My Childhood Homes

There were two things that made this week's prompt difficult to write:

1.  Trying to keep it short enough that readers wouldn't fall asleep

2.  Trying to find pictures that I know I have of these homes.  

I know I have scanned pictures of my grandparents' house, my first childhood home as it appears today, and I have pictures of my second home which I could have scanned if I could have found them.  It's important to be organized, and that definitely has never been one of my strong suits.

Here are the questions for Week #5:

• When did you leave home?
• Where was it?
• Where did you move to?
• Was it rented or owned? – with parents/Grandparents
• Was it inherited
• What was it like – describe it – each room.
• Were there a favourite room?
• Is there anything you particularly remember from the house?
• Pictures
• The road & area

I have what I consider to be two childhood homes,  the first one was in La Grande, Oregon, and was my home for the first seven years of my life.  The second was in Portland, the home my parents bought when I was 10 years old, and my home until I left it at age 19 ½, to get married.  The other homes I lived in, in between those years, were apartments, and for a brief time, with my grandmother.  Here’s my story.

We lived at 1001 11^th Street in La Grande, I am pretty sure it was from my birth till the fall of 1954, when we left La Grande and came to Portland.  For some reason I have always remembered this address, even though I was pretty young when we left.  I have pictures of myself and my brother when we were very young, in front of this house, as you see above.  So if we didn’t live here from my birth, it would have been some time shortly after.  I'm guessing my brother isn't quite a year old here, making me just past two in this picture.  Only because he was born in December, and we don't have heavy coats on.  I don’t remember anything of the interior of the house, nor do I have pictures of the inside of this house.  

It was a white house, and my guess is that it was also a two-bedroom house.  It had a cool porch, and I vaguely remember playing on the porch when it was raining.  We were the last house on the block, there was a sidewalk in front of it but not on the right (as you face the house) side of the house.  Across the street were more houses, and a great big hill!  At the top of this steep hill was Eastern Oregon College (now called Eastern Oregon University).  My grade school was also at the top of the hill, but we weren’t allowed to climb up the hill and cross the campus to get there, so I had to walk a few blocks before finding a street with a sidewalk that went up the hill, then backtrack to the street the school was on.  Kitty-corner to our house was a big white house surrounded by a lot of bushes and an overgrown huge lot.  We kids were afraid to go into this lot, not knowing what kind of critters lived there.  I don’t remember anything about the people who lived there, either.  Years later, when we returned to our old house to show our kids where I lived, it didn’t seem like this house and lot had changed any, although the “big” hill certainly shrunk a whole lot over the years.  I could not find the picture I took of the house as it is today, but if you go to Google Maps and type in "1001 11th St., La Grande OR, you'll see it as it is now.  Totally remodeled.  Doing a sweep of the area, the "scary" white house with the big lot is now red and the lot is less overgrown that I remember it.  Keep sweeping, and you'll get a view of the "steep" hill just to the left of the house across the street from us.  It doesn't look like there have been many changes to the other houses; the one across the street, which was home to my best friend Shirley Wilhelm, looks pretty much as I remember it. 

One Friday afternoon in October, when I was in the 2^nd grade, my father was supposed to pick me up from school.  He wasn’t there.  I waited around for a few minutes, but he never came.  That meant the long walk home, which I hated.  Often there were older boys who teased me all the way home, so I never looked forward to walking to or from school.  A neighbor usually drove their kids to and from school, and I was often able to catch a ride with them.  But this time I had missed them, so had to walk home alone.  I remember crying all the way home.  Little did I know that there was going to be plenty to cry about.

My father had deserted us.  I never knew whether he flat out left us with no word, or if he had words with my mother before leaving, but I can only remember seeing him a couple of times after that.  Mom’s family all lived in the Portland area, so that is where we found ourselves shortly after that.  I don’t remember how we got there. Mom didn’t drive, so I’m guessing we came on the train, like we did for so many summers to visit grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. 

Our next home was in Gresham, another suburb of Portland.  We lived in a basement apartment of a house next door to the library.  I continued my second grade career at West Gresham grade school.  When school was out, we moved out to my grandparents’ house, next door to an aunt and uncle near Boring (yes, there really is a town called Boring),   This house was unique in that there was no indoor plumbing—an outhouse served those needs, and there was a well.  Mom did not work during this time, I don’t know how we survived.  Either the kindness of aunts and uncles, or perhaps my father sent money to Mom.  Mom did not ever say much about him, and I wasn’t pushy enough to ask when I was older.  I hated the outhouse because of the smell and the flies, so whenever we were outside playing with our cousins, we would run into their house to use their bathroom when the need arose.

I started 3^rd grade and my brother started 1^st grade at Orient grade school after summer was over.  This didn’t last too long, as by Christmas vacation we found ourselves at another aunt and uncle’s house in Portland.  Mom came to us one night as she tucked us into bed to tell us she had a new job she’d be starting soon, at Montgomery Wards in NW Portland, and that we would be moving to another apartment.  She asked us which school we would rather go to—Chapman or Couch (pronounced “Kooch.”)  We opted for Chapman, and soon found ourselves living in the White House apartments, on 25^th & Thurman in NW Portland, and attending Chapman grade school.  It was a unique apartment, we went from an outhouse to sharing a bathroom with three other residents of the upper floor of the apartment.  This turned out fortuitous for mom.

There was a single man living on this floor, along with another single woman who had a son about our age.  As mentioned above, we shared a bathroom with all the residents of the upper floor.  One day, the single man left his socks in the bathroom.  Being that he was the only adult male in the building, other than the landlady downstairs and her teen-aged son, the socks could only belong to one person.   Mom took the socks back to our apartment, sewed them together, and hung them on his door.  This opened the door for their meeting, and eventual marriage when I was almost 9.  While he was officially our step-dad, I always considered him our father.  He always said “there are no ‘steps’ in this family,” and considered us his children, too.

We moved to a couple of other apartments after this one, since none of the apartments in the White House were big enough for all of us.  The summer before my 11^th birthday, the folks bought their first house.

It wasn’t a fancy house, but it was home—all ours.  No noisy neighbors, and we had a yard—we didn’t have to go to the local park to play outside.  The best part though, was that it was sort of out in the country.  Our neighborhood backed up to Forest Park, which is one of the largest parks within city limits in the United States.  There was a nearby creek where we could explore and catch crawdads.  Our house was a part of a small neighborhood, consisting of about 3 blocks.  At the time we lived there, it was pretty well kept up.  It was a semi-industrial area, too, and there were railroad tracks which saw lots of train traffic throughout the day and night. We soon got used to hearing the trains and feeling it shake the house.  There were neighbor kids to play with—some of them we already knew from school.  In fact, one of my best friends lived around the corner, although she and her family moved away after our first year in high school.  We were off a busy highway, with the bus stop close by so we could catch the city bus to school, and Mom could catch it to work. We had cats, we had dogs, we were happy here.  

The above picture was taken a couple of years ago.  Basically it looks the same, although when we bought the house it was gray. Later on we painted it green with red trim, and somewhere I have pictures of it in this color scheme.  My dad was a welder, and he welded a fence for the front, which is missing in this picture.  

After my mother died in 1981 Dad rented it out, then sold it, and it became gray again. 

Today the neighborhood isn’t what it used to be when we lived there.  Some of the houses have been torn down to make room for a fire station.  Most of the other houses are very run down.  Our old house was run down for a while, but the new owners are in the process of fixing it up.  We drove by earlier this summer and noted that new siding was being applied.  The yard still looks unkempt, but we’ll be checking back to see the progress.  When someone goes to re-side a house that is almost 90 years old, can the yard work be far behind?