The Good Old Days

Crime is considered by many to be the most pressing problem in the U.S., even though crime rates have declined during the mid-90s. Perceptions of a rising crime rate are created by TV newscasts that continue to air bloody crime footage, while creating a myth that crime and social problems were virtually nonexistent before the 1960s. Of course, the situation is a lot more complex than that. The following conversation between a Media Watch columnist and her father provides an entertaining perspective on crime and the "good old days":

CP: Could you describe what Halloween was like back in the '30s?

LP: In Wichita, 1938 or so, one of the favorite Halloween tricks was to take a bar of soap and to scrawl obscenities on all available windows. You'd have to hide your garbage cans or you'd never see them again. The kids would open all the damn fire hydrants in town, and the water pressure would drop off until they got around to shutting them all off again. I can also remember some incidents when they turned buses over.

CP: That seems like it would take a lot of strength.

LP: It would take a big mob of husky 16 year olds. Most of this was done by 14, 15, 16 year olds...I think one reason why you don't see so much of that anymore is that kids didn't have cars back then. They were doing a lot of on-foot crime. Today, you know, they're out going up and down the freeway and robbing the 7-11, ha ha.

C: Right now juvenile crime is usually thought of as graffiti and drug use. Was there a lot of that sort of thing?

L: I don't think it was the same percentage. I distinctly remember there was a flap about marijuana--people were out trying to stamp out marijuana among the lower class areas, I suppose. In those days they were harder on kids in some respects. If kids got in trouble with burglary or larceny, or assault, they'd wind up in a reform school for a year. Today, they have "group homes" instead of a big reform school, which was kind of misnamed. Nobody came out of there reformed. Also, they didn't have anything called a "playground director" in those days. None of the school teachers dared to venture out onto the playground. Did you ever see Lord of the Flies? Then you've seen these playgrounds.

C: Really?

L: In grade school everyone went home for lunch. There was an hour for lunch and if you got back 20 minutes early, you'd see circles of kids around the playground, and in each circle there would be a fight going on. Sometimes I stayed inside. I remember in junior high looking out over a big field between us and the neighboring senior high school. There were several huge rings and there was a fight going on in each one. Even worse than that, they had sex going on in some of those rings, in junior high...they talk about things getting worse today, but you didn't see that when you went to junior high, did you?

C: No. You know, they say crime and teen sex has increased these days...

L: Yeah, it probably has, but it seems that the delinquents were as bad or worse back then.

C: Tell me that story about your high school football team.

L: Here's how I remember it. This high school happened to be in the rich end of town--it was the equivalent of Mercer Island High School. All the big money went into this one school. The football team had one season unbeaten, untied, and unscored upon. So they had this huge bonfire on the field because it was such a successful winning season. All the kids showed up, 1600 students, and they had a big snake dance...this dance made its way through the streets and wound into a shopping center--they went in the drugstore and started swiping stuff, breaking windows and looting. Then they decided to go out to Waldo's and do the same thing. They started dewiring street cars and, as I remember it, they had 19 streetcars dewired. They wound up in front of the police station in Brookside--the cops had grabbed about 20 students and had them in jail, and 1000 other kids were out there throwing eggs at the police station at one or two in the morning.

C: What is your perception of crime back then vs. now? A lot of people seem to be intimidated by the perception that there's so much crime around them. Has the nature of crime changed?

L: You never heard of things like drive-by shootings. If you did, they were 30-year-old crooks doing drive-by shootings. Of course the automobile was already pretty popular in the 30s, but there's at least twice as many now per person.

MediaWatch is written every two weeks by members of the MediaWatch collective, a local group monitoring Seattle news media. For info or to get involved, e-mail mediawatch@u.washington.edu or call 632-1656.