Prepared with Radio Free Montclair, a new podcast episode featuring oral histories from the Montclair History Center is available! Listen below or read online here.
Through the 1930s to the 1960s, childhood play in Montclair was very different. Rather than full schedules, constant supervision, and paid programs for everything, most childhood fun in town was free-form and unorganized. Some standout quotes from this episode:
Dr. Anthony Caggiano Jr. - “There was no Little League… it was eeny meeny miney mo to decide…was he safe or was he out.”
Gray Russell - “I'm a baby boomer, so there were kids, kids, kids everywhere.”
Roger Terry - “I could not WAIT until school was over to go to the park. There were maybe 100, 200 kids there sometime…and your parents didn’t have to worry about where you were.”
Donato DiGeronimo - “You could go to almost every playground in Montclair. They hired teachers to run the playground. You could just come there anytime you wanted. There were games and things to do all day long. It was the best thing ever.”
Vincent Tango - “[Montclair] had everything for kids. My family was relatively poor… I was able to do everything the rich kids did.”
Ron Owns - “We were like the city kids…we didn’t have yards or lawns to play in at all. We’d go to Anderson Park.”
Joanna Weinstock - “…spent a lot of time at the Bellevue Branch of the library…I loved it…because you could bring home stacks of books.”
William McElroy - “The firehouse was a godsend to us on a ]hot] day…they would take the hose… and we would all run through it.”
Nathaniel Johnson Jr. - “Summertime, we played baseball. Fall, we played football. Wintertime, we rode our sleds down the hill.”
Stay tuned for more radio episodes (and blogs) based on our oral history series!
To explore more oral histories from the Montclair History Center, which were recorded in 2018 to commemorate Montclair’s 150th anniversary, visit online here.