The Philadelphia of my childhood in the 1970s and ’80s, was a city of neighborhoods, or if you went to one of the many parochial schools, and everyone I knew did, parishes. The city was rife with problems. Unemployment, racial tensions and violence were headlining each nightly Action News segment but it was an idyllic childhood to those of us who thought nothing of hopping onto our 10-speeds and taking off across the trolley tracks to meet up with our friends at the playground until the street lights came on.

Even without email or cellphones or social media, our parents knew exactly where we were and who we were with. The first (and only) time I ditched my Southwest Globe Times newspaper route for the corner store and the arcade games they had in the back, my mom knew about it before I even got home. Deep in the recesses of our side by side rowhomes, and into the living rooms carefully decorated with velvet couches covered in plastic, through dining rooms with wood buffets holding dishes we had never seen taken out except for the Saturday morning dusting and into kitchens barely large enough to hold their avocado green and harvest gold appliances, on the wall stood that rotary dial tattletale. My mom already knew where I was and who I was with because she, like every other mother in the neighborhood, had a network. Mrs. Dougherty, God rest her soul, had called my mother and told her that she saw me at the corner store.  She had noticed the stack of newspapers strewn on the floor by the Asteroids machine and correctly deduced that I was slacking off on the job.