'Our Spruce Manor Way of Life'

I’ve learned that a next-door neighbor from my childhood has died at age ninety-eight: Gert Pirko. Like us, she and her husband and three kids moved into the neighborhood in the summer of 1955. Parma Heights was a working-class suburb on the West Side of Cleveland. There’s a photo somewhere of the middle child Karen and I standing in the backyard of their house, holding hands, the grass nearly as tall as our three-year-old selves.

 Our doors were seldom locked. We could enter their house without knocking. I remember borrowing a quart of milk from Mrs. Pirko, the whole glass bottle. Ken, the oldest kid, collected hot rod magazines and I heard “Telstar” for the first time when he played the 45 for me in the basement. Johnny was the youngest.  He and I once walked to Kroger's, selected a bottle of catsup and a box of Cheerios, and blithely walked out the door. The manager stopped us and called Mrs. Pirko, who came to get us in her Chevy. Most women in the neighborhood didn’t drive. The Pirkos moved to Illinois in 1964 and they still show up in my dreams.

 

The indefatigable Isaac Waisberg, proprietor of IWP Books, has just posted Phyllis McGinley’s 1951 poetry collection, A Short Walk from the Station (along with three earlier McGinley volumes). Many of her poems are set in Spruce Manor, a fictional suburb not unlike Larchmont, near New York City where she and her family lived. It joins such mythical literary locales as Winesburg, Ohio, and Spoon River, Illinois. The book’s ten-page prose introduction, “Suburbia, Of Thee I Sing!”, is less a defense than a celebration of life in the suburbs, already seventy-five years ago a punching bag for the snobbery of hipsters and litterateurs. McGinley refutes most of the clichés associated with life in the suburbs:  

 

“I think that someday people will look back on our little intervals here, on our Spruce Manor way of life, as we now look back on the Currier and Ives kind of living, with nostalgia and respect. In a world of terrible extremes, it will stand out as the safe, important medium.”

 

In his review of the book, Jacques Barzun called McGinley “a feminine Horace.” I love the fiction of John Cheever and Richard Yates but there’s another way to think about suburbia and its inhabitants, like Gertude Pirko. Two of McGinley’s poems that might have been drawn from my life:

 

“Local Newspaper,” because once I delivered three newspapers – two dailies and a weekly:

 

“Headlines, a little smudged, spell out the stories

That stir the Friday village to its roots:

town council meets for may, miss babcock marries,

shore club to ban bikini bathing suits.

While elsewhere thunders roll or atoms shiver

 ultimate tyrants into dust are hurled,

Weekly small boys on bicycles deliver

News to our doors of this more innocent world –

A capsule universe of church bazaars

Where even the cross-stitched aprons sell on chances,

Of brush fires, births, receptions, soda bars,

Memorial Day parades, and high-school dances,

And (though on various brinks the planet teeters)

Of fierce disputes concerned with parking meters.”

 

And a remembrance of a much-cherished sound and sight, “Good Humor Man”:

 

“Listen! It is the summer’s self that ambles

Through the green lanes with such a coaxing tongue.

Not birds or daisy fields were ever symbols

More proper to the time than this bell rung

With casual insistence – no, not swallow

Circling the roof or bee in hollyhock.

His is the season’s voice, and children follow,

Panting, from every doorway down the block.

So, long ago, in some such shrill procession

Perhaps the Hamelin children gave pursuit

To one who wore a red-and-yellow fashion

Instead of white, but made upon his flute

The selfsame promise plain to every comer:

Unending sweets, imperishable summer.”