Bonds of childhood survive the decades at West 75th Place

It’s been nearly 60 years since they played together as children.

It was the Eisenhower days, before the height of McCarthyism, before Vietnam. “You Bet Your Life” flickered on small television screens set in large wood cabinets in homes that mostly lacked air conditioning.

“When I look up this street,” Teri Margolis Cohn, now 68, said as she stood in Prairie Village at Booth Drive and looked toward the tiny homes on West 75th Place where she grew up, “I see faces.”

In an unusual reunion scheduled for the first weekend in April, she will see at least 40 of those faces again.

Reunions typically bring together members of a family, a graduating class or perhaps comrades who served in the military. This reunion in many ways will be an homage to a place in time.

It’s for the “kids” of West 75th Place. Some are in their late 60s now. Some are a decade younger. All are linked by the fact that in the early- to mid-1950s — a time that in their childhood memories seemed golden — they were friends living alongside one another on one block, running in and out of one another’s homes and through their sprinklers.

Now they’re driving and flying back from Colorado and Mississippi, from West Hollywood, Calif., and Washington, D.C., to gather as they once gathered on their front lawns to play midnight ghost or red rover. This time, one is a neurosurgeon, another a professor. One became a bike shop owner. As best as is known, the only parent of the kids from those days who still lives on the street is Sonia Warshawski, a Holocaust survivor who is now 88.

“Oh my gosh, that block formed our whole friendships. Those were our friends,” said Kansas City Councilwoman Jan Marcason, who said that when she closes her eyes and thinks of 75th Place, “I am 10 and riding my bike everywhere.”

Although not exclusively built for Jewish families, the 30 or so homes on 75th Place were constructed by a Jewish developer at a time when discrimination kept Jewish families from buying homes in many Johnson County communities.

So while the block was home to Catholics as well as Baptists like Marcason (“My aunt, uncle, cousins and grandmother lived next door,” she said), it also bound together young Jewish families, many buying their first homes as the baby boom erupted after World War II. The one-story homes were newly built, the trees barely saplings. Kids ran everywhere.

“It is possible that we romanticize it a lot, but it was the 1950s, kind of before the ’60s revolution,” said Miriam Kasdan Zigman, who is flying in for the reunion from San Francisco.

Cohn said that in her mind’s ear, she can still hear Zigman’s mother calling her daughter for dinner, “Miiiiiriam!”

From a larger perspective, the 1950s was, of course, as divisive as any era with African-Americans beginning a bloody crusade for civil rights in the South. At Somerset Elementary School, the children of 75th Place were taught to “duck and cover” for fear of a nuclear strike from the Soviet Union.

But in the 1950s, the children of 75th Place were just that children. They talk of a time, true or not, that they cherished as more innocent.

“The way I live now is different. I would kill to give my daughter that same environment,” said Zigman, now 66, with an 11-year-old daughter.

Zigman lived on 75th Place from 1951 to 1957, before her parents moved the family to California where she lived through the changes of the 1960s. A self-professed “good girl,” a “kind of a cross between a hippie and sorority girl,” she was in college during San Francisco’s Summer of Love and graduated from the turbulent University of California, Berkeley in 1969.

Her years on 75th Place somehow shimmered.

“I was only 4 to age 10. It is amazing how it stayed in my brain,” she said.

Memories of her father playing banjo with the neighbors remain vivid, as does the day she shot down the street’s soft hill on a scooter, ran into a parked car and ended up with a bloody leg.

“Every mom on the block came out of their front doors, ‘Are you OK?’ ” she recalled. “It was like it takes a village.”

For these reuniongoers, the current of nostalgia runs strong — with comparisons of childhood then and childhood now — as it does at many reunions. No scheduled play dates back then. No video games. No one could recall a mother who worked outside the home.

“Back then there were no cellphones, so your mom said to be home whatever time for dinner,” said Archie Solsky, 61, who’s coming to the reunion from Fort Collins, Colo., where he owns a bicycle shop.

For weeks now, the group has been posting old photographs on a Flickr account and sending in remembrances.

“Mostly I remember that the neighborhood was very safe,” wrote Solsky’s sister, Marilyn Solsky, 63, a rheumatologist in Los Angeles. “We could go in and out of everyone’s house because we all knew one another. One day, I thought I would run away from home. I got as far as Shirley Gale’s house when she convinced me I should probably return home and talk to my mom.

“Once when my mom was in the hospital, Helen Brown looked after my brother and me until my dad came home from work. It was just that kind of neighborhood where we all looked out for one another.”

They were still looking after one another when the idea for a reunion was born.

“I give all credit to Marshall for the idea,” Cohn said of Marshall Miller, 68, who also grew up on 75th Place. Miller, a lawyer, is known locally as the founder of the annual Art of the Car Concours, which brings sparkling vintage cars to Kansas City each June as a fundraiser for the Kansas City Art Institute.

Cohn and Miller had barely seen each other in the decades since they were children. But when Cohn heard Miller’s father had passed away, she sent a note. Miller wrote back, telling Cohn that he’d also received notes from others in the old neighborhood.

“He said, ‘I think we should have a reunion,’ ” Cohn recalled. “Then we got busy with our lives and nothing happened.”

After Cohn’s mother died, the idea was raised a second time, and a third time in September after the death of Marcason’s mother. Cohn and Miller were celebrating their 50th high school reunion, Shawnee Mission East class of 1963.

“Those really were idyllic times,” Miller said. “We started talking about the good old days on 75th Place, and I said to her, ‘You know, why don’t we see if we could contact some of those people?’ ”

To help retrieve the names of who lived where, Miller dispatched an employee of his law firm to the library to check out old neighborhood directories. Coupled with Facebook, email and the Internet, word began to spread about three days of gatherings at a restaurant and the homes of Miller and Cohn.

“I feel like we shared this innocent, beautiful time and I believe, very strongly, that we never forget our childhood friends,” Cohn said. “They are a big part of who we are, and who we were. They remain in our hearts.”

In searching for those friends, one name would lead to another and another. Often, Cohn would pick up the phone.

“This is Teri Margolis calling,” she recalled saying, using her childhood name. “Do you remember me?”

They had never forgotten.

This story was originally published March 28, 2014 at 11:07 PM with the headline "Bonds of childhood survive the decades at West 75th Place."