• John Ruane wrote memoirs of growing up Catholic on Chicago's southwest side
• He said baby boomers who grew up in the 1960s are often associated with hippies and drugs instead of their childhoods
• Ruane: Kids' busy lives today don't let them develop creativity and decision-making skills
• Students today agree lifestyles have changed, but kids have many of the same interests

This is second in the the Tribune's series "Gotta Have Faith," which explores different ways individuals express their faith.Drugs, hippies and the sexual revolution are often the first things associated with the 1960s. But there was also an often-forgotten culture full of family values and childhood innocence outside the decade's racier elements.

Baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 remember a very different world, said John Ruane, author of "Parish the Thought: An Inspirational Memoir of Growing up Catholic in the 1960s." In the book, Ruane chronicles growing up at Saint Bede the Venerable Parish in a mostly Irish-Catholic, working class neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side.

Ruane, who now lives in Roswell, Ga. with his wife and children, said he wrote the book because the childhood aspect of the boomer generation is overshadowed by other events of that era.

His family's Irish background was always prevalent. His father was an Irish immigrant and his mother was from an Irish family. When his mother and father died while he was in college, members of the Irish community helped him and his older sister take care of his younger siblings. Now, Ruane and his wife make sure their children know about their Irish heritage.

"They need to know what their roots were and where they came from, who they are," he said.

Childhood is different now, he said.

"Kids in grammar schools today are being stressed out by the amount of work they have to accomplish under a certain timeline," he said.

Music lessons, gymnastics and soccer practice have replaced the afternoons of milk and cookies and baseball in the street he experienced, Ruant said.

For safety reasons, parents aren't able to give their children the same freedom that he had growing up, Ruane said. That has its benefits, he said, because he and his friends often found their way into trouble, as he wrote in his book. But the downside of restricting kids' playtime is that they don't develop the same decision-making skills or out-of-the-box thinking that his generation learned from creating new ways to spend their free time. That creativity helped him create his own lifestyle, coaching youth sports and starting his own public relations company, Ruane Communications, he said.

Jim Love, a Saint Bede the Venerable alumni and student at the same high school Ruane attended, said he agrees expectations for students are very high, especially for ACT scores. But even though lifestyles have changed, Love said kids today enjoy many of the same things their parents did. Opportunities for kids to join new activities and less traditional sports like rugby and lacrosse are appearing, he said, but everyone enjoys non-organized sports, too.

"It's more freedom," he said. "It's just you and your friends."

The best thing about growing up in his parish is the solid community he experienced.

"When I was a kid I don't think we ever left church on time," he said, because he and his family were always stopped by other parishioners for a chat.

Love said living on the south side of Chicago is a unique experience, and people who live there form permanent bonds with the area.

"I feel like my roots are here," he said.

Another author, John Powers, wrote several books in the 1970s that are memoirs of his own experiences growing up on the south side of Chicago.

"Until you start traveling around the country you don't realize how interesting the south side is to grow up in," he said.

Many Chicagoans, even non-Catholics, identify themselves by the parish they live in, he said, which is rare in other places in the country.

"Everything revolved around the parish," he said. "Your religion really defined the world."

Like Ruane, he said a big difference between kids from his childhood and today is the level of parental control over their children's free time.

He said he once told a teacher there should be a law that there should be no school on nice days. The teacher said, "What if they're all nice days?" He said he replied thoughtfully, "I could live with that."