THE VERDICT:A strolling stone gathers no moss

Walking as a means of transportation seems to be a thing of the past. I grew up in a family of walkers. My father walked to work. My mother walked to the store or to church. I walked to school.

When I lived on the Balboa Peninsula, I walked from there to the 14th Street Grammar School in Newport. Jimmie Van Trees, Albert Spencer and I walked that two miles every day, rain or shine. On the way home, we walked along the beach and picked up soft shell sand crabs, which we sold for 10 cents a strawberry box to the fishermen on the Balboa Pier. A dime split three ways wasn’t much, but it gave a certain commercial zest to walking.

When we moved to Maywood, I walked to Huntington Park High School, a distance of about five miles. Again, I remember the kids I walked with — Bob Brown and Lawrence Livermore. I remember them because we were all on the Class “C” swimming team, and during the swimming season, we walked home in the dark dodging occasional cars because there were no sidewalks.

When I went to college, walking to school was a piece of cake — a mere couple of miles to the Central Manufacturing District to pick up the V streetcar, which went by the USC campus.

Today, the very idea of walking to school is considered un-American. If their parents don’t drive them, kids are picked up by school buses, and those buses better pick them up close to home, or school officials will hear about it.

As for me, I probably walk as much as I ever have. Part of that is because I no longer drive, so if I want a quart of milk or a pound of ground round, I have to hoof it to the market. Part of it is because I have a dog that loves to eat, and if she doesn’t get her exercise, she begins to resemble the Hindenburg.

She is not an enthusiastic walker. Most dogs see the leash and come bounding. She sees the leash and crawls under a chair, and even after she’s coaxed outside, our “walk” is a rather leisurely thing. Every blade of grass is worthy of examination, and it can take the better part of an hour to go around the block, not that you could tell it from her. When we get home, she collapses on the rug like one of those people finishing the Iron Man. You’d think we’d walked from Corona del Mar to Laguna instead of from Shore Cliffs to the Five Crowns.

You couldn’t tell it from my dog, but I think walking may be coming back. Go to Ocean Boulevard in Corona del Mar any time of day, and you see people walking. There are the workout walkers who march along with all the seriousness of Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guard, eyes ahead, arms pumping. There are the amblers who stop every hundred yards or so to gaze out at the ocean. Whatever pace they set, they’ve all discovered that walking is an excellent way of getting someplace.