This from special guest contributor Eric Burnsee from Dixie Chopper.
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Growing up in an idyllic Chicago suburb in the 1950s and ’60s, it was second nature to embrace the experience of well-manicured lawns.
But those gloriously green bastions of suburbia were not our homage to the American Dream as much as they were the infields of our whiffleball parks and the end zones of our front-yard football fields.
As we pause to reflect on the arrival of April — National Lawn Care Month — we realize those lawns of those Wonder Years and Happy Days eras represented the confluence of social changes at work in postwar America. Not only was a neat, green lawn a symbol of the suburban social class but also a sign of conformity, diligence and family values.
On the melting pot that was our block back in the day, the lawns in front of our two-story georgian homes were as varied as they were pampered.
Next door, at the Tamaraz home, the sprinkler always seemed to be going, wetting our sidewalk and blacktop driveway that doubled as our whiffleball batter’s box as much and as often as the greenery on their side of the property line.
Across the street, the Botts ringed their yard with neatly trimmed hedges that we longed to usurp for a pseudo-ivy-covered outfield wall for our whiffleball park. But true to Mr. Bott’s stern nature, no baseball or football games were every played in those unfriendly confines — although I do remember we once found a handgun under one of his evergreens, a weapon stashed by a robber who held up a jewelry shop around the corner.
On the other side of us, the Mazzei family had the lushest lawn on the block, a layer of green that felt ever cool to the touch, even after the hottest of kiddom days. Fawn, their German Shepherd, liked to lie in the shade on our side of their garage, enjoying nature’s doublemint twins of cool air and cool grass.
Directly across the street the Balons paid the least attention to their lawn. The father worked late hours and the two teenage sons were more preoccupied with cars, boats and girls than lawnmowers. So we always knew whenever their yard work was in progress, ours would not be far behind. No, we weren’t keeping up with the Jones, just the Mazzeis and the Ahrs.
Ah, Mr. Ahr. In our neighborhood, he was the most obsessed with his lawn. Often we would look down the street and spot him on his hands and knees, crawling along, plucking dandelions or crabgrass out by the roots.
Americans still love a good lawn. And today, 40-50 years later, U.S. lawn care is a $40 billion industry and some 58 million home lawns could cover a lawn mass essentially the size of Florida. Some 46.5 million acres of grass under cultivation in the U.S. are more than any other single crop, including corn, wheat and tobacco.
Taking care of a lawn, of course, is hard work, and many homeowners have turned to professional cutters to groom their yard. And helping make the perfect lawn possible, whether by homeowner or commercial cutter, are technological advances in weed whackers, leaf blowers and zero-turn riding mowers.
Art Evans of Dixie Chopper didn’t invent the zero-turn mower as much as perfect it. But when he spotted one at the Indiana State Fair in the 1970s, he knew then and there how people would be mowing their grass in the future.
Well, that future is here as Americans strive to mow faster and better, preferring to spend their spare time on the golf course or at the fishing hole rather than sweating in their yard.
And because of mowers like the Dixie Chopper — which can cut up to 8.7 acres an hour with as much as a 50 horsepower engine and a 72-inch cut — homeowners are able to do just that.
Just don’t tell Mr. Ahr. I’d hate to have him think all that crawling around his front yard was for the birds.
Marketers are working to give a healthier glow to many products perceived as not so good for you by increasingly nutrition-conscious consumers.
