rstrack@tnonline.com

We often hear that life was better “back in the day.”People say growing up in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s was the best when kids kept their innocence until they were well into their teenage years.For some, though, the good old days were not so good.Johnny, the kid next door in my old neighborhood, twitched his head back and forth whenever I talked to him.I thought it was a nervous condition until I found out the truth. His father would smack him across the face so often that Johnny could not stop the twitching even when he wasn’t getting hit.No one raised an eyebrow then. We all would trade stories at the playground about how our fathers would beat us.“Wait until your father gets home!” was the cry from our mothers.“Go in your room and get ready for a beating’” was the cry from our fathers.There were other scary stories, too.When my sister was 6 years old, she would walk to and from school following an older girl who lived near us.One day the girl wasn’t there to follow after school. As my sister walked home alone, a man jumped out from a building, grabbed her and carried her into a basement.As she cowered in the dark in terrifying fear for hours, the man told her how they were going to live a happy life together. He would take her places and he would take care of her.My sister asked for a glass of water. While he left the basement, she found the door and ran as fast as she could.It was dark by the time she arrived home. My father had already returned from work.“Where have you been so long?” was the question asked.My sister cried through every detail of her story.“You better be more careful next time,” they said. “Look what you’ve put us through, waiting for you to come home.”My sister was blamed for what happened, and my parents, who were not evil people, did nothing about the kidnapping.I think they would have felt ashamed or embarrassed if anyone found out.“Make sure you never, ever tell anyone about this,” they told my sister before she went to bed that night.Here’s one more from back in the day.Down the street lived a large, extended family in a small house. We had heard that a little girl living there was “fooled around with” by her uncle. At our young ages, we didn’t quite know what that meant.“Mary Ann” would come to the park on summer afternoons looking sad. She never talked much so we paid little attention to her because we were there to have fun.Years later, a friend of mine ran into her in a grocery store. He said that Mary Ann had told her mother about what her uncle was doing to her, but her mother told her that it wasn’t true, that she must have been making it all up.“No one is going to believe such nonsense,” said her mother.Child beating, kidnapping and sex abuse were largely swept under the carpet in “the good old days.”Before 1970, official reports of child abuse were as infrequent as were arrests for perpetrators of domestic violence.“People also worried if they said anything, they could ruin someone’s life,” says Maia Christopher, an executive director of a child abuse center.Failing to convince the child that it didn’t happen or the abuser didn’t mean to do it left the innocent victim with a lifetime of emotional scars.Before my sister died three years ago, she was still afraid to walk anywhere by herself.Johnny, my childhood neighbor, became an abusive parent himself after climbing inside whiskey bottles for the last four years of his life.Mary Ann had to recover from drug addiction and two suicide attempts.It’s a good possibility that someone we know holds on to a dark and painful secret from those good old days of stolen innocence.This victim is now past 60 years of age, but inside his or her heart, a child’s voice still cries out for help that no one will ever hear.Rich Strack can be reached at

katehep11@gmail.com