Let me take you back to a time when TV sets were few and those that were around had poor reception from distant stations; back when people got up and walked places, talked to people, and grocery shopped at neighborhood stores.

On those rare occasions when reception was clear — the result of some freakish atmospheric anomaly — it would be the talk of the town. \

“Did you see TV last night?”

“Wasn’t it Amazing?”

Those would be the exclamations heard over backyard fences, during the passing of classes in high school, or at work and play.

No internet or Facebook then, no Twitter or Trump — it was a different world.

Most advertising was done door-to-door, word-of-mouth, or in the newspaper. The radio played a part but primarily during breaks in Tigers baseball or when “Skeets” Deno was hosting the,”Breakfast Club,” or Ed Nowak the “Polish Hour.” All were conveyed by our community’s only radio station, WATZ, with its 250 watts of broadcast power from atop “Radio Hill.”

This was before Ernie Harwell. Ernie started commentary for the Detroit Tigers in 1960. As you walked the streets of Alpena in the summer of 1957, it wasn’t Ernie’s voice you heard coming from radios in garages and on front porches, it was the voices of Van Patrick and George Kell.

When a person moved from their porch to inside their home, or upon his or her return to the porch, that movement was announced. Screen doors today do their closing with a “cush, cush — click.” All the slam has been taken out of them. But, back in the day, screen doors had spring-loaded hinges unrestrained by damping cylinders. Despite a mother’s plaintive plea — “Don’t slam the door!” — it always did.

The sounds of children off to bed, their litany of complaints, final practice notes on musical instruments, sounds of exasperation but more often of laughter, voices raised in exclamation of things both good and bad. Finally, yawns, followed by “good nights.” All these sounds floated into the neighborhoods through open doors and windows blending with sounds of window fans and moths and millers flying around light bulbs that dangled bare.

Kids played in streets, on sidewalks, and in alleys until the final moments of darkness triggered street lights whose soft yellows were too dim to illuminate further play. Neighborhood dogs, mongrels, those friends of ours who ran free, found their summer beds under porches and in bushes.

Tom Ferguson was our mailman. In summers, we would encounter him along his route. To each of us, he would say, “Hello, Joe,” though there wasn’t a Joe among us. Nor was he a one of them.

But we always returned what we got: ” Hello, Joe,” we’d yell back. It was a rare case of informal communication between a bunch of kids and an adult.

After Ernie Harwell came, he would read this biblical passage before the start of every baseball season:

“For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” — Song of Solomon 2:11-12

In 1957, in Alpena, in summer, after dark, on a weekend — if you were over in the 200 block of Mirre Street, listening, you could sometimes hear more than the usual neighbourhood sounds, more than the buzzing of millers and moths, more then window fans humming. More than the sounds of the turtle and baseball.

There, if you listened carefully, you would hear the sound of rubber tires moving slowly over a gravel driveway as Tom Sepull, Jack Gaasch, John Kaufman and me — not a one of us yet 16 — quietly pushed Sepull’s grandmother’s 1956 Buick out of her garage, down the driveway along the side of her house, out onto Mirre Street.

Then, Sepull — possessor of keys to its ignition and that evening’s adventure — would assume the driver’s position.

Soon, the sound of a Buick would be heard in the land, harmonizing with anticipations from temporarily emancipated youth as a summer evening’s joy ride began again.

Doug Pugh’s Vignettes runs bi-weekly on Tuesdays. He can be reached via email at pughda@gmail.com.