School had let out just a few days ago at the end of May. My newly minted summer vacation still felt cool and relaxed around the edges. While foraging in the kitchen for a midday snack, I heard the WDLB radio announcer report that a criminal had escaped from a Wisconsin prison. Mom looked up from the mixing bowl she was stirring and seeing my worried expression said, “That prison is a long way from here.” I shrugged and relaxed.

Continuing with his news report, the radio announcer explained that the criminal had family living in Northern Wisconsin and someone who looked like the criminal had been seen walking on a local road last night. When a car approached, the man disappeared into a nearby woods.

I liked listening to the radio that Mom kept on the kitchen counter and playing from sun-up to sun-down every day. The radio station played many different types of music and reported local and national news. It also had story programs for children, and soap operas like Helen Trent.  One of the things I liked about the radio station was it was located nearby, on the outskirts of Marshfield, and the announcers were men and women who lived in the area.

Usually, the news reported by WDLB wasn’t as scary as it was that morning. Even Mom’s nerves were jangled by the news. She didn’t want anyone to go for bike rides or walk far back to the woods. She didn’t have to tell me to stick close to home. I feared that the bad man would show up at our farm.

The next few days were hot, and the hay fields grew tall. Daddy cut his first crop of hay. He didn’t worry about the criminal because his focus was on getting the hay dry enough to safely put it in the barn before the next rain. Relief came to everyone in the family a few days later. Rain held off until the cut hay was tucked away in the barn, and the WDLB announcer reported that the escaped criminal had been captured.

Everything in my childhood seemed up close and personal, whether it was good or bad. A telephone was installed in our home before I started to attend school. A lady named ‘Operator” lived inside the phone! She was a real person. When someone received a call, all the neighbors on our party-line had their phones ring. The number of long and short rings indicated who the call was for, but anyone could pick up their phone to rubberneck (eavesdrop on someone else’s call.)

The doctor and dentist that my family went to were men who lived in our hometown. They weren’t strangers from far away. We saw them attending our church services, school events and out taking walks.

If the electric company or the telephone company made a mistake on a bill, we were able to go to the local office of that company where we could talk to a person, face-to-face, about the problem and straighten it out.

Through the years as I grew up, my family did worry about some things outside our immediate realm: the cold war, communism, and the Iron Curtain. But even those things were up-close and personal for my mother. Once, when the farm lost electricity and it wasn’t storming, she worried that the Russian army had invaded America. The next day we learned someone lost control of their car and had knocked over an electric highline wire pole.

Even my boogiemen were local, such as the next-door neighbor’s dog. Schmidt’s black and white beast terrified me because I never saw it passive and resting. It guarded the yard and road in front of their farm. Anytime anything came near, the dog mysteriously shot out from nowhere to aggressively snarl and bark. It seemed other-worldly, just like the strange, reclusive family that lived in the shrub-shrouded farmhouse.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that news report about an escaped convict was a turning point. That there were random people and situations outside my immediate world that could harm me was scary. That made my small, safe world feel less up-close and personal.