Neighborhood Secrets: Lessons on Tolerance #1

Understanding neighborhood dynamics is tough enough as an adult but often lost on children, who may spend their lives wondering what was really going on.

Take how bigotry operates, for example.

Until I was 5, we lived across the street from Ron and Dolores Craig and their daughter Cindy in Rolling Hills, a middle-class subdivision in Irwin, PA, where everybody’s parents looked out for everybody’s kids, all the dads played pinochle together on a Thursday night, and all the moms traded recipes and gossip over morning coffee.

Cindy Craig was a year younger than me, and I absolutely adored her (so much so that I named a favorite doll after her). But Cindy’s mom didn’t like me. More than once I came home crying because she basically kicked me out for no reason.

Mrs. Craig was always quicker to give me the boot if Heidi Grafen was on the scene. Heidi was the same age as Cindy, and the three of us always got along fine. In fact, mom even pointed that out to Dolores and suggested she leave us kids to work things out ourselves, to no avail.

The Grafens were a German family who immigrated to the United States after World War II and were in my parents’ circle of friends. Mr. Grafen—Helmut—got all upset once when a Jewish couple moved in on one side of him and a mixed-race couple on the other side. He asked my dad to help organize a committee to keep out “undesirables.”

Both Helmut and dad served in World War II, although on opposite sides. Dad’s army unit helped liberate the concentration camp at Nordhausen, so he wanted no part of Nazi-era oppression in the neighborhood. Suggesting tolerance, he reminded Helmut, “It wasn’t so long ago you and I were shooting at each other, too.” That put an end to that conversation.

Then when dad’s job transferred him to Elmira, NY, and our house went up for sale, Helmut wanted dad’s assurance he wouldn’t sell to any blacks. “Are YOU offering to buy my house?” dad asked him. Of course, the reply was no. “Then mind your own business,” dad said.

Much later Helmut would buy the houses all around him—one for each of his three daughters and their families. Sounds like enmeshment, but in Helmut’s case it was more like insulation.

Sometimes we do figure out the “whys” behind those early mysteries though. I think maybe the issue with Dolores Craig wasn’t about me at all. I think she just preferred Helmut Grafen’s idea of neighborhood development to my dad’s, and I paid the price.