Growing up in Bend in the 1950s and early ’60s felt like “Leave It to Beaver” — lots of kids, many stay-at-home moms and an aura of innocence that made it a great place for all those kids. Bend resident Sue A. Fountain captures the community and the era well in her “Too Cold to Snow,” a memoir of growing up in Bend.

I’ve known Fountain for years — more than 50 of them, in fact. She was a couple of years ahead of me in school — a nearly insurmountable distance when one of you is 15 and the other 17. When we were in high school, she was one of the “cool” senior girls, at least from my perspective as a sophomore in a building that had no freshman class. She had a Pep Club sweater, which I don’t think sophomores were entitled to, among other things.

Fountain’s book is small, a series of essays rather than a plotted story, and it’s a format well suited to her subject.

Bend was a small town, its population less than 12,000, when Fountain and I grew up — she on Broadway Street and I on Trenton Avenue. Her father was a millwright at the Brooks-Scanlon mill, and while we must have been at both Kenwood School and Bend Junior High School at the same time, it wasn’t until we were in high school that I really became aware of her.

That said, it’s remarkable — to me at least — how much her childhood memories mirror my own, from the ice skating at Troy Field to the fact that winters were measurably more snowy than they have been in recent years. And that some days it was, as her title says, too cold to snow.

Though neither Sue nor I understood the phrase at the time, I found an explanation recently that makes sense: The clearer the sky, the cooler the temperature can be in winter, what with no insulating blanket of clouds to hold in the previous day’s heat. Thus a starry, clear night is likely to be very cold, indeed, too cold to snow.

Fountain writes about all the things that made Bend special, at least to its children. The Tower Theater, with its Saturday matinee of cartoon serial episodes and one or two movies, plus 5-cent suckers big enough to last the entire show. The ability to go anywhere, on foot, day or night, was another.

And the kids, baby boomers in the earliest years of the boom, who assured that almost no child in town was without a neighbor to play outside with on a Saturday afternoon. In my neighborhood, all within a half a block of our house, there were more than a dozen children my age or thereabouts.

That’s critical mass for a game of “traffic cop and drivers” on bicycles under street lights on a summer evening, more than enough for a good game of Red Rover (Red Rover, send Peggy right over) and more than enough to spend an afternoon working to build a bomb shelter in the empty lot behind my house. It was, after all, the 1950s, when kids my age really were terrified at the prospect of nuclear war.

Fountain marks the beginning of the community’s lost innocence in Bend as Feb. 2, 1962, when high school senior Judi Reeder was murdered and dumped under the footbridge in Drake Park. It was a Friday night, and cold, and the young woman’s body was discovered the next morning by a couple out for a stroll.

As it did with Fountain, that murder, which is still unsolved, impressed me as little else had at the time. That a girl in school in our town could come to such an end just didn’t seem possible — or even real. And I suspect that mothers across Bend were a little less willing to let their girls go out by themselves after dark, at least for a time.

Bend didn’t change overnight, of course, but that murder was the beginning of a shift that we old Bend residents don’t always like. It was wonderful growing up here when we did. We had friends, space and plenty of things to do, generally outdoors. Life was untroubled and innocent, and often just plain fun.

Fountain’s book, by the way, is available at Amazon.com.