Metuchen Edison History Features

Recollections of

Boyhood Days

In Old Metuchen

By

David Trumbull Marshall

Published by The Case Publishing Co., Flushing NY 1930

(Second Edition)- (c) 1930

Country Proper Place for Children.

Freud has said that no impression which is made on the brain of a child is ever lost.

As one gets old and the impressions made on one's childhood brain are recalled, fortunate is that man whose childhood impressions are so uniformly of pleasant things as mine have been!

A good Father and a good Mother and six brothers and sisters who were until the last, good and kind to me. A large country house and barn with unlimited room outside in which to play, what an ideal life to look back upon!

When I came to New York to live I realized what Mary Antan meant when she pitied the poor children of the city "with nothing to look forward to" and most pitiful of all "nothing to look back to."

Almost all the story books and school books for children deal with scenes in the country and with domestic animals and wild animals of which the average city child knows nothing.

The child of well-to-do parents goes to the country during the summer. The child of the tenements, and he is in the vast majority, stays right where he was born until he is old enough to go to work and then he stays there some more.

The average child and the average adult of the country village has no more idea how the city child lives than he has how the Man in the Moon lives.

Say what one will about the advantages of the city, and they are many, the only proper place for a growing child is in the fields and the woods.