My brother and I knew many of the 20 stanzas of the Davy Crockett ballad and honed our bear hunting and tree recognition skills in the empty cement square down the hill from our fourth-floor Boston apartment. When our games became too loud, Mrs. Lang opened her corner basement window a couple of inches and shouted, "Be quiet or I'll call the police!" We took our hopscotch chalk, wrote "Old Lady Lang is a witch!" on her bricks, and ran fast. In those days of no air conditioning, we stayed

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... until dinnertime, when my father would open the window and whistle in his special call that we could hear from as far away as we were allowed to go. We would stop our game and run for home, taking the steps two at a time. My parents had no noticeable interest in what we played as long as we were seated with clean hands before my mother had dinner on the table. We lived at the top of Beacon Hill, and when I went to first grade, I could jump rope in the playground after school and walk home alone about a quarter of a mile across the top of the hill. There were no major streets to cross, but I was a little afraid of witches that might be hiding on the far side of parked cars. By the time I was eight, I took a public bus to a Schools: Studies in Education, vol. 5, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2008).