Do you ever think about all the houses you have lived in? Or more
generally, all the addresses? I recently lay in bed at night going
through the list, visualizing the houses. And, yes, I actually do have
a list.
When I was in my early 20s, just starting my career, I was temporarily out of
work. I applied for a job at a company that held military
contracts. For the required background check, I was asked for the address
of every place I had ever lived to that point. Being a person who enjoys
working with details, and perhaps a little obsessive compulsive, I have added
to that list over time.
I started wondering if I could get pictures of
those addresses through Zillow, real estate listings, county assessors, or
Google Street View. What thoughts might be generated by seeing these
pictures? Were there memories related to particular places in the houses? And so it began.
In August 1940, my parents and sister moved to a new house at
635 South Spruce. I was born at 8:52 a.m. on October
7, 1940, making me a Libra and a “Breakfast Club” baby, named for Don McNeill's
Breakfast Club, a morning variety show on the radio. The house had 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom totaling 1,136 square
feet. A recent picture of the house shows that the garage in the picture of little me pushing a toy Donald Duck on a wheel in the early 1940s has since then been torn down.
The only
thing I remember about that house was a flood in the basement in the spring of
1944. Dirty water swirled around the unidentifiable objects floating in
it. Our house was near what came to be called “The Big Ditch,” a canal
built to divert the Arkansas River water around central Wichita before
rejoining the main body of the river downstream. The picture of the basement from a recent real
estate listing shows that a sump pump has now been installed.
Shortly after this flood in June 1944, we moved to 405 South Rutan St. It was the Wichita house I lived in the longest. My sister, Earlene, was nine
years old and started the 4th grade at Sunnyside Elementary. I was three years old and had to wait a year before I started kindergarten. This house also had 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom totaling 1,272 square feet.
Earlene and I shared the large upstairs bedroom located above the back of the house. We loved to crawl out our bedroom windows onto the roof. There was a charming short closet in our bedroom where we hung our clothes. I can remember helping my mother paint the lattice style wood framing around the glass in the folding doors at the top of the stairs.
There would have been clotheslines fastened to poles in the backyard. If it wasn’t rainy, the clothes were hung outside to dry. Otherwise, they were hung on clotheslines in the basement where the wash tubs and wringer washer machine were located. It was a physically demanding process. While I helped Mom with the laundry, we listened to the “Arthur
Godfrey Time” radio show. Earlene put on plays in the basement for neighborhood children. There were wooden storage shelves to hold all the fruits and vegetables our mother canned.
In the
mid 1950s we got a black and white TV. The first TV station near us didn't start broadcasting until 1953. One of the shows we watched was the “Hit Parade.” It was sponsored by
Lucky Strike cigarettes which was not uncommon at the time. The show featured Dorothy Collins, Russell
Arms, Snooky Lanson and Gisèle MacKenzie.
In 1957, I really enjoyed the popular hit “The Witch Doctor” (ooo eee
ooo ah ah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang), and in 1958, “The Purple People
Eater” (It was a one-eyed, one horned, flyin’ purple people eater). This was my generation's hip hop.
There were built-in bookcases on either side of the gas fireplace in the living room. A new grand piano fit perfectly in the big room. Earlene and I took piano lessons from the teacher across the street, Thelma Ragel. My friends and I played many board games including Monopoly and built structures using Tinker Toys, an Erector Set or Lincoln Logs in the living room.
The picture of the garage still shows a basketball goal like the one that I used. The garage housed my father’s 1902 Knox car.
In December 1956, after my sister’s June wedding, I moved with my parents to 239 South Parkwood Ln. It had 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and was larger totaling 2,668 square feet. I was very happy to have my own bathroom. The house had a family room upstairs and a finished room in half of the basement. This was my permanent address during my last year and a half of high school and four years of undergraduate college. My mother gave me a microscope and chemistry set that I kept on a workbench in the unfinished part of the basement which also had an old bed and rustic bathroom. My sister’s two sons stayed in the basement when they paid summer visits.
The finished portion of the basement was where my mother’s Extension Home Unit met to learn about and work on sewing or craft projects. There was a period when it seemed like the decoupaged items they made were everywhere. We played ping pong on the table that also served as a work surface at their meetings.
It should be noted that
each of my family’s moves took us farther east in Wichita. Homes trended
toward greater affluence in the Eastern direction. When my parents were
married in 1934, my father was already working in the floor covering business
that he subsequently bought and grew over the years. Mother and father
were a smart, ambitious, hard-working couple who did well financially.
This was their last house. My father died in a nursing home. My
mother had to move to an assisted living facility when she couldn’t walk
without the assistance of a walker or wheelchair, and this house could not
accommodate either.
In the fall of 1958, I headed to the University of Kansas in Lawrence for my freshman year. An addition had been built on the North end of Corbin Hall, and for a few years it was called North College. I loved my room on the back side of the building on the ground floor. It was the only year at KU during which I had a room to myself, something I had become accustomed to when Earlene left for college the year I started the 7th grade. I briefly lived there again during the summer of 1961 while I was in summer school.
North College (North Corbin)
My sophomore year, I shared a room with Roberta (or Bert) in Carruth-O’Leary, the first coed dorm on the KU campus. In the picture below, the rooms for the women were on the right side and the rooms for the men were on the left side. We shared the dining room and lounge in the basement.
Carruth-O’Leary Lewis Hall
My home during my last two years at KU was in Lewis Hall. At the time, it was on the very edge of campus. It was there that I met Karen and began my life of loving women.
