Free An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood by Tom Purcell Page B

attempt to buck our worry-prone culture — one lady allowed her 10-year-old son to walk a mile to soccer practice — face the wrath of family, neighbors and local authorities.

When a police officer saw the boy walking alone, he stopped him and drove him to practice. The officer reprimanded his mom and told her she would have faced child endangerment had anything happened to her son.

To be sure, we're an uptight, control-freak culture these days. Our paranoia is stoked by sensationalistic news stories and 24/7 coverage about children who have been abducted, but our fears are not entirely warranted.

The Times offers an interesting statistic: There are roughly 40 million elementary school-age children in America. Each year, 115 children are abducted — but more than 250,000 are in car wrecks.

Which shows how times have changed — and not necessarily for the better.

When I was 10 in 1972, I was permitted to roam all over the place, so long as my mother knew where I was going.

I am certainly sympathetic to the challenge parents face today. A friend of mine is determined that both her children experience some of the freedom she knew as a child.

She allows her kids to go into the woods to play — but she is filled with terror as she attempts to monitor them, unnoticed, from the window.

In any event, on the day I disappeared in 1966, my mother finally got my sister Krissy to fess up. Shortly after I arrived at the store, my mother pulled our station wagon into the store's parking lot and rushed inside to hug me.
     
    And she even bought me some candy!
     
     

A Reckoning with Jerry Gray
 
     
    I was so determined to ram my plastic toboggan into Jerry Gray’s shins — as he’d done to me and a dozen other kids on the sled slope earlier that day — I forgot about Mr. Ayres’ pond.
     
    I suppose I better explain.
 
    Tracy Drive ran straight up a mountainous hill. It was lined with modest ranch and split-level homes that were built in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Each sat on a rectangular lot.

To provide each homeowner with a level backyard, the builders used giant bulldozers to cut, essentially, a giant set of stairs into the massive hillside — unaware they were creating one of the finest sledding slopes in the history of kid-dom.

No sooner did the clouds open up and the snow begin covering the ground than a gazillion kids, from as far as several blocks away, arrived to whip down the massive roller-coaster slope on sledding contraptions of every kind.

I was always a Red Rider kind of fellow.

Sometime before I was born, my parents had bought one. Though my father can’t recall when or where he got it, it was probably used — my father never bought things new unless he had to.

My first memory of the sled dates back to 1965 or 1966. I vividly remember one snowy day when I was 3 or 4 and my mother, then 26 or 27, took me and my older sisters Kathy and Krissy out to the front yard and sat us on the sled. We were surrounded by giant mounds of snow and bundled tight in our winter coats. We still have that black-and-white photo.

As I got older I fell in love with that sled.
     
    I loved to be off the ground, atop the sled’s rails and body, as I raced down the hill. I liked having the ability to steer, to maneuver over jumps and around obstacles. I polished the rails and kept the hardware tight. I truly loved every moment I enjoyed that sled.

It served me well for many runs until it slipped beneath the wheels of our massive Plymouth Fury III station wagon in our garage — I hadn’t hung it on the wall as my father told me to do — and it was crushed beyond recognition as my father backed the car out.

The Christmas following its untimely demise, my parents replaced it with a plastic toboggan. It was about the same size as my sled. It had grooves cut into its bottom that allowed it to be steered when you held the sides and twisted it left or right.

It could never be as good as the sled had been, but it was