never closed the front or back doors during the summer when we went to bed. We left our garage door open, keys in the car, bikes on the front lawn, and they were all still there when we got up in the morning.
There were less than one thousand people there when I was born, one mailman, one milkman, one park, a woods with a small pond, and honestly I don’t recall if there was a mayor. One grade school and one high school. No public swimming pool so for swimming lessons we were bused to another small community about a half hour away.
On Facebook I follow a page for the county that my hometown is located in. Day after day, post after post, is nothing but crime, shoplifting, medical emergencies, high-speed chases down the highway that runs outside of town, etc.
And day after day, post after post, my heart hurts. Where farms once stood is now subdivision after subdivision, strip-mall after strip-mall. Where two-lane dirt roads were are now four-lane paved roads.
One grade school still stands, the high school became the middle school, and a new high school was built years ago just west of town. I graduated from that high school. Last year I was able to go back there because my granddaughter was in a performance in the performing arts auditorium. PERFORMING ARTS ???? What happened to the Home-Ec department? The shop department?
The school has been expanded several times, and to increase school revenue the kids who have cars and can drive to school must now pay for a parking space. The woods behind the school which also served as our ‘smoking lounge’ is now gone and replaced with commercial real estate known as the Industrial Park!
Main Street is still there but not the same. The drug store that had a soda fountain counter is now part of restaurant-tavern. The feed mill is gone. The farm at the end of Main Street is gone and is now a huge condo complex. The eight-lane bowling alley is no longer there but the building is.
Nobody in town gets a free quart of chocolate milk from the milkman on their birthday any more…only because the milkman doesn’t exist anymore. Farmer Brown is long gone so you can’t walk to his farm to buy a dozen eggs.
The little library which stood next to the old high school and was probably all of one-thousand square feet has been replaced with a HUGE library that is attached to the new HUGE police department next to one of the HUGE strip malls.
There are over forty-thousand residents now in what once was my sweet, safe, and secure hometown…that is now riddled with crime, speeding, drugs, and God only knows what else.
No…I can’t go home again. It’s not there.
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