McCOMB - It was an idyllic experience, growing up white and middle class in small Mississippi towns in the 1950s.
World War II and the Great Depression were over. The fighting in Korea was done before we were old enough to go. The Vietnam War had not begun.
The economy was prosperous. Although there were fears of nuclear war, kids didn't worry much about it. A more imminent threat was the prospect of catching polio.
Street drugs were unknown in Mississippi communities in those days. A "weed" was a cigarette which, admittedly, was more popular then than now. There was even a song about smoking cigarettes: "I don't reckon they hinder your health - I've smoked 'em all my life and I ain't dead yet."
True, there was racism - Jim Crow laws that kept black people from exercising legal and social rights now taken for granted. Their schools were segregated and inferior, and many of them were encouraged not to go to school.
But many black people my age will tell you that even amidst the hardships they endured during that era they experienced a sense of family and community that seems to be missing in today's society.
There were fewer single- parent homes both in the white and black communities.
With no compulsory attendance laws, schools were safe and, at least for the whites, good. The worst students usually dropped out by the eighth or ninth grade and went to work. There was more opportunity for unskilled labor and one didn't have to have a high school education to make a living.
The past came to mind as I listened to Warner Alford at the Rotary Club reminisce about growing up in McComb.
Warner, of course, is a local hero whose roots run deep in McComb - high school football star who went on to excel at Ole Miss and later become the school's athletic director, son of former Mayor and merchant J.W. Alford and now, semi-retired in Oxford, an executive assistant for development with one of the university's foundations.
At Rotary, he talked of the sense of belonging in McComb, the playgrounds in neighbors' yards, the same schoolteachers teaching the same grades year after year, attending church with friends, Friday night football and Thanksgiving afternoon rivalry games with Brookhaven. Read Willie Morris' books about growing up in Yazoo City and you vicariously experience the same thing.
Life is more complicated now, and we're not going to return to the 1950s. Some things about that era we don't need to resurrect.
But Alford mentioned three things he had growing up that every child deserves, and it has nothing to do with athletic ability or scholarship.
"I had a good mama and a good daddy," Alford recalled, parents that insisted on instilling values, including a work ethic, at an early age. He also was exposed to good churches, his own Methodist Church, but also churches of other denominations he visited with friends.
And he had good and compassionate neighbors who were always there in good times and in crises.
Too bad that every child of every generation doesn't have good parents, caring neighbors and a habit of going to good churches.
