Introduction

I’m lucky. I grew up when kids were still allowed to be kids.

While rummaging through the family bookcase on a winter day in 1955, I found a special book. The author described what it was like to grow up in a small town. It was about his family, friends, boyhood adventures and life’s lessons learned.

I was only ten years old when I found the book. It fascinated me because many of the incidents the writer described paralleled my own experiences. The primary difference was that his adventures occurred 110 years earlier.

Although the world changed dramatically between 1840 and 1955, boys were pretty much the same.

Although I don’t pretend to be an expert on today’s youth, all one has to do is look around, watch the newscasts and read the headlines to realize most kids and families are different than they were forty years ago.

Some critics claim the "traditional American family" never existed - that the "good old days" so many Americans yearn for are figments of bad memories. That’s not true. This book is my proof.

Modern sociologists may argue that some of the incidents in this book demonstrate what was wrong with those times. Nowadays, society and government try to control the lives of youngsters from the time they leave the womb. Many of the experiences I had as a youth would today be, at the very least, socially unacceptable and at worst, in violation of a multitude of federal, state and local statutes.

Although the story is told through the eyes of this writer, it really isn’t an autobiography. It could have happened in any one of hundreds of small towns that existed in the 1950s--it is the story of the last generation of youngsters to slip through before the rules changed.

I’m glad I grew up when and where I did.

It was a great time to be a kid.

Wayne Cornell
1996