Nancy Drew and childhood memories

Buying The Hidden Staircase for Maddie, a product of the current Nancy Drew craze, made me think about my childhood. I talked tonight to a good friend a few years younger than me (isn't everyone?), and she remembers that she and three other girls in her Kansas City neighborhood spent an entire summer reading Nancy Drew (okay they also played Monopoly and Parcheesi) and they traded books, until they'd all read all the books up until then. I began to remember the summers--was I ten or eleven?--when I rode my bike from our house in Madison Park to the Blackstone branch of the Chicago Library every morning. I took out three or four books, went home and read them, and brought them back the next morning to exchange for more books. In retrospect, I am amazed my parents let me ride alone those eight or ten blocks on the South Side of Chicago--by the time you got to the library, you were close to 47th Street, where a questionable neighborhood began, and we were always afraid to go. But it was a different time. Mom also let me ride from 50th to the commercial district on 53rd to meet a friend and substitute for lunch--this was an occasional treat--those thick, real-ice-cream chocolate shakes at Cunag's where the straw stood straight up in the middle. Today, I don't let Maddie sit on the steps in front of my house unless someone is watching her--it's a through street, and you never know. But it's a shame. We've lost a wondereful part of childhood in the '50s and '60s--and our grandkids will never know it.
TCU Press about a year ago published Before Texas Changed: A Fort Worth Boyhood, in which David Murph, now a minister and director of church relations at TCU, recalls a childhood in the TCU area when he was free to roam downtown and virtually anywhere in the city--he just had to be home for supper. Of course, David had an inventive imagination and got into unimagineable scrapes, which are what make the book a delight, but he had that sense of freedom and yet safety.
Sometimes I think it's the publicity given to abductions these days. There were kidnappings when I was a child--I remember one horrible one in the Chicago area that scared the life out of me because a man had taken a ladder to the to the second-story bedroom of a young girl. My bedroom was on the second floor. But surely we have to publicize these things to make the public cautious--and in so doing, we've changed childhood. It's a circular maze, and there's no figuring it out, but I don't like it. On the other hand, I'm fierce about keeping my grandchildren safe. So there's the dilemma.