You ever walk along the sidewalk and notice those little imprints that have the contractor name and year the concrete was poured? I thought I was the only one interested in those.

Our neighborhood is full of “J&B / 2018” prints from when they replaced dozens of slabs, but on a side street I found a “Halloran / 1959” stamp that’s original to when the first houses came in. I assumed I’d have no one to share my excitement with.

Then I got on the internet. And there are hundreds of us, maybe thousands!

There’s the Sidewalk Stamps Facebook group; some people have Pinterest pages; but the main hangout is Duane’s forum, which is the top result when you google that sort of thing. He has really helped the community grow. We have photos from New York that go back to the 1800s!

The forum is big enough to have some off-topic threads: cars, sports, movies, and so on. The biggest subgroup is FNPH, and we sometimes joke about Sidewalk Stamps becoming an FNPH forum. It’s a political topic, which can easily overrun a forum, but Duane and his mods have done a great job of keeping things civil. His view is that they don’t need to push ideas into someone’s face. Instead, just plant some seeds and let things grow.

To be honest I was totally against it at the beginning and feared for what might happen to our hobby. But after a while, it seemed to make more and more sense. Of course females are people, biologically. But if they are not legally, then a lot of problems in our society just disappear. That’s the main thing. And there is a lot of resistance at first, so you can’t go all Westboro Baptist on the rest of the world. How good did that turn out for them?

Slow and steady is the way to go. We won’t fix things in a day, or a month, or a year, or even five years. But we have FNPH-friendly ordinances in 23 cities now, and what’s really exciting is the Sidewalk Party candidate for Missouri governor, who has led a poll for the first time. People see “Sidewalk” and might think of earlier times, pleasant neighbors, and so on, but the origin for that is our group! That’s really cool.

Duane says if we win enough key elections in the next few years, we can get to a point where we won’t need elections anymore. That would be awesome. So there’s an extra spring in my step these days as I stroll down the sidewalk, looking for new reminders of an older, better America.