ABSTRACT
An American minister of religion, resident on one of our subdivisions, wanted his neighbour to be ‘interested but not nosey, one who would be willing to share good fortunes or troubles but who is not in and out all the time’. This fear of many Americans has been dealt with in detail in the section on preserving privacy. We have shown that with many it is more fear than fact; few suffer actual invasion from their neighbours, and some actually would prefer more frequent contact with them. Residents who had come from smaller country towns or villages made this quite plain. One such expressed horror that the neighbours amongst whom he lived ‘would object if you dropped in when they were eating their dinner’. ‘What of it!’ he exclaimed. I can hear many Americans saying, ‘and so would I’, for in most neighbourhoods a visitor would be expected to telephone before doing so, even if he lived just across the street. Not so the country-bred American or, indeed, the telephone-less Englishman. This particular householder was seriously considering moving because he could not find the kind of neighbourliness to which he had been accustomed when he lived in a small town some 30 miles away where, incidentally, he was amongst people with whom he had lived and worked for many years. When he arrived on the new subdivision the neighbours across the street had welcomed him the first afternoon with a freshly-cooked pumpkin pie. This gesture he welcomed as admirable, but, although, subsequently, he had found his neighbours friendly ‘in the yard’, he had failed to persuade them to cross his threshold. He had himself entered their home on divers excuses but had met a blank wall whenever he had tried to develop the acquaintanceship farther. ‘People here are not socially minded,’ he remarked rather bitterly. The man himself was a member of a profession which is highly respected and he enjoyed an income slightly above the average for the subdivision. His manner was naturally easy and there appeared no obvious reason why his efforts to make friends should have been repulsed. On the same subdivision a homemaker from one of the western, prairie, states said that she, similarly, missed the kind of open friendliness she had known at home. She had tried hard by organizing parties for children and adults, several in her own home: these appeared to have been well attended, but reciprocal action just did not take place. On this better-class estate, occupied in the main by householders over 35 years, she had failed signally to recreate the habit of ‘dropping in’ she knew so well in her youth.
