Kids and Parks

Wednesday’s Michael Berry show on KTRH (and syndicated across the country) spent a lot of time talking about a single mother who was arrested for letting her 9-year-old daughter go play at a nearby park while she worked at McDonald’s.  It really got me thinking about how much things have changed in my lifetime.

I was about that girl’s age – it was the summer that I turned 10 in August – when I won a scholarship to summer classes at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  The classes covered everything from astronomy to zoology, and we got to play with everything from live snakes to shrunken heads, stuff a 9-year-old boy thought was super cool!  Robert Vines, the museum curator, taught the classes, and had a real gift for making science exciting.

Back then, the museum was located about where the tropical bird house is now in the middle of the Houston Zoo. To get to the classes, I walked six blocks, caught the Oak Forest Shuttle bus to the Sears on North Shepherd, where I transferred to a bus headed downtown.  Then I walked over to Main Street to catch the bus that dropped me off at Fannin and Outer Belt (now Cambridge Street) between Hermann Hospital and the Zoo.  From there it was just a couple blocks to the entrance to the Zoo.

Once the classes were over, I rode the bus back downtown, walked over to Congress Avenue, and transferred to the number 43 bus back to Sears and then the Shuttle back to where I started.

I only had one problem all summer, and it was my own fault.  The bus stop on Congress not only served the 43 bus, it also served the number 34 and number 44 buses, and I once took the 44 bus by mistake.  I ended up as the last passenger on the bus somewhere in far northeast Houston in an area that I had never been to before.  The driver asked me where I was going, and I tearfully told him I had got on the wrong bus and was planning to keep on riding until I got somewhere I recognized.  He said that he was through for the day and headed for the bus barn, but he would take me to a corner where I could catch the number 43 bus.  I got home about an hour late, but still made it before my parents got home from work. I don’t think that I ever told them what had happened.

I had a great time that summer, and wouldn’t trade those memories for the world, BUT…If attitudes 60 years ago were the way they are today -when a woman can get arrested for letting her unsupervised daughter play in a park a block from work - they would probably have put my parents under the jail.