Suburbs still fulfill the dream

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

New to this city, to this country, he wanted to know about suburbs. What they are, exactly? What they are like?

"They're safer than cities, are they not?" he asked. And though I said, yes, they are, I didn't explain that this is not their essence; that suburbs weren't born out of a need for safety. Suburbs, after all, have their roots, not in today's fears, but in yesterday's dreams.

In 1949 when William J. Levitt purchased a 1,500 acre potato field in Long Island's Nassau County to build 17,500 identical houses - houses that average Americans could afford - he was fulfilling not only a need for shelter. He was fulfilling the American dream of owning a home.

Millions of GI's and their families were in need of a roof over their heads. The cities were teeming with people. The areas surrounding the cities were not. In retrospect, it seems a natural extension that communities were built on the outskirts of towns.

But the kind of community that developed is the wonder. Levittown was, to the common man, deluxe. A four room single-family house sold for $6,990; with a landscaped yard and all electrical appliances, it was still under $10,000. This mass production of homes coupled with low interest GI loans opened doors that had been locked tight to all but the rich.

I grew up in a tiny Levittown in the 1950s. It had long been my mother's dream to have a house in the country, and Randolph was country back then - mostly dirt roads, woods everywhere, a piggery down the street.

I don't think I ever heard the word "suburb" in my youth. It was too new. You were either a city mouse or a country mouse, and we were definitely country. Buses didn't thunder down our street. We saw grass, not pavement, when we looked out our windows. And both my grandmothers told everyone they knew that their family had moved "to the country."

Randolph today, however, is not country at all. Its woods are long gone, and most of its grass has been paved over. But it remains suburbia, nonetheless - an amalgam of city and country, but growing more citified every day.

Yet strikingly different from a city, too. I live in another suburb now, next to the one in which I grew up, and what defines it is not how it looks, not how much open space remains, but how it feels. It feels steeped in community, rich in the personal history of its inhabitants. It feels like a huge neighborhood where people care about people.

I was thinking about this last Saturday, while sitting in the high school auditorium, watching kids I've seen grow up, and a few I've never seen before, practice their production of "Anything Goes." I watched with pride, like a surrogate mother, our town, our singular connection. And their success was my pleasure.

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago when hundreds of people came to a party for Debbi and Kevin Sexton, to honor them for working so hard to keep a small store open - for being there for the community for so many years.

I was thinking about this, too, on Monday, when I took my daughter to Dr. Batchelder's. His office, attached to his home, is right off the main street of town. His wife is his receptionist and secretary. If you have an 8:30 appointment, he sees you at 8:30. He always explains exactly what is right and what is wrong with you. He is not a technocrat. She is not a bureaucrat. They do not distance themselves from people.

It is this accessibility, this personal caring and contact, that separates the suburbs from the city. In Norwood last winter, a high school student was head injured in a skiing accident. At 5 p.m. the word went out that there would be a Mass for him at St. Catherine's at 7:30. At 7:30 the church was filled.

In Walpole, townspeople gathered last year to raise funds for a 6-year-old who needed a liver transplant. First they had a dance, then a walk-a-thon, then a fair, then a toy sale. Their caring continues still.

It's the same in my town. People know people, and they reach out in both big and small ways. When you get your prescriptions filled at Andreotti's, Victor tells you what to take with what. When you're a regular at the library, Joe or Arlene will recommend books to read. When you walk into A Taste of Italy, you always get a taste of something.

It's a small town, still, my suburb, but bigness encroaches. The suburb ends where the mall begins, where Route 128 intersects, where Route 95 intrudes.

But in the few square miles between these things - in the few square miles of all American suburbs - there lives still a bit of the American dream.