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"Anybody Home?" The suburbanite has been prodded, poked, gouged, sniffed and tweaked by armies of sociologists and swarms of cityside cynics, but in reality he is his own best critic. Organized suburban living is a relatively new invention, and already some of its victims are wondering if it has too much organization and too little living. The pressure of activity and participation in the model suburb of Lakewood, for example, can be harrowing. The town's recreation league boasts no boys' baseball teams (2,000 players), 36 men's softball teams, ten housewives' softball teams. In season, the leagues play 75 boys' and 30 men's basketball teams, 77 football teams, all coached by volunteers, while other activities range through drama, dance and charm classes, bowling, dog-training classes, "Slim 'n' Trim" groups, roller skating, photography, woodcraft, and lessons in how to ice a cake. Says Joy Hudson, 35, mother of three children: "There is a problem of getting too busy. Some weeks my husband is home only two nights a week. My little boy often says, 'Anybody going to be home tonight?' " Suburbia, echoed Exurbanite Adlai Stevenson (Libertyville, Ill.) recently, is producing "a strange half-life of divided families and Sunday fathers."
The parental press to keep the youngsters busy has created an image of an Organization Child, or Boy in the Grey Flannel Sneakers. The thriving Cub Scout movement is a wondrous machine of 1,822,062 beanie-capped boys who visit fire stations, make kites and tie knots, all en masse, and the Little League has more than a million little sports who are cheered on by an equal number of overexuberant daddies. "Some kids," says Long Island School Psychologist Justin Koss, "need the Little League. But some need to dig in their own backyards, too. The trouble is that plenty of parents think that if their kid isn't in Little League, there's something abnormal about him." Declares Shirley Vandenberg, 33 (three children), of Portland, Ore.'s suburban Oak Grove: "We don't need Blue Birds and Boy Scouts out here. This is not the slums. The kids out here have the great outdoors. I think people are so bored, they organize the children, and then try to hook everyone else on it. And then the poor kids have no time left to just lie on their beds and daydream." Says Jean Chenoweth (two teen-age children), who moved to a Denver house from the suburbs: "Parents do nine-tenths of the work. I had a Blue Bird Group for three years, and we never accomplished a cotton-picking thing—they just came for the refreshments as far as I could see." Making her choice, Mrs. Chenoweth devotes her spare time to fund raising for a school for handicapped children and making recordings for the blind.