As a schoolkid I had two basic ways of getting around Falls Church:  By foot and on bicycle.  

I walked everywhere, usually accompanying my mother, when I was a pre-schooler.  The center of Falls Church – the movie theater, the five-and-dime store, the drugstore (with a soda fountain) and the hardware store (still then a general store) and the bank – the intersection of Broad and Washington Streets, was about one mile from my house.  So was our church (the Falls Church Presbyterian Church), where both my mother and grandmother were Sunday School teachers (in addition to being school teachers).  

And Madison Elementary school was only a few blocks up North Washington from that central intersection, and easily reached via East Columbia Street.  I walked to them all.  I was intimately familiar with the routes I walked daily.  World War II was still ongoing when I started first grade at Madison, and I visually scoured the roadsides for paper and other items then being collected for government conservation drives.

I was midway through first grade when my family gave me a bicycle.  But I didn’t know how to ride it.  I was friends with a boy a couple years older than I, who lived a half block away.  He was athletic and we worked out a method for us both getting to school on my bike:  He peddled and I was a passenger, riding the bar between the handlebars and the seat.  On the steeper hills, we both dismounted and walked, pushing my bike.   By the end of the year my friend had grown tired of this and taught me how to ride my bike on my own.  He was a good friend.

After that, I bicycled everywhere within a radius of a mile or two.  I usually headed to the drugstore (Ware’s) for a hot dog and a Coke, and browsed the comic book rack.  But the five-and-dime (Robertson’s) also had a comics rack and sold hot dogs and Cokes. I couldn’t go wrong.

In 1951 RKO Pictures released “The Thing From Another World.”  By then I had become a dedicated reader of science fiction and I knew this movie was based on John W. Campbell’s story, “Who Goes There,” which I found in an anthology (in the Falls Church public library) and read before going to the State Theater to see the movie.

The movie was a blend of science fiction and horror, dealing with an alien creature whose spaceship crashed in the arctic and left the alien frozen in a block of ice.  When it is thawed, bad things happen.  The genius of the director (Christian Nyby) was to show very little of the alien – just quick glimpses that suggested more than they showed – creating a remarkably scary movie.  Especially for a 13 year old kid.

For that reason, I agreed to see the movie a second time, a day or two later, with a friend from school.  He had heard about the movie and he wanted company.  And after the movie – it was a weeknight and after dark – he told me he was scared to go home alone.  Would I ride with him to his house?  He lived in Greenway Downs – the opposite direction from the State than my home.  Reluctantly, I agreed.  The ride home, alone, at least two miles and maybe longer, was probably the longest and least pleasant bicycle ride of my young life.