Rose remembers Prairie Village of days past

A photo from the JoCoHistory.org’s archives of Prairie Village’s early days.

Former Johnson County Sun publisher Steve Rose penned a great column this week looking back on some of the keystones of life in 1950s Prairie Village that are no longer.

Steve Rose

Read the whole thing here — it’s worth the time. Here were a couple of my favorite paragraphs:

This may sound like an odd fond memory, but I do recall with some nostalgia being in a school classroom at Porter School (now a park) with 40 or more kids. How could anything get taught, when today’s elementary school teachers will tell you that 24 kids should be the maximum, and 15 kids per classroom is ideal? I don’t doubt them, but I made lots and lots of friends, and we seemed somehow to learn. Of course, unlike today, the special needs children were segregated to their own room down the hall, making it far easier for a teacher to handle more children.

The city of Prairie Village had a part-time marshal, and he happened to live on my block. About once a week, he would let us kids sit in the car and run the siren. Today, you can’t even sit in a police car without signing your life away, unless, of course, you are suspected of a crime.

And, finally, there is the memory — probably never to be repeated — of literally hundreds of kids living on one street, two or more children in every single house. The games we played, the snow forts we built, the baseball cards we traded, the butterfly hunts we went on, playing into the darkness of night with no safety concerns, all of this is gone.