My Childhood House - Fond Memories

In my last post, I mentioned that my grandfather came from California to help my father finish the second floor of our house. They had put up the drywall to form the walls of the bedroom and a closet before my grandfather had to leave. Shortly afterwards, Marvin Stromgren came to live with us for a while.

I thought that he may have been a relative or a friend of my father's. He moved into the unfinished room upstairs for a while. It didn't seem like he was there for a very long time. Marvin had recently been discharged from the Army or Marine Corps as he had a uniform and a wool dark green blanket when he came. I think that he was in the service during the Korean Conflict.

As I was composing this post, I actually didn't know how Marvin and my dad knew each other. I did a little snooping on Ancestry.com. From the bits and pieces of information that I found, it looks like Marvin was a friend and not a relative. That's another story.

After Marvin's stay ended and before Dad had a chance to work on finishing the second floor, my brothers engaged in a game of dodge ball upstairs. That game ended with a large hole near the floor in the drywall on one side of the room. I remember that we tried to tell our dad that a huge mouse was in the attic and made the hole.

My brother and I were consigned to the unfinished bedroom after Marvin left. We apparently were not very good at getting to bed and staying there. My dad was a very astute person and decided to turn the story into one that worked for him. He said that a huge mouse may have made the hole in the wall, but it was the bear who lived in the attic that was now the problem. He told us that the bear would come out when one of us got out of bed before morning.

My dad sometimes miscalculated things. I started to wet the bed because I was too afraid to get out of bed at night because of that bear in the attic. Since bears are afraid of light according to my dad, he installed a low wattage light (today called a night light) so I could feel free to get up to go to the bathroom. My dad had an explanation why the bear wouldn't come out when I went to the bathroom vs. when I was being a problem child. Dad tried!

That house had gable in front with an air vent. Even before my dad put up the drywall there was a trap door to access the gable. As kids we would pull down the trap door and get into the gable. The small vent would allow us to see the outside of our front yard. My brothers and I would pretend that we were in a rocket ship and that we were looking down at earth.

Minnesota summers are hot and humid. After my father finished off half of the basement into a rec-room, I found myself spending most summers in the basement reading when I wasn't in some lake. The basement was the only cool place in the house.

After the rec-room was finished, we started to have Christmas Eve dinner at our house. By that time my mother's sister and her family moved from New York to Minnesota and my mother's brother and his family moved from Chicago to Minnesota. So now Christmas Eve was at our house in our basement. At that point, the Christmas Tree was put in the basement. Up to that time, our tree was set up in the living room.

The last time that I remember the tree in the living room was the year that my parents got us cardboard bricks and enclosed the entire doorway to the living room with these bricks. Mom and Dad apparently spent much of the night of Christmas Eve assembling the cardboard bricks and setting them into the door way in hopes that we would take enough time to get through the barricade to allow them some sleep. The lesson I took away from this memory...Don't under estimate your kids.

Thinking about our house also reminds me of our neighbor, Rosie Bryant. She had the most beautiful flower garden in her backyard. My dad had planted a vegetable garden in our yard, but I was entranced by Rosie's flowers. My dad let me have a small plot, about 2 by 3 feet in our small backyard. Rosie helped plant my garden each year and my tiny garden was always beautiful.

That little house has so many fond memories for me. It was hard to leave it.

The Basement House

The reporting of the terrible tornado that devastated a community near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma brought to mind root cellars. If you watched the Wizard of Oz movie with Judy Garland, her aunt and uncle took shelter in the root cellar as a tornado was approaching. I remember visiting relatives who lived on farms having root cellars.

The root cellar was under the house and access was from outside. They were not very deep, but deep enough to store vegetables. Most had a dirt floor. In the days of root cellars, they served an additional function, that of a storm cellar.

My parents bought a house in the city. Like all the houses on my street, we had a basement. I am not sure, but I think that city houses had basements to accommodate the furnace that was used to heat the house. Our house had a huge gas furnace but the older houses must have had coal burning furnaces because a couple of the old houses in my neighborhood had coal chutes from a small window at ground level into the basement below. I can't recall visiting a house in Minneapolis that didn't have a full basement.

Not all of my friends and relatives had lived in an above ground house. Some lived for a short time in a basement house. Instead of buying an existing house, the family purchased the land and built their own house. The first step was making the basement and foundation for the eventual house.

It usually took a few years to complete the entire house. Once the basement was complete, some families moved into the basement. When the main floor was finished, the family moved up to the main floor.

The basement house had a distinct appearance. It was a small structure on with a door. I remember these so distinctly that I was certain there would be a photograph on the Internet. I was surprised to find almost none. It seems now a basement house has a new meaning.

This was the only image that I could find of the entrance of a basement house like those of my childhood.





 

My Childhood House -- So Huge Yet So Small

It was many years that I last saw the house where I lived until I was twelve. In my memory, it was a big house with a big backyard. I was married with children when I saw my house next. Oh my! How very tiny!

The exterior of the house wasn't much different from when we moved. Most changes were in the landscape. The lilac bush that stood near the street on the left side of the yard was gone.

The tree near the front of the house to the left of the walkway was gone as well. I wasn't surprised as it was struck by lightning about a month before we moved. A portion of the tree was split from the tree so I expect that the tree didn't survive the next winter.

The tree on the right side of the walkway was still there. My father and I visited his uncle's farm one day and came home with a sapling. It was the first tree in our yard. When we moved, the trunk of that tree wasn't much more than 5 inches in diameter. How it had grown!

The next time that I saw the house was 10 years later. The exterior was quite different. The fake stone façade was removed and new windows installed. The poor little house looked quite plain.

When my sister and I visited the house in 1991, we did not see if the residents were at home. When we visited the house in 2001, she knocked on the door. The son of the current owner was home and invited us in to see the house.

We learned that his parents bought the house from our parents. They had not enlarged it or appreciably remodeled it other than adding a deck behind the house. The huge old furnace in the basement had been replaced by a much smaller, modern one. I remember that it seemed to take up a large portion of the basement on one side of the staircase. As my sister and I walked through the house, we couldn't image how 8 people fit in that house.

About a year ago, I saw the house again. I don't know if the people who owned it in 2001 were the current owners, but whoever owned the house had made a number of improvements to the exterior and the landscaping. I am really sorry that the fake stone façade was removed. But the red door and the shutters on the windows really help make the little cute again.

I am hoping that the interior was updated too.

Most of the houses on our side of the street looked like this house. We called them Monopoly houses because they were shaped just like the green houses in a Monopoly game. They were built after World War II to support the baby boom. When my parents bought this house, it had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, a kitchen, a basement and an attic.

The front door opens to the living room, which is on the right of the photo. The window on the left side of the door is in the master bedroom. The second bedroom is behind it. Behind the living room is a staircase to the attic. The kitchen is on the other side of staircase. Below this staircase is one to the basement and is accessed from the kitchen. The bathroom is located between the rear bedroom and the kitchen.

As our family grew in size, my father finished half of the basement into a recreation room, sometimes called a rumpus room. One year, my grandfather came from California to help my dad turn the attic into another bedroom with storage space.

That house holds a lot of fond memories.