Dalraida: My Neighborhood

Posted on May 1, 2014 by bob in Features

Montgomery Fair photo by John E. Scott, courtesy Robert Fouts, Fouts Commercial Photography. For additional historic photos of Montgomery visit www.historicmontgomery.com.

by Rheta Grimsley Johnson

The thing that made the Dalraida neighborhood special in the 1960’s was its absolute normality. It had its share of pleasing eccentricities and characters, but the sum of the parts strictly adhered to convention. They don’t make ‘em that way anymore.

The churches looked like churches, especially the stone Methodist one. The stores had owners with names. Jake Chambers ran the nursery and toted your camellia bush to the car. The YMCA swimming pool was affordable and a short walk away. The shopping center anchor store, Montgomery Fair, let mesmerized kids go up and down, up and down, on its escalator, the first any of us had seen.

The doughnut shop sold holes. The elementary school playground was available after hours. Even the gravel pit had allure, a horse stable nearby and its legendary purpose as a popular parking spot for teenage lovers.

We knew our neighbors. We knew our neighbors’ dogs. Dalraida kept the neighbor in neighborhood. The dogs came to visit, just like the people. There were no leash laws, and if a garbage can got knocked over during the night its owner picked it up the next morning and fussed under his breath but took no action. It wasn’t a criminal offense.

I lived in the center of this game board of a place from age 9 till 18, attending the Baptist church exactly one block away. I think but can’t say for certain that attendance at Vacation Bible School was mandatory. Might as well have been. Everyone went. The church parking lot was where in summer months I met the bookmobile, the most fascinating rolling vehicle I’ve ever known with its cramped interior and six-book limit.

Dalraida Elementary might as well have been Cambridge as seen through my unsophisticated eyes, a citadel of knowledge with a well-lubed process administered by females. We frolicked as hard as we worked, tapped at entry as a Green or a Gold, a division that designated opposing teams for volley ball, kick ball and other games on a day devoted to play: Play Day. I was a 
proud Green.

Looking back, I think the Green-Gold deal might have been to prepare us for life in our state with its fierce Auburn-Alabama allegiances.

My street had small, new ranch houses and puny trees. I thought it beautiful. If there was a nook, a cranny, a crabby elder or an unofficial bicycle path unknown, unexplored, I don’t admit it.

Nobody fretted over our absolute freedom to roam the neighborhood called Dalraida. It was safe. We waded in its storm sewers, trick-or-treated its dark doors, skate-boarded its hills, all without noteworthy disaster.

There were thousand of southern neighborhoods like Dalraida, truly middle-class and, for the time, fashionably modern in the bath-and-a-half sense. Yet each had its peculiar and geographical allures. Dalraida had shade trees and ample sidewalks and a few old houses with pedigree azaleas.

I visit Montgomery now and find my old street looks better than 50 years ago. The trees have matured, for one thing. And today, contrasted with ubiquitous gated “neighborhoods” with houses too large for their lots and people who couldn’t name 10 others on the street with a gun at their temple, Dalraida looks nostalgically appealing. The houses were built before people wanted media rooms and bathrooms the size of Ecuador. There are carports that allow you to see automobiles, not garages that hide them. Dogs no longer roam free, but I bet they are still known by name the way they used to be.

Simpler times, I know. No diversity, if you don’t count a few Northerners, I know. No exposure to ethnic foods and cultural adventures or a whole other indigenous race that lived just beyond its perimeters. I understand that well. Dalraida was a period piece.

But when I think back to my growing up years, I relish the memory of neighborhood, pure and simple, with its faults and plusses, its working people and curbs and gutters. If in the natural containment we were limited, we also were formed. For better or worse.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson, who grew up in Montgomery, is a syndicated columnist whose essays appear in newspapers across the country. One of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, Rheta shares these memories exclusively with readers of Prime Montgomery.

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