Locking your Doors
By: David L. Norris
Topics: comedy, Arvin, 1950's
Posted by Sloigo Tue Aug 28, 2007 13:01:14 PDT
Viewed 1630 times
0 responses 0 comments
In the 1950s, Arvin was a very nice place to live. Everyone knew and trusted each other. By keeping a simple ear out, you could hear clear across town. You could tell where your friends were playing, whose parents were having a fight, or measure the progress if someone was coming over to your house to pick you up in their car, by going outside and sit on your porch stoop. You would hear the car start, back out, drive – shifting gears and increasing speed, stopping for stop signs and starting all over again following their progress with your ears until they turned onto your street and you first saw their car.
No one ever had to wonder where their car keys were. They were in the ignition key slot!! Why would anyone keep them anywhere else? Likewise, no one ever locked their house. My parents would leave for weeks at a time with our house totally open. We did not own any keys to our house. Upon returning, we would find all of the newspapers neatly stacked against one couch arm and all of our mail stacked against the other arm. The milkman had brought in momma’s half-and-half, butter and eggs, changing out anything that was outdated. Nothing was out of place. My parakeet and hamster were well fed and all was good with the world.
Arvin experienced its first wave of Big City Crime in the form of a cat burglar. A man so brazen that he was crawling into bedrooms on his hands and knees and was sneaking men’s wallets out of their pants pockets that were hung over their head post of the bed in which they were sleeping. Money out of women’s purses, all while the people were in their home. He would crawl through the houses and seemed to know where the women had their household money hidden.
One woman got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and came nose to nose with a strange man standing in her hallway. First, there was the blood-curdling scream and the man’s mad dash from the house. I doubt if either of them still needed to visit the bathroom. Finally, the burglar was caught and prosecuted, but Arvin’s innocence was over for good. The man could have made out better on a door lock sales commission program than he could have on any of the money he netted out of those poor men’s wallets.
One of my friends lived with his parents in a housing development. To save money, there were only two house blueprint designs. One night my friend came home in his convertible around 3 a.m., about three sheets to the wind, dead drunk. He always parked his car in front of his house. He got out, slamming his car door. As he stumbled around, fishing for his house keys, he became disoriented, turned and walked across the street to the house of a widowed friend of my mother’s.
He stuck in his key, unlocking the door and stumbled right in. In the dark, and being heavily intoxicated, he did not notice the differences in furniture also since the house floor plan was the same; he found his way down the hallway to his bedroom. He sat heavily onto the bed and began taking his shoes off. The widow awoke to the sight of a man sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark. She screamed and reached for her pistol that she kept in the nightstand. My friend, still not sure what was going on and why there was a strange middle-aged woman in his bed, panicked and ran from the house wearing only one shoe. I do not think either of them needed to visit the bathroom either.
My friend stayed hidden over at his house, while my mom and several other women went over to the widow's house to see what was wrong. Finally, the police arrived. By this time, my friend was Cold-Slap sober. The police were first sure they had nabbed some kind of perverted rapist until they checked out his story and tried his key in the widow's door lock and sure enough it opened her door. They retrieved his shoe and on the promise that he would stay at home and go to bed, they did not arrest him.
In order to save money and minimize the quantity of keys necessary to give to all of the subcontractors performing all of the work tasks necessary to build a house, all of the houses door locks had the same key and these door locks had never been changed out. The following day the police came back and everyone started comparing keys and found that out of the 11 houses, only two of the individual owners had thought to change out their own door locks themselves. My friend had his 15 minutes of fame and the gossip circles literally burned up the phone lines talking about the widow's adventure. For a long time, when anyone met, the first thing they did was to compare their keys, to see if they had the same set as the next person.
The End
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