Pop Is No Pal

"WHERE DID YOU GO?" "OUT." "WHAT DID YOU DO?" "NOTHING." (124 pp.)--Robert Paul Smith--Norton ($2.95).

This is a reactionary little exercise in nostalgia which will have a whole generation of fathers shaking their heads and murmuring, "Amen!" Novelist Robert Paul (So It Doesn't Whistle) Smith writes bluntly from the notion that, for small boys growing up, the good old days were best. The point is illustrated by the dialogue of the title--"Where Did You Go?" "Out." "What Did You Do?" "Nothing." Author Smith's belief is that today's parent too often knows where his boy has been, and that in all probability he or some teacher or other tiresome grownup sent him there.

Just Dig a Hole. When Smith was a boy, he and his pals well understood "that the grownup was the natural enemy of the child, and if any father had come around being a pal to us we would have figured that he was either a little dotty or a spy. What we learned we learned from another kid." Smith is appalled to know that "kids in the Little League cry when they lose a game." What sensible man would deny that it was a healthier day when the brat ballplayer, unwashed and ununiformed, never cried "unless he caught a foul tip with the end of his finger"?

Author Smith (a father of two boys eleven and eight years old) is also pretty tired of such notations on his children's report cards as "gets along well with the group." He would like to see the return of solid rules of behavior which all kids, understood and appreciated. Instead, he finds children, his own included, Geselled and Spocked and Ilged to the point where "nothing but a jail term is going to convey disapproval." He even holds that what he learned about women from the Police Gazette was educational. And what is left of the child's fine art of doing nothing? "Many many hours of my childhood were spent in learning how to whistle . . . how to snap my fingers. In hanging from the branch of a tree. In looking at an ants' nest. In digging holes. Making piles. Tearing things down. Throwing rocks at things." He sees too many bored kids around now, and he makes a nice distinction: "Being bored is a judgment you make on yourself. Doing nothing is a state of being."

Just Throw a Chestnut. Progressive moderns will cast a cold eye on a man who moons for the time when a Dodge car ("if your family happened to own a Dodge") was the best there was, who recalls the wonderful sensation of running smack into wet sheets hanging on a backyard line ("Do that with an electric drier!"), and well remembers that one important use for a phonograph was to see how far the turntable could throw a horse chestnut. Smith knows he does not have a chance to prevail in the golden age of the child psychologist. He is simply a brave, worried man who knows that boys "don't want science. They want magic."

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