Mobile Bay Magazine - April 2018

This is not a pretty picture, but with all of its neglected, sordid appearance, it seems just a little better than the privacy and enjoyment of the present-day [1930s] backyard, which is not your own backyard by any means. You can only lay claim to what small portion remains undestroyed when your neighbors’ children get through with it.

Nearly everyone spends an unlimited amount of strength and cash on beautifying their yards, and they should be encouraged, because it adds to the morale of a town to see lovely, well-kept homes, but this cannot be done unless the legislature steps in and limits the number of children allowed in a family. Such mass production prohibits proper rearing, and in order to prove to your own satisfaction that birth control is essential to well-kept backyards, just rent a house in a bungalow neighborhood, and you will be permanently convinced.

Most of the backyards in Mobile are very attractive, or at least they begin that way.

But if your neighbor has a dog who insists upon making your pansy bed his repository for surplus bones, and the children next door race around your concrete walks and tumble off their bicycles and snap off the branches of your valuable azalea bushes and crush your narcissi beds to a pulp, it is rather discouraging. When they come up on your porch and carve their names on the arms of your new porch chairs and leave all of the fat from a ham sandwich on your clean steps and sticky chocolate and gumdrops on your cushions, it is more than the “good neighbor policy� has a right to expect. You feel murderous and wonder why there was such a hullabaloo when Herod wanted to dispose of all male children.

It has happened that very infrequently, a man or a woman would venture to reprove a child, or even to very politely ask a parent to mention to their offspring that it would be better not to completely mangle a garden so that it looked like a garbage dump, but it brought no results; in fact, it seemed to bring about a combine among the parents and children, which caused the complainant to find broken windows, smashed milk bottles, tacks in their tires and, in many instances, the loss of a favorite pet dog or cat. Clothes would mysteriously disappear from the line, and doorbells would ring at all hours of the day or night. MB april 2018 | mobilebaymag.com 75