1100 Reid St, Mil's House (the white one)
********************************************************
REMEMBERING OUR OLD NEIGHBORHOOD
********************************************************
It's no longer green anymore---that neighborhood where I grew up. (Maybe it's sort of a metaphor for our lives---we kids who grew up there. Most of us don't feel green anymore either.)
When it was new, and the houses just built, around 1940, every house had a nice green lawn, shrubs, and trees. The trees were mostly elms, the great shade tree of that period. My guess is that most of the elms were gone by the 70's, due to the elm disease which swept our country. Losing the big shade trees just about ruined the neighborhood.
We moved into our brand new two-bedroom home in late September of 1940. I was pretty small, and in the second grade. We had visited the house while it was under construction. It had plaster walls inside, not taped-and-bedded sheet rock as is the general custom today. It had the finest hard wood floors you can imagine, and I suspect after 73 years, they still look good today. It had a big floor furnace in the living room which kept the house nice and toasty.
I can still remember the first night when we moved in---the brand new varnish/plaster smell!
Early on, Dad planted elm trees out past the sidewalk toward the street; he planted shrubs and bushes, and some roses in the flower bed. And the biggie is that he wanted a clover lawn, so he planted what turned out to be about a 50/50 grass and clover lawn. Ir was a superb lawn for little kids to grow up with. It was soft but tough; it was fun to get it wet and slide on it. It smelled good. There was a "sink place" right at the corner of the house which we filled with water and played "Jap Zeros--Down In Flames," as we crashed there in summer--- WWII times, wearing our swimming trunks, of course.
With the record rainfall in the autumn of 1941, everything in Clovis was saturated. Water backed up from the old dry lake bed at the end of 14th Street---nearly all the way to the new Clovis Memorial Hospital. Some vacant lots were covered with water several inches deep. This moisture gave a tremendous boost to the new lawns and trees around the new neighborhood.
If that little house of ours could only talk...or maybe sing---the song might be "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," for you see, my dear, loving, and dedicated mother raised three little kids in that house, nursing them through colds, tummy naus, measles, mumps, and chicken pox. How she did it all, I don't know. She was also one of the best cooks in the world, and that house often was saturated with buttery country kitchen-cooking smells! There is a special place in heaven for mothers, I believe.
When I stayed home from school---"sick"---if I weren't too sick, I'd get out my Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and trucks, and dump them all in the living room floor on that marvelous varnished hardwood, and build all manner of things, and listen to KICA RADIO and Jack Bailey---at 1 p.m.---saying, "Would You Like To Be Queen For A Day?!" Mother would go and buy a carton of those great grape soda pops---Delaware Punches---good for sick kids because they had no fizz.
We had a one-car detached garage and a gravel driveway. As was the manner of many people in those days, we had a cow barn, cow lot, and a cow---even a horse for awhile. We had a chicken house, chicken pen, and rabbit hutches---all in the backyard---and all painted white. Dad milked the cow everyday and my job was to churn butter.
We had a Victory Garden every year--- a good one. My dad was a farm boy and he knew how to grow things. I was the official hoer and waterer of the garden. Also the pea picker.
We, and most of the residents of our neighborhood, did not have phones. Mrs. Purselly
did. (See the third house to the right in the photo; that's the Purselly house.) Mother would send me down to Mrs. Purselly's to borrow the phone and call my dad down at our laundry on West Grand. I was scared to death of it all. I was little. I'd say, when the operator said "number please?" "Er, 397." Then I'd say, "Dad, Mother says get a loaf of bread on the way home. Bye." People always put their phones in the hall in those days, and Mrs. Purselly's hall was very dark.
There were some interesting and handy vacant lots around the neighborhood. One was right north of Art and Bob's house at 1020 Thornton. (I met Art in the first grade at La Casita, then we moved near to them in 1940 and he and Bob became life-long friends with me and my brother, Bill.) We dug foxholes and fought WWII on that lot.
Another one was a block south on Reid from my house. As we got to early teen-age, we built a nice backstop for baseball on that lot...and they came! Heavy duty baseball players from all over town came, and practically took over our venue. after facing Cameron McTavish's curve balls, I nearly gave up baseball. Strangely, it never occurred to us that someone owned that lot. We didn't get permission---we just built our backstop with some "liberated" chicken wire!
We had a really special treat there in our old neighborhood. Priscilla Lane, a famous and beautiful movie star was married to a captain stationed at The Clovis Air Base, and they rented a house about halfway down the block from us. They were there a year or more. I used to see her coming and going down our street...and tried to show off on my roller skates.
Readers will know many of the kids who lived on our block on Reid. There was Donald Frederick, the Simms boys, the Barella boys, the Eubank sisters, Charles Rutledge, and down the street south lived Pat Lesperance. On the next street over lived Donald Mardis and Doug Ridley. The Ingall kids lived another street west. And of course, already mentioned, Art and Bobby Joe Snipes who lived one block east of us.
In a number of previous posts, I have already told you of our great fun and adventures in growing up. In this post I wanted to mention the old neighborhood...and please be kind to it in your judgements. It would look pretty good if people would just do a bit of landscaping!
My old home at 1100 Reid looks pretty well taken care of with a new stucco job and a new roof. I've been gone since '48.
If I could afford to buy the house today, and had ready cash, I would totally landscape it with trees all around, shrubs and roses, a paved driveway, a nice clover lawn, and gravel in front of the sidewalk next to the curb. Then I'd put a nice white picket fence all the way around it---to the alley. It is clearly--- a picket-fence-house. Such a faithful, marvelous, OLD FRIEND, deserves no less.
Maybe I'd even have an open house and invite old friends from around the neighborhood.
Mrs. Purselly is gone, as is Priscilla Lane. Donald Mardis passed away.The Timmons kids are both gone, and Pat Lesperance lives a way off in the east somewhere. Some of the others I don't know about. But "Country Boy Bob" will help me rustle up a crowd!
Before I invite anyone, I must go out to the fertile soil of our old backyard... and plant a garden!
1100 Reid, Backyard
Neighbor Houses Across the Street
L.: Eubank House
R. Barella House
All the above photos by Bobby Snipes
*******30*******
BY MIL
2/10/13
Sent from my iPad
No comments:
Post a Comment