Whenever I run into someone who grew up on Chestnut Street during the 1940s through the 1950s, I notice they wear that childhood street like a badge — as if they’d grown up next to the rollercoaster at Midway.

That’s because Chestnut Street was a kingdom unto itself — a little kingdom of kids who had forty backyards to run through, and parents living in houses who made good Swedish cookies and bought televisions sets. They had trees and fields and sidewalks and they had each other.

Someone once counted the number of kids living on Chestnut Street back then and they counted more than 60.

My mother was one of those sixty kids and my whole life, I’ve been hearing stories about that street. The stories are told with such warmth and enthusiasm by everyone who lived there, it seems to me they hold the same sort of notoriety as when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Chestnut Street was a special place to the people who lived there then because it captured a time in America that now seems extraordinary. So many kids! So many games! So much freedom! The kids and their parents formed their own nucleus of warmth and familiarity there.

Today those memories tell a sweet story about what so many of us remember and long for — a more innocent time in America when a quarter was an acceptable allowance and parents were the paragons of moral values.

At 75, my mom can still go up and down the street in her mind and name all the families: Moynihan, Ottoway, Westrom, Lyons, Betty Lou’s family, the Anderson’s, and on and on until she’s exhausted her memory somewhere down near the end of the street, where the fields once grew.

“It was more fun than should have been allowed,” my mother says. “We would just play all day and night. One game we liked was the Civil War. We bought Union and Confederate costumes at a store downtown with hats and rifles. And we’d battle all the way up and down the street, through everyone’s yards. And there was hide and seek and kick the can and dodge ball.”

But perhaps the thing those 60 kids remember most is the cookies at the Lyon’s house.

“I’d kill for one of those,” my mother tells me. “Mrs. Lyons’ mother lived with them and the two of them made cookies like you’d find in a bakery — even better.”

What more does a neighborhood need than a Swedish cookie maker?

Apparently a TV ranked pretty high, too.

“The Colby’s were the first family to get a television set. They were so nice. We’d line up on their front porch everyday at 4 until they let us in to see the Howdy Doody Show.”

Picturing the neighborhood kids lining up to watch TV in the Colby’s living room is incredibly endearing, especially in light of the fact that kids play video games on flatscreen television sets for whole days at a time now, but before I can lament the perils of modern life, she’s telling me about the first time she ate pizza.

“I think it was one of the days we were watching Howdy Doody, Mrs. Colby walked in with this big tray and it sort of looked like a pie,” my mom remembers. “And when we asked her what is was she told us it was pizza. We’d never heard of pizza. She’d gotten the recipe off a Bisquick box and we all went crazy over that. Then we all went home and made our mothers go out and buy Bisquick to make us pizza.”

It seems to me that the Colby’s brought a lot of interesting things to that neighborhood.

My mother’s family seemed to have brought the only negative light to these happy stories by way of their dog — a known milk thief.

After the milkman came around, the dog would go from house to house and pop off the tinfoil seal on the milk bottles and drink all of the neighbors’ milk.

I tell her if that’s the only sad neighborhood story she can conjure up, that’s a good thing.

But then she tells me that once while conducting the yearly circus in Lizzie Anderson’s garage for the neighborhood parents (it cost a nickel to get in), my mom fell off the trapeze and hit her head on the concrete.

And that was the end of the Greatest Show On Earth on Chestnut Street.

To all the folks who grew up on Chestnut, and all the streets like it, I say good for you. What a lovely way to have grown up, safe in the watchful arms of a small street in a small town in America.

My mother’s happiest memories spring from the well of goodness there.