Sixties Trilogy - Part 3: Lost in Suburbia

When I look back on the Sixties, the period of my life when i was in grade school and high school (I graduated in 1969), I think not of rock music and anti-war marches, but mowing lawns every summer in the suburb where I grew up and collecting stamps. I had a small lawn mowing business, and my passion/hobby was collecting stamps of the British Empire. Why I was so intrigued by this really puzzles me these many years later, but I think i know the psychology behind it.

New Orleans is an extremely hot, sticky, tropical place in the summer, and I gave up my Saturdays on many a weekend from 1964-68 hauling a Sear's Craftsman lawnmower with grass catcher up and down the block to my various customers. Actuallly I think I mowed one lawn on Friday afternoon and two on Saturday. It was horrendous, sweat-drenching work, pushing the lawnmower through thick carpets of St. Augustine grass, trimming, sweeping with a broom (no leaf blowers, thank God), and edging and pulling weeds, etc. One of my customers had a swimming pool so I could cool off if I wanted to. She gave me a Coke and a Fudgesickle and paid me the same thing for five years -- $4 for three hours work. That works out to about $1.35 an hour. No raises. I think the minimum wage in 1967 was $1.25 an hour.

I always took pride in doing a good job and was dutiful and conscientious about showing up to cut the grass when I would have enjoyed nothing more than staying home in my air conditioned room. But the work ethic was instilled in us kids, and we were taught to do a job right or don't do it at all.

Another customer lived two doors down from us. He was a big-shot grocery chain executive, she was a homemaker and a lovely person. I always enjoyed it when I sat on her patio gulping an ice cold Fresca as I chatted with her after cutting the grass. She had the thickest and densest grass of anyone on that block, and I struggled mightily pushing the lawnmower forward and emptying the grass bag every three rows or so. It was character-building work, for lack of a better word, for what normal teenager would spend his Saturday's doing this if he didn't have to?

Talking to Mrs. R__ was always enjoyable and I became quite fond of her. I always seemed to be able to relate much better to adults and older people when I was a teenager than with people my own age. I am pretty much that way now except I am old and not young anymore. How strange.

In my leisure time, I pored over pictorial and commemorate stamps from far-flung British empire colonies and protectorates in the Carribbean and Pacific and Indian Ocean (St. Lucia, Grenada, the Solomon Islands, Pitcairn Islands and the like), all very exotic and faraway places that my adolescent mind traveled to via the scenes on those stamps. For instance, the isloated Pitcairn Island is where the descendants of the Bounty mutiny still live. The history of that one place alone was fascinating. It was relaxing and a lot of fun, though now when I look back it all seems terribly geeky and nerdy, though I really wasn't a nerd, or so I thought. I bought stamps at auction, through mail order houses, and at one of our huge department stores downtown, which in those days had a large stamp and coin department on the fourth floor. Imagine something like that today.

So while other kids my age were hanging out at the newly invented enclosed shopping malls, or partying on weekends, I was mowing lawns and collecting stamps. The tumultuous Sixties passed in that manner for me. It was only in later years that I really paid attention to what went on in that decade. Race riots and war protests seemed very far off when you grew up in a nice middle class suburban cocoon.