Hello, Write On Followers, I thought you might enjoy reading a short essay on the town that I grew up in Maple Shade, NJ. I would love to get feedback and comments. Or tell me about the places that you all grew up in the comments section of my blog. SUSAN
Although Maple Shade wasn’t exactly Mayberry, and I wasn’t exactly Opie, I did have an idealized childhood, if slightly more tarnished version of it. I was born in 1951, and lived in Maple Shade, NJ until I was twenty. When I spread my wings and moved to a small one-bedroom apartment on Haddon Avenue in Haddonfield, that was over a yarn shop.
I grew up two houses away from the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church on Fellowship Road. I attended OLPH elementary school through the eighth grade. I attended highschool at St. Mary Of The Angels Academy in Haddonfield. It was an all- girl school.
The kids in my neighborhood were mostly of Irish or Italian descent. We were Catholics but not everyone went to the Catholic school, some of my best friends were publics. That’s what we called anyone who didn’t attend OLPH.
The families were generally large. It wasn’t uncommon to have six or more kids in the family. Which is hard to believe because most of us lived in three-bedroom homes, with one bathroom. We didn’t have a lot of money but, we never went hungry, our parents loved us each in their own way.
There were always plenty of kids in the neighborhood to play with. Kids from school were only a bike ride away. We were safe; we didn’t have a lock on our front door, until the late 1970’s. Divorce was unheard of, and all the neighbors watched out for each other’s kids. And told them if they were up to no good.
The summers are what I remember most, the absolute freedom we were granted, as long as we showed up for lunch and dinner, on time. We did pretty much what we wanted. Going down the Pike (Main Street) to visit the .5 & .10 Department Store, and peruse the aisles, for inexpensive new treasures. There was the Rexall Drug Store, where you could get a roll of film developed, or buy your first tube of lipstick.
The Maple Shade Bakery, made the best donuts and bread anywhere available for miles. But perhaps my favorite haunt was Shucks. It was everything a kid could want rolled into one, a penny candy store, a soda fountain, and subshop, and for the older set a separate space for dancing, and listening to records on the Jukebox.
And, oh the malted milk shakes were out of this world, not to mention the root beer floats. I spent almost every Saturday afternoon seeing a movie at the Roxy Theater, where you could see a western, or the latest sci-fi for twenty-five cents. It was a three-block walk from my house. We used to smuggle in a Lebanon bologna sandwich and eat for free.
The Maple Shade public library was my second favorite place to visit. I read every book in the children’s section by the time I was eleven, those books took me all around the world and back. The library was part of same building as the police station. It was my second home.
We used to catch a bus one Saturday a month out front of the police station and go roller-skating in Riverside Roller Rink for fifty cents. My family didn’t have TV until I was about nine or ten, although some of our neighbors had one, sometimes I would go over and watch TV in the window of the TV repair shop on Main Street. Not Mayberry, but close enough!