Front porches Archives - Bob on Books

The home I grew up in with our front porch. (Photo taken by Carol E Campbell)

I recently discovered a website called The Front Porch Republic. The idea is to encourage local culture and community, believing too much attention is given to far off national political structures and divisions. I have no interest in getting into any political discussions. But the website shares something in common with my series on Youngstown. It is all about loving the places where we live or have lived. And I really like the name. The Youngstown I grew up in was a front porch city.

Maybe I’m thinking about it because this was the time of the year we pulled out the front porch furniture. At my house we hung awnings to keep the porch shady in the afternoon. We didn’t grow up with central air conditioning. Cooling was either window fans or air conditioners in windows that mainly cooled the room they were in. The front porch was the place we went to cool off, catching whatever breeze there was, with a cool drink at our side. We’d sit out and talk late into the evening. Sometimes, especially if you had a screened in porch, you slept out there on the hottest nights.

The other thing we did on the porch was visit with neighbors. Porches were our social network. If we weren’t on our porch, we were walking a dog or going for ice cream, and often stopping to talk with other neighbors. We’d catch up on vacations, expected babies, sick relatives, and engagements. We’d talk about projects we were working on around our homes, or something we needed to repair on the car. And yes, there was the passing of neighborhood gossip. Guys would talk about strike rumors, the Indians and the Pirates and the team we all loved to hate–the Yankees.

I knew every neighbor on our street, and as I grew up I began to learn all the ways people could be different, and that different was just different. Old people and younger families. Catholic and Protestant. People fussy about their yards and others more laid back. I knew the families of friends on other streets and all the people on my paper route, many who waited on their porches for their paper in the summer.

In our own front porch republic, we had parents, and then there were the other adults in the neighborhood. You were expected to respect them and their property the same ways you respected your own family. And other parents could yell at us when we got out of line.

Most of the time people were pretty self-sufficient. We all kept up our own places but we were around to lend a hand when an extra one was needed. We cut our grass, and in the winter shoveled our walks. But in the front porch republic, we learned when someone was sick or had a family member in the hospital and pitched in to help with some yard work, or a meal.

The pandemic has been a time of rediscovering neighbors. When you couldn’t do very much else, you went for walks. And you met people on your street you hadn’t met before. We discovered again the joys of small talk and care for one another, wishing each other’s health. We found out life may be better off social media and not listening to 24/7 news streams, and how much we longed for real human connection, even at a social distance.

I hope that is something we can keep. I’m troubled by the rising gun violence in many of our cities. The risk of random gunfire puts the front porch republic at risk. The restoring of the fabric of neighborhood, where the adults on the front porch keep watch not only on their own kids but others could be part of turning the tide. The neighborhoods we live in are still more important to the health of our cities than any virtual community we may find online. That’s something we grew up with in Youngstown. We knew about front porch republics before they ever became a website. We had them in every neighborhood.

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

The home I grew up in with our front porch. (Photo taken by Carol E Campbell)

The hot weather of the past week brought to mind one of our favorite ways of keeping cool on those warm and muggy summer evenings. We would sit out, often until late in the evening, to catch whatever breeze there was while the house cooled off after sunset.

You see, most of us didn’t have air conditioning back then. Sitting out on the front porch with a cool drink, and maybe some ice cream, was the best way to keep cool. My parents had old-fashioned metal lawn chairs that could rock (we inherited them). I would often sit on the old metal glider, rocking back and forth to keep cool.

We had big green awnings that dad hung each spring to shade the porch from the late afternoon sun. We had spirea bushes in front of the porch that came up just above the banisters and the awnings came most of the way down so that kept the sun out pretty well.

Often, I would have my transistor radio on listening to Herb Score broadcasting the Cleveland Indians games. We always hoped this would be the year they’d win the pennant, and then the World Series. Still hoping.

Everyone sat out on summer evenings. Sometimes you would visit families walking down the street, many walking to the Dairy Queen a block up on Mahoning Avenue. Mostly, the parents would talk–about how hot it was, how good the yard was looking, how work was going, how big the kids were getting. Or we would watch neighbors drive down the street and notice when they got a new car.

As I grew older, I would cross the street and sit on the front steps of my friend Jim’s house and talk with him until his parents told us it was time to call it a night. As it turned out, that was usually when my parents wanted me home. You’d think they conspired with each other. Mostly I remember talking with Jim about cars, sports, and that mystery we both were trying to figure out–girls! (Don’t ask me if we ever did!)

Front porches weren’t just a west side thing (where I grew up). Most homes in the older urban neighborhoods of Youngstown had front porches. My grandparents lived on Cohasset Drive, a beautiful tree-lined street and they had a big front porch with old, comfy porch furniture.

Now everyone has air conditioning and, at least in our area, few houses have front porches. If we ever buy another house, I want a front porch. As it is, whenever it isn’t too hot, we sit out in the drive and enjoy the evening air and visit with people walking by, usually with their dogs. Growing up in a neighborhood of front porches, it just doesn’t seem right hiding out in my house or backyard on a summer evening. But it is different. In Youngstown, I knew the names of every family in the neighborhood. I can’t say that here. We didn’t always have fond thoughts of each other, but we knew each other. That’s what came of growing up on a street lined with houses with front porches.

[Want to read other “Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown” posts? Just click “On Youngstown” on the menu bar at the top of this page to read any or all in this series.]