Kamala Harris’s Childhood Homes
With twenty-two more days to go until the presidential election, and given that Kamala Harris’s 60th milestone birthday falls on October 20th, it seemed fitting to write about her childhood home, or I should say homes, for this month’s newsletter. By the age of seven, she had lived in three different places in West Berkeley, California.
Kamala was born in Oakland to parents Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, immigrants from India and Jamaica respectively, who met each other at the University of California, Berkeley. Shyamala became a breast cancer researcher and Donald was an economist who taught at Stanford for decades, and both parents were deeply involved in the civil rights movement. For most of Kalama’s childhood, her parents were renters; their first home was at 2531 Regent St. (see photos below), her second home was in an apartment building at Milvia Street and Berkeley Way, and her third home was at 1227 Bancroft Way. She writes fondly about all three homes in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold.”
“Those early days were happy and carefree. I loved the outdoors, and I remember that when I was a little girl, my father wanted me to run free. He would turn to my mother and say, ‘Just let her run, Shyamala.’ And then he’d turn to me and say, ‘Run, Kamala. As fast as you can. Run!’ I would take off, the wind in my face, with the feeling that I could do anything. (It’s no wonder I also have many memories of my mother putting Band-Aids on my scraped knees.)
Music filled our home. My mother loved to sing along to gospel—from Aretha Franklin’s early work to the Edwin Hawkins Singers. She had won an award in India for her singing, and I loved hearing that voice. My father cared about music just as much as my mother. He had an extensive jazz collection, so many albums that they filled all the shelving against one of the walls. Every night, I would fall asleep to the sounds of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, or Miles Davis. . . By the time I was five years old, the bond between them had given way to incompatibility. They separated shortly after my dad took a job at the University of Wisconsin, and divorced a few years later. They didn’t fight about money. The only thing they fought about was who got the books.
My parents often brought me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches. I have a memory of a sea of legs moving about, of the energy and shouts and chants. Social justice was a central part of family discussions. My mother would laugh telling a story she loved about the time when I was fussing as a toddler. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, trying to soothe me. ‘Fweedom!’ I yelled back.”
Kamala was seven years old when her parents divorced in 1972.
The third home, on Bancroft Way, is a yellow two-flat where Shyamala, Kamala, and her sister Maya lived upstairs from a nursery school. They resided there for seven years until her mother could afford to buy their own home. “I was a teenager when the day finally came,” Kamala writes in her memoir, “and I can still remember how excited she was.”
In the 1970s, West Berkeley was known as a close-knit neighborhood populated by hard working, middle-class families. Since Shyamala’s job was demanding of her time and attention, most of their conversations took place in the kitchen while she prepared dinner. “When Maya and I were kids, our mother sometimes used to serve us what she called ‘smorgasbord.’ She’d use a cookie cutter to make shapes in pieces of bread, then lay them out on a tray with mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, and fancy toothpicks. In between the bread slices, we’d put whatever was left in the refrigerator from the previous nights of cooking. It took me years to clue in to the fact that ‘smorgasbord’ was really just ‘leftovers.’ My mother had a way of making even the ordinary seem exciting.”
When school was out for the day, Kamala and Maya spent time at the nursery school downstairs from their apartment. Those times were filled with laughter and play. The woman who ran the program, Mrs. Shelton, became like a second mother to the girls and was devoted to getting the neighborhood children off to the best possible start in life. Kamala writes, “Though the seed was planted very early on, I’m not sure when, exactly, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. . . I cared a lot about fairness, and I saw the law as a tool that can help make things fair. But I think what most drew me to the profession was the way people around me trusted and relied on lawyers. . . I wanted to be the one people called. I wanted to be the one who could help.”
A closely connected neighborhood, loving support from Mrs. Shelton, Kamala’s teachers, and others, and a mother who cared deeply for her daughters’ success in life is the context in which Kamala Harris grew up. Sadly, her mother died in 2009 of colon cancer. She would have been so proud to know that her daughter became the first woman vice president of the United States and is now running for president. “My mother always said to me, ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things. Make sure you’re not the last.’”
“It takes a village to raise a child,” as the saying goes. And sometimes multiple domiciles. Was that your experience, too? Susan and I would like to know. Write it up and send to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com, we would love to post it! And if you’d rather be interviewed, let us know and we’ll record and edit your story for you.
Best,
Laurie
Kamala Harris's childhood homes:
Her first home (left), 2531 Regent St., photo: Steven Finacom
Her second home (right), the apartment building at 1945 Milvia Street, photo: Steven Finacom
Her third home (bottom),1227 Bancroft Way, photo by Jim Heaphy Cullen328, Wikimedia Commons
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The October 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/67PAGkA3F?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc
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Lorraine Hansberry’s Childhood Home
Last month Chicago unveiled a unique monument to Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), native Chicagoan and ground-breaking playwright, journalist, and civil rights activist. One of very few public U.S. monuments to women, the welcoming and interactive piece by sculptor Alison Saar is located in front of popular tourist destination Navy Pier (photo below). A cast bronze figure of Hansberry sits on a tree stump, symbolizing her short life; she died of pancreatic cancer at age 34. Viewers can take a seat on their choice of five symbolic life-size cast bronze chairs surrounding her: an office chair, two kitchen chairs, an ottoman, and a bar stool.
While she was recognized as a journalist, editor, and short story writer, Hansberry is best known for her play “A Raisin in the Sun,” which made history in 1959 as the first work of a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and which won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as Best Play of the Year. She also wrote the screenplay for the movie version (1961) which earned a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. “Raisin,” a musical adaptation, won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1973.
Lorraine was the youngest of the four Hansberry children born to Carl and Nannie Hansberry who were both college educated and distinguished in their Chicago community. Carl is remembered for successfully challenging Chicago’s restrictive racial covenants preventing Black citizens from buying homes in white areas. But his legacy is complicated. During the 1930s Carl had bought many dilapidated buildings in the city's Black neighborhoods and invented the “kitchenette,” a type of dwelling that subdivided existing apartments and created up to ten homes in spaces designed for only three. His “kitchenette” concept contributed to widespread substandard living conditions and to the growth of slums, but he was able to crowd many more tenants into his buildings and he became rich.
The Hansberry family originally lived at 45th and South Parkway. In his 2022 biography, “Lorraine Hansberry—the Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun,” author Charles J. Shields describes the Hansberrys’ early home. There was a baby grand piano in the living room, and a gleaming china cabinet. Carl and Nannie owned a "library of contemporary literature from subscription book clubs—fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, some by authors of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, William Waring Cuney and Countee Cullen.” Lorraine began exploring these works when she was in elementary school.
Lorraine and her siblings would have played on the neighborhood’s wooden back porches during the summer. She wrote, “My childhood South Side summers were the ordinary city kind, full of the street games and rhymes that anticipated what some people insist on calling modern poetry…I remember skinny little South Side bodies by the fives and tens of us, panting the delicious hours away.” I also found references to a maid, a chauffeur, and a bodyguard employed by the family before and after the Hansberrys’ more controversial home purchase.
In 1937 Carl purchased a 3-flat at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue in a predominantly white neighborhood on Chicago’s south side (photo below), and then moved his family into it. They faced significant challenges and legal opposition. White renters occupying the second and third floors immediately refused to pay rent to the new owner because he was Black.
Neighbors snubbed and ostracized the Hansberry family. The children were told to stay close to home. In her 2018 biography, “Looking for Lorraine,” Imani Perry writes that Lorraine “and her siblings were hit, spat upon, and cursed out as they walked to school. In the evenings her mother protected the home with a German Luger pistol while Carl was often out of town working with the team of lawyers, fighting for their right to be there."
I couldn’t find much information about the interior of 6140 South Rhodes Avenue, but based on my experience with this common type of building, I’d guess that on each floor there is a living room in front, an attached dining room, and then two or three bedrooms and one bathroom along a hall that leads to a kitchen. Lorraine wrote that in the winter, she “could smell the paint on the hot radiators."
One evening during the summer before third grade, Lorraine and her older sister Mamie were sitting on the front porch when some whites gathered on the street in front of the building. Author Shields recounts what happened next. “They {the whites} started pointing and hooting. When a stone clattered against the brick, Mamie grabbed Lorraine and shooed her inside. Mrs. Hansberry told the girls to stay back from the windows. The bodyguard was there, she reminded them, and the maid. But Lorraine was shocked to see her mother take a pistol from the desk drawer and begin patrolling the house, peering through the window shades as if they were under siege.”
A piece of broken brick flew through the window screen and slammed into the living room wall. The bodyguard took out his gun and went outside to face the mob until the police got there. When the police arrived, Nannie Hansberry asked them to leave the brick embedded in the wall as evidence to show her husband. Afterwards a squad car kept a lookout on the street all night, but no one was arrested, and the police let the case drop. The official message was “stay where you belong.” Only black newspapers printed the story.
Carl persisted in his lawsuits and appeals, and though the United States Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor, the victory didn't have much effect; many types of systemic housing discrimination continue to this day in Chicago. The city designated the building a historic landmark in 2010.
Lorraine’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” directly addresses the struggles her family endured while living on South Rhodes. A new production of the play at Chicago’s excellent Court Theater is scheduled to run from January 31 to March 3, 2025. Laurie and I hope to pay a visit to Hansberry’s monument before it gets cold here, and to see the Court Theater production next year.
Like Lorraine Hansberry, did you ever feel unwelcome, or that you did not belong in your childhood neighborhood? Your early experience may be the start of a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would like to read and post your recollections. Send your story to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Susan
Photos:
"To Sit A While," Copyright © 2024 Navy Pier, Inc., Chicago, IL. All Rights Reserved.
Lorraine Hansberry's childhood home, Susan Matthews.
The September 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
Eloise’s Childhood Home At New York City's Plaza Hotel
I’m sure I read and liked Kay Thompson’s classic picture book “Eloise—A Book for Precocious Grown-ups” (pub. 1955) as a child, because when I picked it back up recently, Hilary Knight’s beautifully drawn illustrations were familiar. But I didn’t remember most of the sophisticated details, and I especially didn’t remember what a little hellion Eloise was!
Six-year-old Eloise's childhood home is The Plaza Hotel, 768 5th Avenue, in New York City. She lives on the top (18th) floor but spends a lot of time riding the elevator, and “skibbling” up and down the stairs, pressing the call buttons according to whim, and surely inconveniencing other residents and guests. During daily trips to the lobby, she pesters the desk clerk, checks for stamps at the mail desk, and uses the house phones “to see if anybody’s in.” She enjoys “slomping" her feet against the woodwork in the halls, “which is very good for scuffing and noise.” She likes to pretend she is an orphan to see if she can get “a piece of melon or something” from a fooled guest. She spies on the “hotel officers,” checks the garbage at the service elevator to see if there’s anything she wants, “like a ribbon or something like that,” bothers the switchboard operators, and crashes events held in the Crystal Room, the Terrace Room, the Baroque Room, and the Grand Ballroom.
Eloise describes her live-in Nanny in fond detail, and lovingly explains the idiosyncrasies of Weenie, her dog, and Skipperdee, her turtle. Her messy room is depicted in a two-page spread (see photo) where we can see a monthly chart recording the room's “neat” and “untidy” days. They’re all marked untidy. She is the owner of two mortally injured dolls who’ve been subjected to lives of terrible violence (which Eloise admits to making up), and she seems to resent the “extremely lot of extra work” their conditions cause her. A male tutor whom she barely tolerates provides her education.
Her parents are not shown, and in the original 1955 book, only her traveling mother (age 30 and wearing “a 3 1/2 shoe”) is mentioned in Eloise's first-person narrative. We learn that her mother “knows Coco Chanel” and often sends for her daughter, so Eloise remains packed for sudden trips to “Europe and to Paris."
Eloise loves calling room service for meals. “Planked Medallion of Beef Tenderloin with Fresh Vegetables Maison please and two raisins, one strawberry leaf and one clams in season s’il vous plaît and charge it please Thank you very much” is a typical dinner order.
Looking into Eloise's genesis, I learned that she was originally a mischievous imaginary friend and alter ego of author Kay Thompson (1909-1988), who was a famous American actor, singer, and vocal coach, most active in the 1930s through the 1950s. Thompson would perform comic monologues as 6-year-old “Eloise" for her friends. She had written the first best-selling Eloise book for adults, but because it looked like a children’s picture book, thanks to collaborator Knight’s illustrations, that’s what it and its sequels became.
The Plaza, an iconic luxury hotel since 1907, still caters to admirers of Eloise with a selection of Eloise products for sale at The Plaza Boutique on the lobby level. Especially devoted fans can rent the 625 sq. ft. all-pink "Eloise One Bedroom King Room” (designed in 2010 by Betsey Johnson) for about $1300 per night. An adjacent “Nanny Suite” is also available. According to The Plaza website, Eloise’s clothes are in the closet, and her favorite books and toys are on the shelves. Afternoon tea in the Palm Room is included.
In February, 2024, Alexa Rockwell, 28, a writer for HGTV’s website, spent the night before her birthday in the Eloise Suite, and loved every minute of the experience. A link to her excellent report with photos is below:
Living Out My Childhood Dream At New York City’s Plaza Hotel
If you’re interested in the backstory of the first books in the series, including the unfortunate and financially damaging rift between Knight and Thompson over “Eloise,” watch this fascinating 35-minute documentary on HBO Max, “It’s Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise," about illustrator Hilary Knight (b. 1926 and still working), and also starring Lena Dunham. Here’s the trailer:
It's Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise (HBO Documentary Films)
Have you read a book or seen a movie about a fantastic childhood home you would have preferred over your own? Thinking about whether you would have “traded places” with a fictional child might lead to a good childhood home story. Send it to Laurie and me at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com and we’ll post it!
Best,
Susan
Photos:
Kay Thompson's Eloise, Amazon
photo of page spread, Susan Matthews
from "Living Out My Childhood Dream At New York City's Plaza Hotel, hgtv.com
from "It's Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise (HBO Documentary Films), youtube.com
The August 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
A Childhood Home Coincidence
In 2022 (the most recent year of official statistics) children under age 18 were living in 40.26 percent of U.S. households. But when you consider all residential dwellings, a vast majority of homes are or have been childhood homes, even if no children live in them now. Many older homes sheltered several crops of children through the decades. Each place has its unique stories.
We bought our current house in Chicago in 1999. It is a 1903 frame Victorian on Avers Avenue. It was our son’s second childhood home. He’s now grown and on his own, but when we moved in, he was 7 years old. Next door were Pat and Bob, a retired couple, dream neighbors we loved living close to. Their house was her childhood home; Pat had never lived anywhere else except for a short time in an apartment right after she and Bob were married.
When she was young, Pat had known the original owners of our house towards the end of their long tenure here, and then she and Bob became good friends with the Ruehl family, mother, father, and three children, who were the second owners for over 30 years beginning in the 1960s. We bought the house from a young couple who had bought it from the Ruehls and had lived here for only 3 years.
At the time we moved to this house, I worked at a suburban park district which was 33 miles northwest of here, at least an hour commute each way. I was in charge of arts programming at the community center. One day I got a call from a local resident who wanted information about an art class. When I asked for her name and number, she spelled out “Ruehl.” I told her that her name was familiar because a Ruehl family had formerly lived in our new house in Chicago. She said that if the house was on Avers Avenue, she had grown up there! We were both delighted with the extreme coincidence of suddenly becoming known to each other through a random phone call way out in the suburbs.
Of course I invited her to visit her childhood home when she came to the city. She dropped by one weekend afternoon and had a good look around. She told us some interesting lore about the place. A beloved pet goat had been buried under our front porch many years before, when Chicagoans were allowed to raise goats within the city limits. The old pine tree in our back yard grew into a bizarre S-shape because her brother had planted a Boy Scout Arbor Day seedling too close to the garage (see photo). She remembered with gratitude her family’s warm association with Pat and Bob next door, though unfortunately they weren’t home that afternoon. It was a wonderful visit, tying the past with the present, and giving us a deeper sense of the house’s cheerful history. We both marveled again at the coincidental phone call.
Have you ever met former residents of your home? If so, what did they think of the place now, and what did you learn about its past from them? The answers to these questions would make a good childhood home story. Write it and send it to Laurie and me at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. We would love to post it! And if you’d rather be interviewed, let us know and we’ll write your story for you.
Best,
Susan
The July 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
July 2024 Greetings (wix.com)
Hank Aaron’s Childhood Home
We’ve all heard the real estate mantra, “Location, location, location.” In the case of baseball legend Henry “Hank" Aaron’s childhood home, it’s literally true. The frame house in Toulminville, Alabama, built by Hank’s father in 1942, has been moved twice and is now settled at its third location.
“Hammerin’ Hank” (1934-2021) was an MLB right fielder and designated hitter from 1954 to 1976, spending 21 seasons as a Brave (first in Milwaukee, then in Atlanta), and 2 seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers. In 1974 when he hit his 715th home run, he broke Babe Ruth’s longstanding career record of 714. Hank held the record for 33 years until 2007 when Barry Bonds surpassed Hank's famous career total of 755.
Hank was born in Mobile, Alabama, but spent most of his childhood in Toulminville, a nearby settlement that was annexed to Mobile in 1945. At the time of Hank's birth, father Herbert Aaron (1908-1998), mother Estella Pritchett Aaron (1911-2008), older brother Herbert Jr., and baby Hank lived in an apartment at 666 Wilkinson (no longer standing) in a neighborhood called Down the Bay, which they rented for $9 per month. Hank eventually had 7 siblings.
Detailed information about family life in the hand-built Aaron home in its original Toulminville location is a little hard to find, but it seems the house initially consisted of three rooms, and measured 24' x 24'. Later it was expanded to its current seven rooms and 1600 square feet. It was constructed of wood and salvaged materials, and had an exterior brick veneer. Young Hank was eight years old when his father built it. His parents continued to live there for decades even though Hank bought them another home in Mobile. After Herbert’s death, Estella lived there until 2007.
In a July 21, 2008 story in the Denver Post, Hank expressed his love for the house. “This was our castle,” Aaron said. “No matter where I’ve been, this will always be my home. . . . Only three bedrooms, with eight kids. I had to be humble.”
In 2008 Hank and other members of his family donated their house to the City of Mobile. It was moved to 755 Bolling Brothers Blvd., adjacent to the grounds of the 6000-seat Mobile BayBears minor league baseball stadium, later named Hank Aaron Stadium, where it was renovated and turned into a museum. For good photos of that process, including removal of the brick veneer, removal of the roof to decrease its height and allow the structure to be driven through Mobile, and the police escort during the 6-hour trip to the stadium, see this blog post by Danny Lipford on the Today’s Homeowner website:
Hank Aaron’s Home Moved to Ballpark
The house-museum at Hank Aaron Stadium displayed hundreds of pieces of memorabilia. Visitors got to see Hank’s Gold Glove Award from 1957, his original Louisville Slugger bat design, jerseys, replica lockers with the names of Hank and brother Tommie (a fellow Major Leaguer), plus extensive documentation of his pursuit of the home run record and his trophy for breaking it. Estelle’s china cabinet and the kitchen with original knick-knacks and cooking equipment gave a glimpse of the family’s domestic environment. Hank Aaron’s voice narrated stories about his early days playing baseball in Mobile and the highlights of his career.
Unfortunately, Hank Aaron Stadium closed in 2022, and the items in the museum were placed in storage. In September, 2023, Hank’s childhood home took another trip through Mobile and was returned to its original Toulminville neighborhood. It now sits at the Mobile Police 3rd Precinct on St. Stephens Road.
Here is an excellent local news story with video showing the house back on the road for the second time, and its new location. Crew leader Joel Reed shares the process and the timeline in an on-site interview. “We left at 9:15 and made it here about 11:45.” (A traditional vehicle can complete the 10-mile drive in about 15 minutes.)
Hank Aaron’s historic childhood home moved from stadium site
Was your childhood home itself more important than its geographical coordinates? Or were you more affected by its location in the world? Thinking about this could prompt a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read yours and post it. Send it to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you’d like to be interviewed instead, let us know!
Best,
Susan
Photos, top to bottom:
Hank Aaron's childhood home moved to the stadium
Hank Aaron's childhood home moved from the stadium
Aaron house on its original Toulminville lot in 2008; Photo: Mary Hattler/AP
The June 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
Harrison Ford's Childhood Home
Laurie and I are together in Chicago this month and we decided to make a pilgrimage to a celebrity childhood home in the area. There are lots of them! We discovered that Harrison Ford (b. July 13, 1942) lived at 109 N. Washington Avenue in the suburb of Park Ridge during his childhood in the 1950s. We made the quick 8-mile drive from my house and took a selfie there (below). The neighborhood is family friendly, with mature trees and a variety of house styles. Several houses on the block are newer construction which means a number of the charming original places have been eliminated. The Ford house is one of the most picturesque houses left.
Ford graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge in 1960, then studied acting during his last year at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. After college Ford moved to Los Angeles and signed a contract with the Columbia Pictures “new talent” program. After a few nonspeaking uncredited acting jobs, in 1973 Ford landed a small part in George Lucas’s “American Graffiti,” which led to his first starring role as Han Solo in Lucas’s “Star Wars” at age 34. His career took off after that, with starring roles in four subsequent Star Wars movies. His popularity continued to grow when he portrayed Indiana Jones, first in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) and in four more Indiana Jones movies produced between 1984 and 2023, among many other roles. Wikipedia lists a total of 59 films he has appeared in, or will appear in, from 1966 to 2025.
While we couldn’t find much information about what it was like to grow up in his early house (Ford has a reputation for avoiding self-revelation), and we don’t have any photos of the interior while the Ford family lived there, the home was on the market in the summer of 2022, so we can see what it currently looks like inside (below).
In a 2017 GQ Magazine interview (link below), Ford describes an event that occurred in the house when he was about 16. "'My dad had a little workshop in our basement and we'd done some work together….I watched him cut his finger off one day down in the basement. So there was a good lesson. He was cutting a sheet of plywood on a little table saw and it kicked back and'—Ford holds up the middle finger on his right hand—'he'd cut off this finger and'—now Ford holds up his forefinger—'came halfway through.’” Ford describes picking up the finger, wrapping it in Kleenex, and taking it to the hospital where the emergency room surgeon threw it away.
Harrison Ford on ‘Star Wars’, ‘Blade Runner’, and Punching Ryan Gosling in the Face | GQ
The house, which was built during the 1920s and since remodeled, is a 2132 square-foot Tudor with three bedrooms, one and a half baths, plus a rec room and bar. It sits on an 8000 square foot lot. On June 22, 2022, the house was listed for $749,000. The price was reduced to $699,000 the next month, and it sold for $680,000 soon afterwards.
Harrison Ford’s Childhood Home in Park Ridge Finds Buyer: See Inside – NBC Chicago
One of Harrison Ford’s most vivid memories of his childhood home happened to be the bloody accident he witnessed in the basement. Do you have a powerful memory of your own early home that overshadows more mundane recollections? This could be the beginning of a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read and post your memories. Write them down and send them to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you’d rather be interviewed, we’ll write your story for you!
Best,
Susan
The May 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
Wavewalker: Suzanne Heywood’s Childhood Home
Imagine being seven years old and setting sail with your family on an exciting three-year trip around the world, in a boat captained by your father. And then imagine that you will not go home when you’re ten, as planned, but will stay at sea for seven more long years before you can finally extricate yourself from a meandering, perilous lifestyle imposed upon you by your parents, with no regard for your wishes. This describes Suzanne Heywood’s childhood aboard Wavewalker, a 66-foot schooner built in the mid-1970s, which was her peripatetic family home for ten years.
In her 2023 memoir, “Wavewalker—A Memoir of Breaking Free,” Heywood gives readers a look at the challenges, deprivations, griefs, and terrors of a life at sea, but also describes its powerful beauty and its ability to create in her a tough resilience that got her to the University of Oxford through her own dogged work, and prepared her for whatever life threw at her.
In the summer of 1976, the Cook family (father Gordon, mother Mary, daughter Suzanne, and son Jon) left Plymouth Sound, England, on a voyage that would retrace Captain James Cook’s final trip, and end in Hawaii in time to mark the 200th anniversary of his murder by natives in 1779. They made it, but while reaching that goal and for years afterwards, their route became a confusing, seemingly spontaneous nautical meander from Brazil to Cape Town to the Indian Ocean, Australia, New Zealand (twice), Samoa, the Line Islands, Hawaii, Tahiti, Solomon Islands (twice), and Fiji. Heywood’s chapters open with maps of the family’s route, and show the length of the trip so far, plus her specific ages during each segment (e.g. “February 1979 - September 1979: 9 to 10 years old. Two years and 223 days to three years and 57 days”)
There is a helpful illustration of the plan of Wavewalker in Heywood’s book (photo below). Looking closely, you can see an aft cabin where the parents slept, a 2-berth cabin where Suzanne slept, a 4-berth cabin where Jon and the crew members slept, a central main cabin with wraparound sofa, dining table and galley, a chartroom, a forward cabin, storage areas, and two heads (bathrooms).
Crew members came and went over the years, but because the family lived on the boat permanently, Suzanne and Jon (ages 7 and 6 at the start of their adventure), were expected to function as unpaid crew members, too. They eventually learned to do everything the adults did, and at first took pride in their early responsibilities and their increasing knowledge of sailing. Jon’s favorite place was anywhere on the main mast, high above the deck, where he climbed to do lookout duty.
When not working, the children spent a lot of time below deck. For a while Mary went over school lessons at the table in the main cabin until Suzanne and Jon grew big enough to crew full time. While Jon was encouraged to work on the deck wearing the only child-sized life jacket, Mary felt that her daughter’s time would be better spent below, helping prepare the meals and cleaning.
During frequent rough weather, the close quarters became terrifyingly unstable. Within a few weeks of departure, Wavewalker encountered a violent storm in the Indian Ocean, which threw Suzanne off her feet, and her father overboard. “When I opened my eyes,” she writes, "I was lying on the floor of the main cabin, half-covered in water and surrounded by pieces of crockery, sodden books, and hunks of decking. Icy water, black, gray, and foaming white, flooded in through a hole above me. Jagged beams hung down from the ceiling and one side of the cabin bulged inwards.” Eventually discovering his daughter had sustained a serious head injury, and after terrifying days of limping along in the severely damaged boat, Gordon, who had been saved by his lifeline, miraculously reached Île Amsterdam. There Suzanne saw a doctor and endured seven painful procedures before her injury could heal. The experience haunted her and caused nightmares from then on.
Occasionally Wavewalker required complicated repairs, and the family would dock somewhere while it was being worked on. Often there was so little money, despite several early sponsorships, that Mary and Gordon would anchor Wavewalker in a random port and take temporary jobs in retail, teaching, construction, or park management. Suzanne was able to experience a few brief, longed-for periods of formal schooling during these times.
At about age 14, Suzanne realized her best way out of the situation was by earning high school certification on her own and getting into college. She poured all the energy she could spare into a demanding years-long Australian correspondence course. She would pick up her graded papers at upcoming ports, which weren’t always predictable, adding even more stress to the process. Yet her parents insisted her efforts to educate herself were “selfish,” because they distracted her from her nautical duties. She was undaunted, and immediately after earning her certification, began applying to any college she had heard of. Only Oxford was interested. And that’s where she landed at age 17, eventually earning a BA in zoology in 1990, and going on to a life that has been successful by any measure.
In 1987, on a last pre-college visit to her parents aboard Wavewalker, Suzanne noticed how much the boat had aged compared to the “majestic galleon” of her childhood. “Her paintwork was flaking, her ropes were stiff and frayed, and the caulking between the planks in her timber deck had cracked open in the sun.” Wavewalker had become “an old lady.”
At the very end of her memoir, Suzanne writes about her ongoing search to find what remains of the boat, which was thought to have been abandoned by her parents near Lautoka in Fiji, in 1991, after a cyclone. Her parents refused to talk about it, so she was on her own twenty years later when she visited Fiji to investigate. Wavewalker had endured a mysterious and hard to trace afterlife, according to the locals she met there. But one of them had rescued and kept the original compass from the chartroom and presented it to her at the end of her visit. She was deeply grateful for this small remnant of her history. Though Wavewalker was the scene of so much hardship, it had still been home.
Conventional or unconventional, our first homes influence us throughout our lives. Do memories of your childhood home comfort you? Or, like Suzanne Heywood, are you haunted by certain traumatic conditions you were powerless to escape from? If your memories spark a story, Laurie and I would love to have it. Send it to childhoodhomestories.com and we’ll be happy to post it.
Best,
Susan
The April 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
April 2024 Greetings (wix.com)
La Casa Azul: Frida Kahlo’s Childhood Home
Although I’ve traveled to México City many times, until a recent trip in January I’d never visited Frida Kahlo’s famous childhood home. Known since 1958 as the Museo Frida Kahlo, she called it La Casa Azul, The Blue House. Visitors seeking the aesthetic equivalent of a religious experience often describe a trip to the museum as a pilgrimage, and as I shuffled through the small rooms of her former home with dozens of other people, a reverent quiet prevailed. The tragedy and triumph of Frida Kahlo was palpable.
Constructed in 1904 by Kahlo’s German father Wilhelm (Guillermo in Spanish), La Casa Azul is located in the Coyoacán neighborhood of México City, approximately seven miles south of the city center, or Zócalo. The compound had ten rooms on two floors, and the buildings surrounded a large tropical garden. The third of four girls, Frida was born in 1907 and spent most of her childhood in the family home because of poor health. When she was six years old, she contracted polio which affected her right leg, making it shorter and thinner than the left leg. During her isolation from her peers, she became her father’s favorite, and he schooled her in literature, nature, philosophy, and sports, thinking it would help restore her strength. He was a photographer by profession and took many excellent photographs of his family and of Frida. However, the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, and Guillermo’s photography business suffered as a result.
Frida described the atmosphere in her childhood home as “very, very sad.” Her parents’ marriage was devoid of love, and they, too, were often sick. When Frida was fifteen, she was one of thirty-five girls accepted at a prep school of 2,000 students, and she intended to become a physician. It was at the prep school where she became deeply committed to Mexican culture and indigenismo, a pride in indigenous culture.
On September 25, 1925, when Frida was eighteen years old, she and her boyfriend Alejandro Arias boarded a crowded bus and sat in the back. The driver attempted to pass an oncoming street car, and it crashed into the side of the bus, killing several people and impaling Frida with a handrail that dislodged during the impact, puncturing her abdomen and uterus. “Arias escaped with minor injuries, recalling [sic] a particularly harrowing scene: ‘Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida.’” With the utmost care, Arias removed the handrail, and later Frida described the injury as “the way a sword pierces a bull.” The handrail also broke her pelvis, collarbone, and several vertebrae; her right leg broke in eleven places, and her foot was crushed. After spending a month in the hospital, she was confined to bed in a plaster corset for three months. To counteract her boredom, she began to paint. A mirror was installed over her bed and a special apparatus constructed so she could paint lying down, and it was then that she began to create the self-portraits she is most famous for. Today, a bronze death mask of Frida lies on that same bed, cradled in a shawl, creating a somewhat eerie effect.
Even though Frida and Mexican muralist Diego Rivera had met in 1922, they didn’t marry until seven years later in 1929. Theirs was an unhappy marriage replete with infidelities. Frida wrote, “There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”
The eight years they were married, for the first time, were the only years she didn’t live in her childhood home. When they remarried, they moved back, painted the exterior a cobalt blue, and named it La Casa Azul. They created studios for themselves in upstairs rooms, where her original furniture, art supplies, easel and wheelchair are on exhibit. In all, 30,000 objects are on display: photographs, correspondence, sketches, magazines, books, her clothing, X-rays of Kahlo's fractured back, a trolley bus ticket, and a note to Diego with a lipstick-stained kiss. The most arresting object in Casa Azul though, is one of her prosthetic legs, made for her when her gangrenous right leg required amputation the year before she died. The prosthesis, made largely from leather, is lovingly decorated with painted floral designs and birds. Several of her plaster corsets are also on display.
Frida Kahlo lived in her childhood home a total of thirty-nine years, from her birth to her death in 1954 at age forty-seven. Per Diego Rivera’s will, La Casa Azul was donated to México, designated a museum, and left unchanged. The last words Frida wrote in her diary were “I joyfully await the exit – and I hope never to return.” Accompanying the quote was a drawing of a black angel.
Did someone in your family live in their childhood home their entire life? For baby boomers, it may have been common for our grandparents. There are interesting stories of all kinds to be shared. Please send to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com, or if you would prefer to be interviewed, Susan and I can record and edit your story.
Best,
Laurie
Photos of La Casa Azul and Frida Kahlo's workspace by Laurie McDonald.
Photo of Frida Kahlo's prosthetic leg by Javier Hinojosa. © Museo Frida Kahlo.
Childhood Home of the Wright Brothers
This month’s newsletter has an ulterior motive: to recommend “The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough (2015), a wonderful book I just finished for my book group. It's a fast-paced and exciting biography of two remarkable men from Dayton, Ohio.
Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright spent the most important years of their childhood in a modest white frame house at 7 Hawthorn St. on the west side of Dayton. In 1869 their father, Reverend Milton Wright (1828-1917) and his wife Susan (1831-1889), bought the then-new house and moved into it with their sons Reuchlin (1861-1920), Lorin (1862-1939), and toddler Wilbur. Orville was born two years later in 1871, and their sister Katherine was born in 1874 (d. 1929). Twins Otis and Ida (b. 1870) died in infancy.
The Wrights leased the house and moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1877, and then to Richmond, Indiana, four years later so that Reverend Wright, now an elected bishop with new regional responsibilities, could more easily plan and attend conferences of the United Brethren Church in Christ. The family returned to their Dayton house in 1884 when Wilbur and Orville were teenagers and after the older brothers were on their own. Reverend Wright, Katherine, and Orville lived there until 1914, two years after Wilbur’s death at age 45 from typhoid fever in 1912.
Hawthorn Street was unpaved until the turn of the century. The Wright house was similar to others in the neighborhood, with the addition of a large wraparound porch built by the brothers. McCullough writes that there were seven rooms, three downstairs and four upstairs, all of them small. The lot was small too. “Only two feet separated the house from Number 5 next door on the north side. To get between the houses required one to turn and walk sideways.”
There was no electricity, and no indoor plumbing or running water in the house until the brothers were in their twenties. They took their baths in the kitchen in a tub of hot water. Water came from an open well and wooden pump out back, where the outhouse and carriage shed also stood. Natural gas lit and heated the house, and meals were cooked on a wood stove.
The front door on the porch led to a small, formal front parlor, but a side door leading to the sitting room was more often used. From the sitting room, the front parlor was to the right, dining room and kitchen to the left. A narrow carpeted stairway led to the upstairs bedrooms. McCullough says the furnishings were of the “inexpensive Victorian variety to be found in homes throughout Ohio, or for that matter nearly everywhere in the country at the time.” There were lace curtains at the parlor windows, a mirrored oak sideboard in the dining room, upholstered wooden rockers to sit on, and a chiming Gilbert clock on the mantelpiece. But high ceilings and the simplicity of the furnishings made the place less cramped than it could have been.
Upstairs the decor was limited to "bare essentials—beds, bureaus, chamber pots—with the exception of the bookcase and rolltop desk in the Bishop’s cluttered bedroom at the front of the house overlooking the street,” writes McCullough. Wilbur slept in the middle room and Orville’s and Katherine’s bedrooms were at the back, but the brothers’ rooms adjoined. Bedroom doors were kept open in winter because gas fireplaces downstairs provided the only heat.
Reverend Wright believed in the “limitless value” of reading, and owned a large collection of books. Everyone in the house read all the time. Their father encouraged his children’s intellectual curiosity, even if it meant missing a day or two of school for a worthy project, or just for reading. Years later Orville credited his father's encouragement and his mother’s unusual mechanical ingenuity as key reasons for his and Wilbur’s prodigious achievements.
If you read “The Wright Brothers,” you will speed past these ordinary childhood home details to get to the real excitement, Wilbur and Orville’s meticulous, self-taught, self-funded attempts to give humans the ability to fly, all accomplished while running their thriving bicycle shop in Dayton. It was a time when you could send a letter to the Smithsonian Institution, as Wilbur did in 1899, with a request for a list of books about flight and for Smithsonian publications about aviation, and receive enough material to serve as a foundation for an intensive study. They were wholeheartedly certain that they could master the secret, and unlike countless other inventors who designed preposterous and ineffective contraptions, they set out to observe and record everything they could about how birds fly, and then applied their observations to spectacular success.
In 1936, when commercial flying on new passenger planes was becoming stylish though still cold and fairly dangerous, Henry Ford bought the Wright house and the bicycle shop (originally at 1127 West Third St. in Dayton) to save them from being lost to history. He relocated both buildings to his Dearborn, Michigan, museum complex, now known as The Henry Ford. Orville Wright, then in his late 60s, attended the dedication in 1938. The short video below, part of The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation series (originally shown on CBS in 2019), shows host Mo Rocca touring the Wright home at Greenfield Village.
Inside the Wright Brothers' Childhood Home | The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation
Was your childhood home environment conducive to creative activities? What in your early environment helped you achieve your youthful visions or set you on the path to your adult career? Thinking about this aspect of where you grew up would be a good starting point for a childhood home story. Send your story to Laurie and me at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com or let us know if you’d like to be interviewed instead. We can write your story for you, and post it after you approve it.
Best,
Susan
The Wright Brothers’ house at Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, MI.
Photo by Andrew Balet on Wikimedia
"The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough, Simon and Schuster, copyright 2015
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The February 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
February 2024 Greetings (wix.com)
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Childhood Home Sounds
Last month we examined the smells that remind us of our childhood homes, and this month I thought it would be interesting to write about childhood home sounds. But I realized it’s a much more difficult task than writing about smells—after all, smells don’t change that much over the decades, but sounds do. This morning’s bacon sizzling on the stove can reliably smell like the bacon we remember from childhood, and can evoke certain memories, but when you pulled the frying pan out from the cupboard, did it sound like the one your mother used fifty or sixty years ago? I remember my mother’s preferred cookware, Revere Ware stainless-steel pans with copper bottoms and black handles with wire loops for hanging. She kept her pots and pans in a large, sliding drawer under the stove, and when she removed a pan and its lid, they made an unforgettable bright, sharp sound. Like Pavlov’s dog, the famous experiment where neurologist Ivan Palov paired the sound of a bell with food, eliciting salivation in the dog, to this day I react to that clanging sound and instantly become famished! And who can forget the scene in the film “Mommie Dearest” when Joan Crawford’s character screams wildly at her daughter, “NO WIRE HANGERS!” Maybe her reaction wasn’t so “unsound” at all. Maybe, to Joan, wire hangers scraping against a clothes rod connected to a terrifying childhood memory and triggered uncontrollable anger.
According to an article in “Scientific American,” smell evokes stronger memories that either sight or sound, and “. . . in 2013, researchers found greater brain activity associated with olfactory stimuli (like the smell of a rose) than with visual stimuli (like the sight of a rose).”
Evidently, smell stimuli go straight to the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion. But what about sound? Many areas of the brain react to sound stimulus to give us that 3D sonic experience of the world. Perhaps sound can be much more complex and varied in its ability to evoke memories.
As children, songs we heard on the radio and on records will forever be associated with that time in our lives and with our childhood homes. The first 45 rpm record my mother bought for me, when I was four years old (1956), was Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog." “Don’t Be Cruel" was on the flip side. I had my own record player and over a few years acquired a huge stack of 45s, including 50s hits such as “Mack the Knife” by Bobby Darin, “Tammy” by Debbie Reynolds, “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Será, Será)” by Doris Day, and “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Of all these, the lyrics of “Que Será, Será” made the biggest impression, introducing me to the ideas of fate, luck, and determinism.
“When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what will I be
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?”
What if, as a woman, I became neither? What if my adult home didn’t measure up to my childhood home? To this day, hearing “Que Será, Será” gives me that queasy feeling of uncertainty about what is to come.
What about ambient and perhaps more subtle sounds, the sounds of the house and the people and pets who lived there? Both the washing machine and the dishwasher had a distinct sloshiness that is absent in today’s modern appliances, but you might recognize that sound in a drive-through car wash. When I hear the expulsion of air from a pneumatic door-closing mechanism, regulating the speed with which the door closes, I think of my father returning from work and entering the house from the garage—a happy association. Loud rotary dial phones made it difficult to be discreet about calling a friend when you were supposed to be doing your homework. Some of us, nostalgically, chose a ringtone for our cell phones that imitates the sound of the old rotary. The sound of a manual typewriter evokes memories of typing many drafts of a high school term paper, striving for a mistake-free version. When I hear the chimes of Big Ben in London, in the soundtrack of a film, I connect that sound to our house doorbell and relatives arriving for a Thanksgiving meal. Listening to people chew their food, I’m reminded of when my sister raised silkworms in boxes in her bedroom and the chewing sound they made eating mulberry leaves harvested from the tree in our backyard. A certain high-register meow will remind me of a feral cat I tamed that became a favorite pet; the bark of an unidentified dog in my neighborhood sounds like our beloved childhood pet German Shepherd Lassie. I’ll always link the mournful sound of a distant train with my comfortable childhood bed.
Susan remembers that her father could whistle loudly enough to be heard from anywhere in the neighborhood. It was the signal to come home for dinner. Her mother, who had a beautiful singing voice, used a distinctive melodic yodel for the same purpose. Their house had two doorbells. She says that hearing the chord produced by the one at the front door was more exciting because the back doorbell, one tone, was used mostly by familiar visitors like the milkman or neighborhood kids.
What are some of the sounds that make you think back to your childhood? Susan and I would love to read what you come up with. If you’d like to contribute a childhood home story based on any theme that you’re inspired to tell, and you’d prefer to be interviewed, let us know. We will record it, transcribe and edit it, and send it back to you for approval. Contact us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Laurie
Listen to the songs here:
Elvis Presley - Hound Dog - Bing video
Elvis Presley - Don't Be Cruel - video Dailymotion
Debbie Reynolds ~ Tammy (1957) - Bing video
Bing Videos (Que Será, Será)
Bing Videos (Sixteen Tons)
The January 2024 Greetings can be viewed here:
January 2024 Greetings (wix.com)
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Childhood Home Smells
This month we’re attaching a wonderful essay by David Owen (“The Dime Store Floor,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2010) about the powerfully evocative nature of smells, especially the ones we noticed in our early environments.
I forwarded the piece to some childhood friends (we all grew up in Fort Worth, Texas) and it sparked a discussion of never-forgotten smells from our first homes and our native land. One friend remembered the smell of mimosa blossoms in her yard. Two of us mentioned the unpleasant smell of mothballs in closets. Other vivid home-smell memories were shampoos (Prell, Herbal Essence, and Flex Balsam), darkroom chemicals, the clothes dryer, a certain rubber toy animal, pecan trees, Pecos cantaloupes, German Shepherd puppy breath, a wading pool, and a special-occasion Hungarian coffee cake baking in the family kitchen, among many more.
Laurie wrote this:
“What smells take me back to early childhood? The smell of cooked carrots and mashed potatoes. Smelling my childhood book, Harold and the Purple Crayon (yes, I still have it!). Cigarette smoke. But one of my favorite smells from childhood infused my father’s large, glass greenhouse. He was a hobbyist botanist and became an expert at growing camellias, a flower originally from Japan. Winter-blooming camellias come in variations of red, pink, and white and have no fragrance, but the soil in which they grow best, humus-rich and slightly acidic, has a lovely smell. Dad amended the soil from a compost pile behind the greenhouse, full of rotting leaves and grass clippings that produced a piquant smell of their own. In January and February, he exhibited his camellias at shows in Fort Worth and Dallas, preparing transparent plastic sweater boxes with a thick layer of spun cotton before carefully placing his prized blooms inside. When we arrived at the exhibition hall and opened the boxes, I could have sworn I smelled a faint fragrance that reminded me of my mother. Maybe it was the Jungle Gardenia perfume she wore, which was a blend of gardenia, jasmine, and lily of the valley. During those months, she often had a camellia in her hair or pinned to a dress; the association made ‘scents’.”
In addition to home-based smells, we thought of a multitude of others originating in schools, doctor’s offices, grandparents’ homes, camps, and restaurants. Several of us remembered a specific smell that Fort Worth sidewalk concrete gave off for a few minutes at the beginning of a rain shower. And all of us recalled the aroma of fresh bread emanating from Mrs. Baird’s Bakery at a certain place on the freeway heading into and out of downtown.
Here is a link to Owen's essay, below. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read about his mission to track down his remembered childhood smells and discover if they still exist.
The Dime Store Floor | The New Yorker
"Certain smells go all the way down to the core of memory, and encountering them again can set off reverberations,” he writes, and his reverberations will surely set off your own!
Thinking about the smells around your childhood home is a good way to send your mind back in time, and possibly produce some interesting material for a childhood home story. We would love to read what you come up with. Send it to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you’d prefer to be interviewed, let us know, and we’ll write your story for you!
Best,
Susan
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The December 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
December 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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Roger Ebert’s Childhood Home
Last month my friend Karen sent me a short Axios piece by Monica Eng (link below), who wrote about staying in the childhood home of film critic Roger Ebert (1942-2013) while participating in a literary festival in Urbana, Illinois in September, 2023. Eng, a reporter for Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ, had been a close friend of Ebert’s, but she didn’t know that his early home was still standing and available to book through Airbnb. Organizers of the event had arranged her lodging in the house at 410 East Washington Street in Urbana, which usually rents for about $200 per night.
Eng’s account of her visit sent me to Ebert’s excellent autobiography, Life Itself (pub. 2011) to get details. Ebert was the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975 he was the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Beginning in 1977, he and Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel hosted the Sneak Previews show on PBS, produced by WTTW in Chicago, a lively and often contentious discussion of current movies. After Siskel died in 1999, Ebert continued with various co-hosts for seven more years, until treatment for cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands made it impossible for him to speak normally. However, he continued to publish in print and online until his death in 2013.
On the first page of Life Itself, Ebert, the only child of Annabel and Walter Ebert, shares an early preverbal memory of watching ants on the sidewalk in front of his childhood house, a cinematic image that opens the “movie of my life.” Inside, he recalls running “the length of the hallway from the living room to my bedroom, leaping into the air and landing on my bed….The basement smells like green onions. The light beside my bed is like a water pump and the handle turns it on and off.” Returning to the house in 1990 with his wife, Chaz, Ebert noticed, as many of us do when we return to childhood locations, that the place was much smaller than he remembered.
The two-bedroom white stucco house, where Ebert lived from 1942 until he left for college in 1961, had "green canvas awnings, evergreens and geraniums in front, and a white picket fence enclosing the back yard.” His father built a stone and mortar barbecue grill behind the house, “with a dime embedded in its smokestack to mark the year of its completion.” Ebert describes four unusual mountain ash trees on the property, planted by his father, with “white bark that could be peeled loose, and their branches were weighed with clusters of little orange berries.” They were the only trees of this type in town. They needed a special summertime watering system of 5-gallon cans with holes drilled in the bottom placed next to them. Ebert remembers filling the cans with water from the hose.
“Our house had a concrete front porch on which rested four steel chairs that bounced on springy legs. My father painted them in pastel colors. On summer nights my mother would make lemonade and we would all sit out there. They would smoke and read the papers and talk to neighbors walking past,” Ebert writes.
“When you entered the house from the front porch, you were in the living room with our fireplace. My father would place tablets on the burning logs that would make the flames burst into colors.” Behind his father’s chair were two bookcases containing best sellers and some modern classics. Connected to the living room was the dining room, which was almost filled by the table, though the table’s center leaves were usually left out so his mother could pull down the built-in ironing board from the wall. A small alcove in the house’s hallway held the family phone, which was a party line at first.
“My bedroom was the one with the window overlooking Maple Street. The walls were pale yellow, the ceiling red. It had a two-way fan, posing the fundamental scientific question, is it more helpful on a hot night to blow cooler air in, or warmer air out.” As a very young child, Ebert played with a toy workbench in his room, hammering pegs into holes. He listened to The Lone Ranger on his own little radio while lying under his bed “for safety,” and from there he scanned his closet with binoculars for the FBI’s most wanted men during another radio show, The FBI in Peace and War. The bookshelf in his room held favorites including "books about Tarzan, Penrod, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Also Huckleberry Finn, the first real book I ever read and still the best.”
In the basement, Ebert operated the Roger Ebert Stamp Company, collecting stamps, placing ten-cent ads in small stamp magazines, and mailing out “approvals” to a few customers he assumes must have been about his age. He shared space downstairs with the TV set, which his mother didn’t want “cluttering up the living room,” plus his father’s workbench, the wringer washing machine, and some reclining aluminum deck chairs. His mother seldom sat down to watch the basement TV, preferring to read the paper and listen to the radio in the kitchen upstairs, but Ebert and his father had a regular schedule of shows they enjoyed together.
Eng says the home’s current owners have preserved key details noted in Ebert’s autobiography, using an overall mid-century modern motif. She notes the “ketchup and mustard” paint colors of Ebert’s childhood bedroom, his mother’s pull-down ironing board in the dining room, and varsity sweaters from Urbana High School where Ebert studied from 1956-1960. In 2009, Urbana officials placed a bronze plaque on the sidewalk in front of the house to honor their famous local son.
Here is the listing, identified as “2 Thumbs Up” on the Airbnb website, followed by three photos of the house, also from the Airbnb website.
Roger Ebert would say that we all star in the movies of our lives. Did your childhood home provide cinematic early scenes, like his did? Or was it more of a background for character and plot? Thinking about your first dwelling in movie terms might spark a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read and post it. Send it to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com, or if you’d rather be interviewed, let us know and we’ll be happy to transcribe your story for you.
Susan
Ebert and wife, Chaz.
Photo: College of Media, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
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The November Greetings can be viewed here:
November 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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Luis Barragán’s Childhood Home
Did your childhood home inform your creative life, and did light and shadow, the volumes of interior and exterior spaces, its acoustics and color make a lasting impression that you repeated in your adult environment? Did these sensory experiences of your childhood home inform your life’s work in other ways? Architectural historians have written that the majority of Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s projects were autobiographical, drawing on aesthetics he embraced early in life from his childhood home environment, suggesting the powerful influence of architecture on one’s psyche and emotions.
On March 9, 1902, Barragán was born in Guadalajara, México, the third child of Juan José Barragán and Ángela Morfín. The family, which eventually grew to nine children, owned large expanses of land including a ranch in the Sierra del Tigre (Tiger Mountains) south of Lake Chapala and Guadalajara.
"My earliest childhood memories are related to a ranch my family owned near the village of Mazamitla. It was a pueblo with hills, formed by houses with tile roofs and immense eaves to shield passersby from the heavy rains which fall in that area. Even the earth's color was interesting because it was red earth. In this village, the water distribution system consisted of great gutted logs, in the form of troughs, which ran on a support structure of tree forks, 5 meters high, above the roofs. This aqueduct crossed over the town, reaching the patios, where there were great stone fountains to receive the water. The patios housed the stables, with cows and chickens, all together. Outside, in the street, there were iron rings to tie the horses. The channeled logs, covered with moss, dripped water all over town, of course. It gave this village the ambience of a fairy tale… there are no photographs. I have only its memory."
Barragán spent the early years of his life on the ranch and developed a passion for horses. He once told a journalist that as a schoolboy, while out riding, he would notice “the play of shadows on the walls, how the afternoon sun gradually got weaker—although it was still light—and how the look of things changed, angles got smaller and straight lines stood out even more.” Barragán was already developing his architectural aesthetic. But the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) significantly impacted his family’s estate, as large properties, including those of his family, were expropriated in the wake of agrarian reforms.
Barragán’s first commissions were private homes in Guadalajara, and the addresses of at least three Barragán-designed houses are readily available. I decided to find those houses and discovered that two of them are in shocking disrepair and not recognizable as his works. Next I visited the Parque de la Revolución, his one major public commission, to see if it suffered the same fate.
The property was a former orchard that belonged to a Carmelite order and, in 1845, the land manager donated it to the city so they could build a penitentiary. But by 1935, the jail was demolished and the space designated as a green area. Barragán was invited to design the park and supervise its construction.
The Parque de la Revolución is popularly known as Parque Rojo, because Barragán decided that red should be the dominant color of its walkways and benches, perhaps symbolizing the blood shed during the revolution. Interestingly, Barragán repeated the triangular shapes seen in the front wall of his childhood home in the walls of the Parque’s children’s playground. Also interesting is the commission itself, given to a man whose family estate and childhood home were altered forever by the Mexican Revolution.
After his design for the Parque Rojo stirred local controversy, in 1935 Barragán left provincial Guadalajara for México City where he lived for the rest of his life. In this rapidly expanding metropolis, Barragán had the opportunity to develop his architectural skills and explore innovative urban concepts. Major projects ranged from apartment buildings to urban plans for upscale residential areas to the Torres de Satélite, five gigantic prism-shapes painted in primary colors and installed on a plaza just west of México City.
México City is the location of perhaps Barragán’s most famous work—his own house, the Casa Estudio de Luis Barragán—often described as an epiphany.
Has your childhood home figured in some important way in your aesthetic life? If so, how? Susan and I would like to know, so if you have a story to share, please email us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you prefer, one of us can interview you, transcribe, and post your story.
Best,
Laurie
Photos:
Vernacular architecture in Los Corrales, the Barragán family ranch in the Sierra del Tigre.
Photo: The Barragán Foundation
The Parque de la Revolución, wall surrounding a children’s playground.
Photo: Laurie McDonald
Luis Barragán in Majahual, México, 1950s (cropped). Photo: Armando Salas Portugal
Torres de Satélite, credit: ProtoplasmaKid / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 4.0
Casa Barragán, México City (photographer unknown)
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The October Greetings can be viewed here:
October 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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When You Have Dementia, You CAN Go Home Again!
Revisiting one’s childhood home can be a bittersweet experience. Some of us enjoyed idyllic, carefree childhoods, and visiting the home where one spent one’s early years can conjure a flood of happy memories. Others of us lived through trauma and misery, and a mere mention of the city in which the house is located can be triggering. Revisiting one’s childhood neighborhood, school, and home can be the last thing a person wants to do. But for sufferers of memory loss, places, experiences, and objects from early life, the time when we forge the strongest memories can have a salutary effect.
In Tom Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again, protagonist George Webber muses, "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood. . . back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." Well, now you can!
It's called reminiscence therapy. And for nearly a decade, it’s been implemented world-wide. Reminiscence therapy uses prompts from a person’s early life to connect to memories that typically are the most well preserved in people living with dementia or Alzheimer’s. People in their 70s and 80s, the age group most commonly afflicted with memory loss, can now live in therapy facilities that look like their childhood hometowns. In a diner lined with photographs of Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn, and other 50s icons, they can listen to music from a table top juke box and dance to their favorite hits, walk to the local movie theatre to see a clip from the 1952 film The Greatest Show on Earth, and play pool in a favorite pub.
“We know dementia makes it hard for patients to remember the recent past, like the last 10 years, whereas the older memories are preserved better for a longer time, especially memories from childhood and early adulthood,” says Dorthe Berntsen, a psychology professor and head of the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research at Aarhus University in Denmark. Her studies have found that dementia patients can engage more when they are exposed to objects from the past. “You want to have an environment that fits the kind of memories that people have,” she says. “It doesn’t cure dementia, of course, but it does provide a context where people have a better connection to their past and to their sense of identity.”1
These environments, usually day care facilities, bring to mind the 1998 film The Truman Show. In the film, the protagonist, played by Jim Carrey, participates unknowingly in a reality TV show and lives in an elaborate movie set, installed in a huge dome, where every element of his life is controlled. In facilities built for dementia patients, the idea is the same. In 2018, a 1950s town square was built in a giant warehouse in Chula Vista, California, and trained aids lead dementia clients through various activities in the town. Featured is an old gas station with a 50s Chevrolet, a clothing store with racks of dresses and shoe displays, a library, 50s and 60s-era graphics on street and store signs. When dementia clients are led through these environments—many of them interactive—visuals from their early lives stimulate memories and create positive feelings and reminiscences.
“. . . if you can take people back to a time when they literally have the ability to be surrounded by prompts from their past, that's shown to reduce agitation, improve mood and improve sleep quality,” said Scott Tarde, CEO of George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers, which runs dementia daycares in the San Diego, California, area.2 The concept is spreading to hundreds of cities throughout the world, each facility tailored to its regional and cultural distinctiveness.
In 2009, one of the first dementia facilities where clients live full-time, called Hogewey, was created on the outskirts of Amsterdam in the small town of Wheesp. About the size of ten football fields, Hogeway has its own town square, theater, garden, and post office and, like The Truman Show, cameras installed throughout the facility monitor residents 24/7. Only one door is available for entering and exiting. Twenty-three residences, created to look like period homes from the 1950s through the 2000s down to the last detail, are furnished and styled according to the occupant’s age and memory. Geriatric nurses, specialists, and caretakers wander the town playing the parts of librarians, post office clerks, cashiers in grocery stores, and waiters, anyone and everyone who populates a “normal” town. Studies show that Hogewey residents “require fewer medications, eat better, live longer, and appear more joyful than those in standard elderly-care facilities.”3
Our childhood homes and the environments in which we grew up can be a source of comfort and connection in our later years, and reminiscence therapy facilities are a way to help people living with dementia and Alzheimer’s create links to their earlier selves. Do you have a friend, relative, or acquaintance with memory issues who lights up when asked about their childhood home?
When you have dementia, you CAN go home again!
Best,
Laurie
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1 Reddy, Sumati. “To Help Alzheimer’s Patients, a Care Center Re-Creates the 1950s.” The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-help-alzheimers-patients-a-care-center-recreates-the-1950s-1537278209
2 Powell, Robert and Pawlawski, A. “Innovative day care recreates 1950s to trigger memories for people with dementia.” Today, April 10, 2018. https://www.today.com/health/dementia-day-care-looks-1950s-stimulate-patients-brains-t126727
3 Planos, Josh. “The Dutch Village Where Everyone Has Dementia.” The Atlantic Monthly, November 14, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-dutch-village-where-everyone-has-dementia/382195/
Photos:
Pamela Givens, a reminiscence therapy guide, leads a group of patients in morning exercises. PHOTO: SANDY HUFFAKER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The "1950s" town square is built in a warehouse in Chula Vista, California, and features an old-school gas station. Courtesy George G. Glenner Alzheimer's Family Centers, Inc.
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The August 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
August 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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Brooke Shields’s Childhood Homes
Recently Laurie and I watched “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields," the 2023 Hulu docuseries by Lana Wilson (trailer below), in which Brooke Shields (b. 1965) tells her own story of work, success, exploitation, struggle for personal agency, and ultimate achievement of control over her life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7KedT6uvus
Her primary relationship was always the one with her adored but mercurial and alcoholic mother, Teri Shields (1933-2012). Teri was her Everything: life-partner, best friend, agent, manager, roommate, travel companion, and sovereign commander. Interest in their unusual bond led me to Brooke Shields’s 2014 memoir, “There Was a Little Girl—The Real Story of My Mother and Me.” And then I got interested in the many homes she and Teri shared before 18-year-old Brooke finally separated from her mother when she moved into a Princeton dorm room in the fall of 1983.
Theresa “Teri” Schmon, from Newark, New Jersey, met Frank Shields at a bar on the Upper East Side of New York City. Son of an Italian-born aristocrat (his mother) and a NYC-born tennis player who was president of the Davis Cup (his father), Frank had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. “Over the course of a year, my mother met my father, got pregnant, married my dad, had me, and got divorced,” Brooke writes about the time between late 1964 and late 1965. Until the marriage broke up, the three of them lived in New York City on East 50th St., at an address I couldn’t discover. Teri preemptively decided to divorce Frank, partly because of her insecurities around her working class New Jersey origins.
Teri and Brooke eventually moved to a rented 7th floor apartment in the 13-story white-brick Morad Diplomat, a 143-unit building at 345 E. 73rd St. between 1st and 2nd Avenues in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of New York City (see photo). Brooke remembers arriving at their new, virtually unfurnished home. “Our first night was spent on a queen-size mattress on the floor, pushed up to the wall. We had sheets, one down pillow, and a large multicolored neon crocheted blanket that my mom had taken from a visit to her mother’s apartment in Newark.” In later years on Halloween, Brooke, in costume, enjoyed hours-long walks from the top penthouse floor to the lobby, filling pumpkin-head buckets with candy from neighbors in the building. She says she did pogo stick shows on the sidewalk in front of the Morad Diplomat. The apartment was home base until Brooke started high school.
The 1961 building is now a co-op, where the five current units for sale there at the time of this writing are listed at prices from approximately $615k to $1.5k (link below).
https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/lenox-hill/morad-diplomat-345-east-73rd-street/983
Young Brooke’s relationship with her father remained solid. She and Teri spent a lot of time in the Hamptons where Frank lived with his new family in the summer. Mother and daughter would stay with friends or relatives, and also rented a room above Herrick Hardware in the town of Southampton (see photo). “It was a very modest space. The tub stood in the kitchen and was covered by a long wooden lid. In order to bathe, one would lift the wooden countertop and fill the tub,” Brooke writes.
By the time she was ten, Brooke was becoming recognized as a young model and actress with a singular look. In 1977, when French filmmaker Louis Malle offered her the lead role in “Pretty Baby," his first American film, she and Teri moved to the “beautiful, fancy” St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans for four arduous months of shooting. Brooke described the cast and crew as a rowdy bunch. She was cast as Violet, the pre-teen daughter of a prostitute. In the movie, Violet’s childhood home is a New Orleans brothel. Despite Teri’s drinking, the long hours, and Teri’s disruptive but successful legal challenges to the work schedule on Brooke’s behalf, Brooke became attached to the cast and crew, who functioned as a sort of family. She writes that she was drained and depressed when she and Teri returned to their former way of life in New York City.
Brooke soon got an offer to be in a movie about pinball called “Tilt,” starring Charles Durning. She and Teri moved to a large ranch-style house in Santa Cruz, California, where she slept on the top bunk of a dark painted pine bunk bed. “Inside the living room sat the promised two pinball machines. … I was thrilled. I played during every free moment and became quite good.” Most of the two-month filming took place around Santa Cruz, with a few locations in Texas. The result, Brooke says, was “a great couple of months and not a great movie.”
“Wanda Nevada,” directed by Peter Fonda was her next film. She described it as a long camping trip along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and also near Page, Arizona. The crew would film during daylight, then raft down the river to a new campsite. “Every night we placed our sleeping bags under the stars and settled in.” Everyone was on the same schedule, a relief to Brooke because Teri's daily behavior tended to be unpredictable. Though her mother’s drinking caused some upheaval, Brooke was happy and felt looked-after and protected by the close-knit crew.
Immediately after “Wanda Nevada” wrapped, Brooke and Teri moved to Los Angeles to film “Just You and Me, Kid” with George Burns. They rented a house in Bel Air. “It sounds fancy, but it was a run-down ranch-style house with a cracked pool and rats that ate the kiwis we had in a bowl on the kitchen table. I thought it was a mansion and was very excited to live in such a posh neighborhood.”
Brooke’s next film, “Blue Lagoon,” directed by Randal Kleiser, necessitated a move to the South Pacific on Turtle Island, near Vanua Levu in Fiji. Brooke had been told she could choose to live on the actual sailing ship that was to be featured in the film, a home that presented itself as very romantic in her imagination, or she could live on land. After discovering that the ship “was ancient and had rats and creaking planks” she opted for a bure, or hut. The bure she and Teri shared was on the beach, and “consisted of a cinder-block square with a standing sink and a partitioned-off toilet. The rafters were big palm tree trunks and the roof was a thatched canopy with a peak” to help rain run down the sides. There were two connecting rooms, each with two twin beds. “This was perfect for when I had friends visit from the States,” she writes. The pair had to adapt to the many challenges of island life, like rats in their roof that Teri had to beat away with a wooden sword, long hours of body painting because Brooke's skin wouldn’t hold a tan, cuts from a coral reef, extreme weather, and no modern conveniences. But even so, when filming ended and they took off on the boat for the mainland, a part of Brooke wanted to stay. The self-contained movie world on Turtle Island was an easier, safer environment for her, and she dreaded being alone again with Teri’s alcoholism in New York.
Soon after shooting “Blue Lagoon,” Teri bought a large Tudor-style home at 440 Haworth Avenue in Haworth, New Jersey (see photo), a 45-minute drive from New York City, and the pair left the Morad Diplomat for good. I couldn’t find a lot of information about this house, beyond a photo. Zillow says it was built in 1932, is about 6000 square feet, and would sell now at an estimated price of about $2M. Brooke enrolled in a new high school, and had to navigate a different social culture, with the added complication of her growing fame. Teri’s drinking continued. Brooke writes, “She hid bottles everywhere and sometimes even forgot where she had hidden them. I would find empty bottles in cowboy boots, behind cereal boxes, in purses at the back of her closet, and wedged in between folded sweaters.”
Towards the end of high school, Brooke set her heart on going to Princeton to realize her lifelong dream of “a college experience” with “old architecture, wise-looking professors, and students carrying books.” At that time, her fantasy was stronger than the idea of education. But her grades were good, she had fallen in love with the campus on a visit, so she applied, interviewed, and was accepted.
Dorm life was a shock at first. “The dorm consisted of three rooms. There were two bedrooms with a bunk bed and two dressers. The common living room had a couch and a big armchair. We would need to get more furniture.” Brooke realized how sheltered she had been when she tried to get used to passing the boys’ rooms on the way to the communal bathroom. Her three roommates stayed up incredibly late every night and left moldy food in the refrigerator she had rented. “The room itself began to be a war zone,” she writes. But an even bigger shock was the homesickness she felt, and how much she missed her mother. She considered returning to live with Teri and commuting to school. Somehow, Teri encouraged her throughout that first year at Princeton. Brooke did well on her exams, her social life smoothed out, and in 1987 she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Romance languages. Hulu’s “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” gives us a fascinating look at Brooke’s long post-college road to self-realization and her brave navigation of it.
How many childhood homes did you have? If you moved a lot, or even “felt at home” in many different places, you have the start of a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would like to add your memories to Our Childhood Homes. Send your story to us at childhoodhomesstories@gmail.com, or start one and email us if you’d like help with writing or editing.
Best,
Susan
The Morad Diplomat, 345 E. 73rd St., NYC
Photo: Condo.com
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Herrick Hardware, 41 Main St., Southampton, NY
Photo: Herrickhardware.com
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Brooke Shield's home
440 Haworth Ave., Haworth, NJ
Photo: Christopher Villano, New Jersey Monthly
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The July 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
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Growing Up in a Commune
After learning about lighthouse childhood homes last month, I began wondering about a very different, almost opposite lifestyle: Growing up
on a modern back-to-the-land commune. While various popular agrarian movements have swept through the world in many different periods, the one some of us remember (and maybe participated in) happened during the 1960s and 1970s in North America. Groups of like-minded people established communes so that they could share their ideals, their work, living spaces, money, skills, and childrearing, and possibly become self-sufficient.
Most of these groups depended upon, and even were inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog which appeared several times a year from 1968 to 1972, and then occasionally until 1998. Its reviews and essays functioned as a countercultural user-generated source for information about products, tools of all kinds, supplies, crafts, plans, and courses of study that could encourage and support a variety of experiments in community interdependence.
Many founders and residents of communes were middle-class, well-educated young people who rejected the values of their parents. They often built their dwellings by hand, eschewing electricity and plumbing. The chance to live their authentic values was usually, at least temporarily, rewarding for them. But their children, who hadn’t participated in the decision to leave mainstream American life behind, often developed complicated feelings around their upbringings. Many have gone on to tell about their experiences in interviews, essays, blogs, articles, and books.
The Farm, known as America’s largest commune, was established in 1971 by Stephen and Ina Mae Gaskin on 1750 acres in rural Tennessee. At its peak, 1500 residents lived there. (It still exists today with around 200 residents and is open to new members.) Ina Mae Gaskin became an expert midwife and established The Farm Midwifery Center in Summertown, TN, which continues to provide prenatal care, workshops in midwifery, and labor coaching in a peaceful environment for giving birth. An extensive and colorful first-person account of childhood on The Farm during its earliest period can be found in this blog, Growing Up on a Hippy Commune, by Celeste, which appears to have been added to over five years (link below).
https://hippycommune.wordpress.com/
Celeste describes events from the point-of-view of her young self, beginning at age 2. Her first clear memory is a feeling of longing to reside in The Farm’s large house instead of her family’s tent on the grounds:
"I stared at the house wishing and wondering what it’d be like to live in one and sleep in a real bed. I had been inside before and could picture the tiny dark hallway with no windows where several bunkbeds were piled together lining both sides of the walls. Those children were so special to live in a house and sleep in those beds. How I longed to be special too.”
In an online Vanity Fair essay dated August 28, 2014 (link below), Erika Anderson, another Farm child, said there was no refrigeration at the compound, but they had telephones and a busy laundromat, for which they had to phone in their reservations for the 15 available spots per day. If you called early enough, you got to wash your household’s clothes, whether you lived in a small family or with 50 other people. She described daily life and the division of work between the men, who worked in the fields or at jobs off the farm, and the women:
"One or two women would look after the kids in their home, make meals and do the laundry if they could. Then they would spend the other days of the week working in the community, outside the home. 'I got to have a varied life,' my mom has said. 'That was one of the things you missed when you moved away. But it was the only thing you missed.’”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/daily-news/2014/08/the-farm-born-on-a-commune
Wild Child—Girlhoods in the Counterculture, a collection of essays edited by Chelsea Cain and published in 1999, contains several good accounts of childhood homes on communes. Cain, who grew up happily on a farm commune in Iowa, says her mother spent an entire summer meticulously sanding multi-colored layers of old paint from the kitchen windows until they “were natural wood again and she began another project: sewing my father a green felt Robin Hood shirt. … My memories of this period are pure and sweet: love and music, dogs and garden vegetables, sunshine and songs. People came and went. … It was all magic to me."
In the same book, Rain Grimes, who grew up in several U.S. communes, writes that she was born on the kitchen table. “When I finally let go of the embarrassment of that beginning enough to admit it to people, the story always elicited the same response: a wrinkle of the nose and the inevitable question 'And you still ate on the table?’” She goes on to tell more about her first home, a tiny cabin with no bathroom. Her parents were both 25 years old, grew most of their own food, raised goats, and made their own dairy products. “I slept with my parents until I was five, drank goats’ milk, and peed in an outhouse, blissfully unaware that the rest of the country didn’t live that way.” Her father built a miniature house on the back of a green 1952 Chevy truck so the family could more easily move from commune to commune in it. Later, he turned a red Dodge van into “his version of a hippie U-Haul camper” with a sleeping platform in the back. “We spent our nights snuggled together on the platform under our one goose down sleeping bag, looking at the stars out the van window and reading The Chronicles of Narnia again and again.”
While looking for longer and more detailed stories of childhoods spent in communes, I came across Sandra Eugster’s 2007 book Notes from Nethers—Growing Up in a Sixties Commune, and I can’t imagine a better account of the challenges, joys, and heartaches that children and members of all ages experienced while trying to design and share a successful communal life. Until she was 7 years old, Sandra lived in a conventional house in Baltimore, “enormous and satisfyingly ornate.” When her parents divorced, her mother Carla decided to bring to fruition her vision of a commune, which she called Future Village. Carla moved Sandra and her two sisters to “a tiny pre-fab log cabin” in rural Southwestern Virginia. “In the dim hut, barely the size of our attic back home, there was one small living room, a bedroom for Mommy, and a galley kitchen. Rachel, Erica, and I shared the other bedroom, a stuffy little chamber with a built-to-order three-bunk bed.”
Prospective commune members began to show up, answering ads Carla had placed in counterculture publications including the Whole Earth Catalog. Work began on a barn. Some of the strangers slept in the living room, one man surprising Sandra with his practice of early-morning nude head-standing. Many of the visitors moved on, but some stayed. Frequent evening meetings to grapple with worldly ills were “heady and fun but I kept wondering when all these people were going to go home and things were going to get back to normal,” she writes about the early days of Future Village.
Soon the group outgrew the Future Village setting, and one of the members found Tranquility Farm only a short distance away, a small idyllic estate with a tiny red house, a pond, two chestnut trees, and a flagpole,” which the group leased for one year in return for maintenance on the property. Three of the adults moved into part of the house, and the rest was turned into a school for the children, who were happy to be set free from the local public school system. School was loosely interpreted at Tranquility Farm, with the adults, called "be-theres" instead of teachers, leading activities of their choice.
Then, just by chance, Carla and another early member found a large house and some land for sale, a site they could never grow out of, about fifteen miles away. Everyone loved the house. “Huge, square, friendly, and open,
it sat atop the hill, surrounded by twenty-seven-and-a-half acres of shaggy fields covered in tall golden grass that rippled and shifted like the sea in the wind.” Luxuriously spacious, “it had been built in grand proportions with oak floors and moldings, huge rooms, high ceilings, and hallways so wide you could drive a small car down them.” Everyone was thrilled when they were able to buy the place, which came to be called Nethers, and they focused all their energies into painting, repairing, and moving in. School became a low priority.
As if they knew there was now plenty of room, more people began arriving. It was 1970 and there was a lot of interest in the lifestyle. Nethers residents started having meals together more frequently, necessitating planning, purchasing groceries, cooking, and cleaning up.
But while the adults were busy all day with chores, projects, and repairs, Sandra and the other children were left free to do whatever they wanted to, and the lack of structure was disconcerting to her. She yearned for a stable life with her middle-class father. His infrequent visits were uncomfortable. Seen through his eyes, she suddenly perceived their unconventional life away from him as “tacky and primitive. What Mommy had presented as a magical adventure suddenly seemed like plain craziness.”
Notes from Nethers is a wonderful cultural history in addition to being a painstaking and well written account of what it felt like to be a part of the idealistic back-to-the-land movement during its peak in the 1960s and 1970s. We get to know the commune’s assorted human (and some animal) members and follow their often failed efforts to achieve the ideal of a shared self-sufficient life together. We also learn about their dramatic interpersonal dynamics which led to the end of the experiment, what happened to Sandra and her family when the whole collective suddenly fell apart, and the lasting effects on Sandra of the group's ambitious but often unsound way of life.
Did you or someone you know live in a commune-like home during childhood? If you did, your story would be fascinating to many of us who had conventional early lifestyles. And if you know someone who grew up in a collective or commune who might be open to talking about it, of course Laurie and I would love to have a chance to interview this person! Contact us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Susan
Current website of The Farm Community in Summertown, Tennessee:
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Growing Up in a Lighthouse
Looking around in my desk the other day, I found a sheet of pretty U.S. postage stamps labeled “Mid-Atlantic Lighthouses—Seventh in a Series” and immediately wondered what it would be like to grow up in a lighthouse. But I was disappointed to learn that no one has done this in the United States since the 1980s because all American lighthouses are now automated and unmanned (except for Boston Light, which retains volunteer “keepers” who really function as a tour guides). Fortunately, there is a huge amount of easy-to-find information to satisfy curiosity about this unique style of childhood home, including books, memoirs, histories, articles, photographs, logs, diaries, and interviews. One excellent source is Elinor De Wire’s 1995 book, “Guardians of the Lights—Stories of U.S. Lighthouse Keepers."
According to the latest information from the United States Lighthouse Society, there are currently 779 standing lighthouses in 31 of 50 states, and Michigan claims the most: more than 115. There are two right here in Chicago! American lighthouses intrigue us with their 300-year history of saving lives, their architecture, and what we imagine it would be like to live in one. It’s easy to romanticize a childhood spent in or near one of these iconic beacons that are essential for safe water navigation. But in most cases, the life of a lighthouse family was one of constant work, danger, perilous rescues, occasional deprivation, and isolation. The first American lighthouse, built in 1716, was at Boston on Little Brewster Island. Its keeper, his wife, and their daughter drowned while returning from the mainland to the island in 1718.
Married men with families were preferred for lighthouse keeping positions because they were considered more stable, and additional people on site meant more help with the work. Some lighthouses were/are located on the mainland, and even though the job required 24-hour attention, keepers lived relatively “normal” lives in traditional houses attached to or near the lighthouse itself. They could buy their supplies easily, get medical help, and send their children to local schools.
The Project Archeology website features a story about Wilma Daniels, who, as a child, lived at the St. Augustine, Florida, light station where her father was the keeper until 1943. She and her brother had to do chores before they could play. They cleaned (electric) lantern windows, cared for the animals and garden, and washed floors. But because they were not far from town, she attended school, enjoyed a normal social life, used the library, went to the doctor, saw movies, and when she was a teenager she had a job at Woolworth’s in downtown St. Augustine. As an adult, she visits the lighthouse any time she wants to. In this 2021 story from the St. Augustine Record, Daniels reminisces about her childhood, and a photo shows her wearing a tiara and climbing the St. Augustine station’s 219 steps on her 90th birthday.
The most adventurous and even death-defying jobs were in light stations located on rocks or islands separated from the mainland, sometimes by miles. Stannard Rock Light in Lake Superior is 24 miles off the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the most distant from shore of all U.S. lighthouses. For a time in the late 19th century, the Lighthouse Service was reluctant to let wives and children live at remote offshore rock-based lighthouses like Stannard. Islands were considered less harsh, since a boat could be anchored, and there was ground for a garden and for pasturing a cow.
Accounts of adults who spent their childhoods at remote lighthouses emphasize the pride the families felt about their serious responsibilities and hard work, especially before electricity. Everyone helped to remove salt spray, bird droppings, smoky film, and ice buildup from the oil lamps, maintenance which could be dangerous in high winds. They kept daily weather logs. Supply vessels, or “tenders” brought food and water only infrequently. Children helped with bell ringing, scraping and painting inside and outside, and hauling coal and water for the boilers. At foggy stations, babies learned to sleep with the incessant din of fog horns. Many families lived with few comforts or conveniences, sometimes without plumbing. Parents constantly feared that their children would drown, and often attached them to the building with ropes while they played outside. Lighthouse residents weathered terrifying storms and repaired damage with no outside help. Prompt medical care was often an impossibility, so children died of accidents or illnesses they would have survived if they’d lived in more traditional homes.
Many children at remote stations were taken by boat to the mainland and spent the week going to school in town, returning to the lighthouse on weekends. Some mothers rowed their children to shore on school days, and picked them up there after classes. One boy who lived at Cape Neddick station off York, Maine, traveled to the mainland for school every day in a wooden box the size of a laundry basket which slid to shore on a sort of zip line about 50 feet above the turbulent channel.
When getting the children to town for school wasn’t possible, they received their education through “correspondence courses” and home-schooling. In many cases a valiant traveling teacher lived with the family for a few weeks, and then moved on to the next lighthouse family after handing over some teaching materials to the parents. Beginning in 1876, the government supplied wooden library boxes holding about 50 books for all ages and interests. The boxes were made of oak, featured locks and keys, and functioned as pieces of furniture. They were traded for new boxes brought four times per year by a supply tender.
Kids are kids everywhere, and lighthouse life offered all kinds of opportunities for fun. The tower itself, with its beautiful lighted lens, was an excellent lookout spot and even observatory. Families could easily view stars, planets, and spectacular astronomical events like comets. Children roller skated on the large platforms around some lighthouses, and in locations with milder weather, like California and Florida, they enjoyed hours of beachcombing, rowing, fishing, and swimming. Young residents became intimately familiar with every rock, pool, plant, and natural formation on the grounds and could be so tuned in to the rhythms of the light that they were the first to notice something amiss. I read that many lighthouse children never wished to be away from the seas or lakes, and settled close to water as adults.
If you live anywhere near a shoreline, it’s easy to find a lighthouse to tour. And if you google “lighthouse hotels,” you can find some nice retired lighthouses to stay in. Husband Mark and I visited Kenosha (Southport) Lighthouse which was opened as a maritime museum in 2010, and is about 65 miles north of Chicago in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The 1866 lighthouse tower is separate from the keeper’s residence (a normal house), and both have been lovingly restored. The highlight of the house/museum is a jewel-like 4th Order Fresnel lens, a size appropriate for lakes, on the second floor. The highlight of the tower is climbing its 72-step spiral staircase and experiencing the view of Kenosha Harbor, and even Chicago on a clear day.
Did you ever dream of living in a lighthouse, or other exciting non-traditional home? What details of your actual childhood home did you consider too run-of-the-mill, or ordinary? What would you have preferred? Contrasting an imaginary home with the one you grew up in might call up a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would like to have yours. Send it to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com, or contact us if you’d like to be interviewed instead. We’ll transcribe your words and write your story for you!
Best,
Susan
Photos of the Kenosha (Southport) Lighthouse by Susan Matthews
Top left: Mark Pascale at the Kenosha (Southport) Lighthouse tower
Top right: 4th Order Fresnel lens in the house/museum
Bottom: Spiral staircase in the tower
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The May 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
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Nina Simone’s Birthplace and Childhood Home
Last month I got a surprise text from my friend Jenn, who was staying at her own childhood home in North Carolina, with the news that she, her husband, and her mother had visited the house where Nina Simone (1933-2003) was born and had lived during her earliest years. Jenn included in-the-moment photos of the small white frame house at 30 E. Livingston Street in Tryon, NC. The three of them had listened to Simone's music on their drive to Tryon, then parked in front and spent time alone on the grounds where they noticed the blooming wisteria and took the opportunity to walk around the locked building and peek into its windows. There is a simple oval plaque on the front of the house with the number 30 and the words “Eunice Waymon Birthplace” (see photo).
Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on February 21, 1933, the prodigiously talented and influential singer changed her name to Nina Simone in 1954 so that her religious mother who disapproved of secular music wouldn’t know she was playing piano in an Atlantic City nightclub. Eunice was the sixth child (of eight) born to Kate Waymon, a Methodist preacher and housecleaner, and John Divine Waymon, a barber, dry cleaner, trucker, entrepreneur, handyman, and entertainer.
The 660 square foot house with no running water was a tight fit for the then family of seven, but it featured two stoves and a big yard where they could grow vegetables and keep chickens, with a fence in the back that separated it from a pasture where neighbors kept a cow. One stove was in the kitchen, and the other one warmed the living room where the children usually slept. At bath time, they heated a tub of water on top of the living room stove, a risky process that once burned and permanently scarred Nina’s older brother John Irvin.
Mother Kate and her friends used the front porch and steps as their visiting spot. Older sister Dorothy also claimed the steps as her private domain where she set up her play classroom and instructed her dolls. Next door, the Lyle family had a tennis court and established a playground in their yard for the neighborhood children to enjoy. Across the street was Mr. Lyle’s store which Eunice’s father rented after it closed. He opened a dry cleaning shop there which he named the “Waymon Pressing Club."
The house was filled with musical talent, and little Eunice was the star. At eight months, she could hum “Down By the Riverside,” and “Jesus Loves Me.” All the Waymon children sang in the church choir and some of them played instruments, but Eunice was the only prodigy. When she was two and a half, she could climb onto the piano stool at church and play hymns. By the time she was six, she was the regular pianist for the congregation.
The family insisted on encouraging Eunice's genius. In Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography of Nina Simone, “Princess Noire,” sister Dorothy talks about the extra consideration Eunice received. “'She was preserved,” Dorothy remembered, exempted from the typical chores, washing dishes and the like. ‘Her fingers were protected. She was always special in that way. Nobody was jealous. We adored her.’” Eunice went with her mother on preaching trips and the tiny musician impressed all of her audiences. Later, the whole town of Tryon took pride in Eunice’s talent, and two white women residents set up a fund so that she could continue her early piano study with local piano teacher Muriel Mazzanovich.
At first, the family had an organ at home. (Last month Jenn saw a similar instrument through the window of the house in Tryon, see photo.) Later, the Waymons got a piano that became the center of the family. Eunice’s father encouraged her to learn and play “worldly music” including her favorite, boogie-woogie, but he would be on the lookout for her mother’s arrival home so she wouldn’t get caught.
Nina Simone was one of the great singers of her generation and a powerful campaigner for civil rights. And her birthplace in Tryon was deteriorating. Wishing to honor the historical significance of the house, and with a vision of turning it into a museum, Kevin McIntyre, a former economic director for Polk County, NC, bought it in 2005. He consulted with Simone’s brother Carrol for information about period details, and spent $100,000 to get it back to its 1930s state, but ran into money difficulties. Laura Hoptman, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and owner of a small farm in the area, contacted artist Adam Pendleton who jumped on the chance to take over the restoration project.
In 2017, Pendleton and three other prominent Black American artists, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, and Ellen Gallagher, bought the house for $95,000 to preserve the historic birthplace and to bring Nina Simone's exceptional legacy into focus. Read about the purchase and ongoing plans for the site in this 2022 New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/t-magazine/nina-simone-childhood-home.html
The official Nina Simone Childhood Home website can now be found on the National Trust for Historic Preservation website, as part of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (link below).
https://savingplaces.org/places/ninasimone
Pendleton, Johnson, Mehretu, and Gallagher will present a multi-faceted event to support their restoration and preservation work on Nina Simone’s birthplace from 6:00-10:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 20, 2023, at Pace Gallery, 540 W. 25th St., New York. Hosted by the four artists and tennis legend Venus Williams, the dinner/gala will be accompanied by an online auction of contemporary art from May 12-22, with in-person viewing of the works at Pace Gallery on the night of the event. For more information about attending the gala, a link to the Pace Gallery website is below. Take a look at the short video that shows the house’s interior and hints at the vision for its future.
https://www.pacegallery.com/nina-simone/
While few if any of us will experience the official historic preservation of our childhood homes, it’s fun to consider the way we’d each like to have our important early dwelling presented to the public. What period of the home's existence is the most personally significant? What aspects would need to be restored to look like they did in a previous time? Do we have access to the earliest photos of the building to help with the restoration? How would we find furniture, fabrics, and other appointments that would bring the home back to its most “historic" state? Thinking about these issues could bring up a good childhood home story. If you would like to share yours, send it to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com, or let us know if you’d like to be interviewed instead. We’ll be happy to transcribe your story for you.
Best,
Susan
Photos by Jenn Ramsey, Tryon, NC, March 21, 2023
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The April 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
April 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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Jimmy Carter’s Childhood Farm
On November 3, 1976, the morning after the first presidential election I ever voted in, I was a student at Ohio State University and living in Columbus without a TV, radio, or newspaper. To find out the results, I dialed “0,” asked a bemused telephone operator, and was happy to learn that my candidate, Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), had been declared the winner at 3:30 a.m.
We all soon became familiar with the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. He is now 98 years old, and back in the news because of his recent transition to hospice care.
The farm where Jimmy grew up is just outside of Plains, and has been part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park since 2000. The preserved and restored complex (boyhood farm, visitor center, and town railroad depot) is run by the National Park Service, and open daily, with free admission and free parking for visitors (see link below). Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s current private residence is also on the grounds and not open to the public.
https://www.nps.gov/jica/index.htm
Jimmy and his younger sister Gloria (1926-1990) were born in Plains to James Earl Carter, Sr., known as “Earl," (1894-1953), and Lillian Gordy Carter (1898-1983), known as “Miss Lillian.” After Gloria was born, Lillian’s 14-year-old sister, Emily Gordy Dolvin, known as “Aunt Sissy," (1912-2006), moved in with the family and attended Plains High School while helping to take care of the children. Surprisingly, their first family home in Plains was next door to Jimmy's future wife Rosalynn’s home when she was a baby. Two more siblings, Ruth Carter Stapleton (1929-1983), and Billy Carter (1937-1988) were born after the move to the farm.
In 1928 Earl bought a 360-acre farm three miles outside of Plains in a small community called Archery. When Earl took the young family to see their new house for the first time, the front door was locked and he had forgotten to bring the key. “Daddy" slid 4-year-old Jimmy through a 6” window opening and the boy unlocked the door from the inside. “The approval of my father for my first useful act has always been one of my most vivid memories,” Jimmy writes in “An Hour Before Daylight," an eloquent and detailed 2001 memoir of his early life.
Jimmy’s most persistent impression as a farm boy was of the earth. “The soil caressed my bare feet, and the dust was always boiling up from the dirt road that passed 50 feet from our front door, so that inside our clapboard house the red clay particles, ranging in size from face powder to grits, were ever present, particularly in the summertime, when the wooden doors were kept open and the screens just stopped the trash and some of the less adventurous flies.” During the hot months from April to September, Jimmy seldom wore shoes or a shirt.
The house was square, “painted tan to match the dust,” had a wide front porch with a swing, a screened porch extending across the back of the house, and a split-shingle roof. It was laid out in “shotgun” style with a hall in the middle dividing the living room, dining room, and kitchen on the left from three bedrooms on the right. Jimmy remembers his father napping after mid-day dinner on the floor of the front porch. “I relished lying beside him as a little boy, long before I could do useful work in the fields.”
Peter G. Bourne, in “Jimmy Carter,” his thorough 1997 biography of the 39th president, describes the interior of the house. “Inside the walls were painted green and the floors were covered with linoleum, except in the living room, where there was a wool rug.” High ceilings made of beaverboard sagged in places. Jimmy slept on an iron bed in an unheated room in the northeast corner of the house. “The children were forbidden to touch the chifforobe in their parents’ bedroom where Earl kept his pistol and razor blades in the top drawer."
There was no electricity in the early years. Jimmy writes that the family used kerosene lamps, and never let one burn unless necessary. They had an Aladdin lamp about five feet high with an asbestos wick that provided bright enough light for reading in a large span of the living room. They listened to a battery powered radio there, used sparingly and only at night, while Earl sat in his large red chair with ottoman. If the battery ran down during a special event, they would hook up the battery from the pickup truck to keep it playing.
The house was surrounded by a white sand-covered yard that was swept to keep it free of fowl and animal droppings, and leaves from pecan, magnolia, mulberry, and chinaberry trees. The yard’s surface was replenished several times a year with sand from a pit that was about three miles away. On one side of the house was a small pecan grove, managed by Miss Lillian to provide her with spending money. Behind the house were a garage (never used for a car), a chicken house, a smoke house, and a large woodpile. Earl laid out a tennis court, the only one in the area, between the house and his small commissary store. A garden where the family’s vegetables were grown was next to the tennis court. Earl was proud of his large symmetrical barn and the pens for livestock, located beyond the garden. A blacksmith/carpenter shop for repairing equipment and making implements was near the barn.
Family laundry was done in a large iron pot outside. Miss Lillian and the girls washed their hair with rainwater from a drum attached to an outdoor shower. The family and workers hand-pumped water from a well in the yard. Jimmy remembers his strenuous everyday chore of keeping extra buckets of water in the kitchen and on the back porch. “It was a great day for our family in 1935 when Daddy purchased from a catalog and erected a windmill with a high wooden tank and pipes that provided running water for the kitchen and a bathroom with toilet.”
Beyond the well (and before the windmill was installed) was an outdoor privy with a large hole for adults and a lower, smaller one for children. Bedroom “slop jars” were emptied there each morning. Jimmy says, “We wiped with old newspapers or pages torn from Sears, Roebuck catalogs.”
Constant wood-sawing and chopping was necessary to supply the cooking stove and two fireplaces. During the winter, Jimmy’s "worst job was getting up in the morning to start a fire going somewhere in the frigid house.” He and Gloria would put on their clothes in their parents bedroom where a fire was lit at dawn.
The family could recognize by sound most of the local vehicles passing the house, and there was usually someone out in the yard, at the commissary store, in the garden, or in a nearby field who would note the comings and goings of the small community. Blacks and whites lived and worked closely together, but Jimmy says, “I grew up in one of the families whose people could not forget that we had been conquered [in the Civil War], while most of our neighbors were black people whose grandparents had been liberated in the same conflict.” Though their daily lives in the farm community were intertwined, the two races were kept apart by social custom, different interpretations of the Bible, and even the law of the land.
At the peak of its operations, as many as 260 black field hands and tenant farmers were employed on the farm, growing cotton, corn, sugar cane, and peanuts, the dominant crop of the area. The farm also produced hams, sausage, syrup, lard, soap, and wool blankets, all sold in Earl’s store, a short distance from the house, which was open on Saturdays (payday). If someone wanted to buy something from the store at dinner time, Jimmy had to interrupt his meal and walk over to make the sale.
As a child, Jimmy’s main playmates were the sons of Archery farm families and they spent time at each other’s homes. Miss Lillian differed from most white mothers because she let Jimmy's black friends eat in the kitchen with him. She also helped any passing traveler or vagrant who needed food. When she asked a group of vagrants why they never visited the neighbors’ houses, one of them told her there was a mark on the Carter mailbox post that meant they would be helped if they knocked there. Miss Lillian and the children went out and saw some “unobtrusive scratches" on the post; she did not remove them. Outspokenly inclusive and pro-integration, she later became a civil rights activist and joined the Peace Corps at age 68.
Carter’s memoir, “An Hour Before Daylight,” is practically a re-creation of his Depression era boyhood, so much richer than this quick sketch, with precise memories of his daily life, farming techniques, and education, plus fascinating portraits of eccentric relatives and the five important adults who prepared him for his life of service. He delves into the intricacies of the relations between the community’s two races, which determined his strong future principles of anti-discrimination and human rights. It’s a good companion book to Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s “Little Heathens,” which I wrote about in January. Both books are fascinating chronicles of a transformational era by skillful writers who are exact contemporaries.
How did the the greater environment and community around your childhood home affect your time there? Memories of playmates, adjacent buildings, or the flora and fauna of the neighborhood might bring up a good personal childhood home narrative. If you’d like to write one, we’d like to post it. Send it to Laurie and me at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com, or we’re happy to interview you and transcribe your story for you.
Best,
Susan
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Early photo of Jimmy Carter’s childhood home, from “An Hour Before Daylight.” The restored Carter farm and store. Photo by National Park Service.
The March 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
March 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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Garth Brooks’s Childhood Home
Driving on the Oklahoma stretch of Interstate 40 from Amarillo back to Chicago last month with husband Mark at the wheel, we passed a sign telling us that Yukon, OK (just northwest of Oklahoma City) is the "home of Garth Brooks," and then we zipped past Exit 136 for Garth Brooks Boulevard. I was excited when a quick Google search gave us Garth’s childhood address, only seven minutes into town from the exit, but Mark was in a hurry to get home and wanted to keep going. After I bribed him with a Whataburger® at Exit 142, he agreed to turn around and look for the house.
Exit 136 takes you past a Kentucky Fried Chicken, a Waffle House, and a T-Mobile store as you turn onto Garth Brooks Boulevard. This is the main thoroughfare through Yukon, and was originally known as 11th Street, State Highway 92, and Cemetery Road. In 1992, five years into Garth’s massively successful music career, the Yukon City Council renamed the road to honor its most famous son.
Garth’s childhood home stands at 408 Yukon Avenue, in a subdivision of late-1960s-era houses, all about 1500 square feet, many of them split-level with single-car garages, like Garth’s (see photo). More photos of the house can be seen on Zillow (link below), along with a short description that tells us there are three bedrooms and a full bath, a half-bath downstairs, plus two patios and a storage building in the back yard. The estimated selling price is around $166k. You can see that the house hadn’t been updated extensively when the pictures of the empty rooms were taken, seemingly in 2017 at the last sale. White vertical blinds and mini blinds hang at the windows. White cabinets, white appliances, and a corner sink comprise the small, traditional, island-free kitchen. Black curvy metal 1960s balusters support a simple stair rail on the upper level, where a ceiling fan is visible.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/408-Yukon-Ave-Yukon-OK-73099/52535651_zpid/
Garth, who’s full name is Troyal Garth Brooks, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on February 7, 1962, to Troyal Raymond Brooks (1931-2010) and Colleen Carroll Brooks (1929-1999). Colleen was a country singer with Capitol Records in the 1950s, and for a short time appeared as a regular on Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee, a country music television show produced in Springfield, Missouri, that ran on ABC TV for six seasons beginning in 1955. Colleen became a full-time mom after her brief singing career. Troyal, an ex-marine, worked as an engineer and draftsman for the Union 76 Oil Company, and enjoyed playing guitar and singing as a hobby.
When his parents married in 1957, Colleen had two sons and a daughter, and Troyal had one son. The couple produced two more sons. Garth was the youngest of the six kids. In 1966, when Garth was 4 years old, the blended Brooks family moved to Yukon, essentially a suburb of Oklahoma City, with a population of around 10,000 at the time, though it’s grown to 24,000 now. In “Garth Brooks, Platinum Cowboy” by Edward Morris (1993), Garth describes his childhood house as “just totally cool. You could live in the house. You could try things—stretch your imagination. It was a house you could make mistakes in.” The family had weekly talent nights, or “funny nights” when each child would do a skit, tell jokes, or sing songs. As the youngest, Garth participated from the time he was in diapers.
“It is to Colleen and Raymond’s credit that there was never a division among the children, just one big happy family,” says author Patsy Bale Cox in “The Garth Factor” (2009). As the youngest of six, "Garth grew up with both adoration and a healthy sense of competition.” He wanted to make people happy, and enjoyed being the center of attention. They all loved holidays. On Halloween, Colleen would dress up as a witch and tell ghost stories. “The Christmas tree went up right after Thanksgiving, and Colleen admitted it was usually dead by the time they took it down.”
The family listened to many styles of mainstream music, and all the siblings played the guitar, the harmonica, or the kazoo. Garth benefitted from the influence of the seven other family members’ tastes, including his parents' love of classic Grand Ole Opry stars, his older sister's and brothers’ records by Janis Joplin, Rita Coolidge, Three Dog Night, and Steppenwolf, and his own appreciation of Townes van Zandt, Boston, Kansas, Queen, ELO, Styx, James Taylor, Dan Fogelburg, Elton John, and Billy Joel. But his most personal early influence was George Strait, whose single “Unwound,” heard on the car radio, made Garth realize this was the kind of music he wanted to create.
It’s easy to imagine young Garth listening to music for hours, working out guitar chords, and singing with his siblings in the bedrooms shown in the Zillow listing. As he grew up, his weekly talent night performances started to include dialogue, jokes, and even simple plots, showing his developing understanding of the basics of entertaining. Later on, his half-sister Betsy Smittle (1953-2013) played bass guitar and sang with Garth’s band, Stillwater, from 1990-1995.
If you’re interested in seeing the beginnings of the Garth Brooks mystique, here is a funny 1989 local Nashville talk show video, recorded as 27-year-old Garth was just emerging into stardom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUwn4ypINCg
There is endless information out there about Garth’s career, which naturally has eclipsed the years he spent in his childhood home. After 16 studio albums, 2 live albums, and 51 singles that made him the best selling solo artist in U.S. history, hundreds of concerts, a divorce and storybook marriage to Trisha Yearwood, a couple of “retirements,” plus 13 Grammy nominations and 2 wins, Garth says 2023 will be "our busiest year ever.” In May, 2023 he’ll begin a new headlining Las Vegas residency called “Garth Brooks/Plus ONE” at The Coliseum at Caesars Palace, a 4100 seat venue. Demand for tickets ($180 to $8999) has been so great that the residency was extended through 2024.
Garth's modest childhood house gives us a sense of what it must have been like for him and his siblings as they grew up on Yukon Avenue, nobody realizing yet that there was a superstar-in-training among them. Did your childhood home atmosphere shape the adult you are today? How did that environment contribute to all you’ve accomplished in your own life? The answers to these questions might stimulate a good childhood home story. To share it, email us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. We can also interview you and transcribe your words, if writing is not your medium!
Best,
Susan
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Photo: Susan Matthews
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The February 2023 Greetings can be viewed here:
February 2023 Greetings (wix.com)
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“Little Heathens”
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
“Little Heathens” (2008), a book by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (b. 1922), is a childhood home masterpiece I’ve been recommending and giving away for years. (Amazon tells me I have bought eight copies since 2011.) The subtitle is “High Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.” Kalish, a retired professor of English who specialized in expository writing, has created a sparkling account of how it felt to grow up exactly where and when she did.
Her story begins with a mystery: her father was banished from the family for reasons that were never explained to then-5-year-old Mildred and her three siblings. Around 1930, her mother’s frugal, hardworking parents, who were retired and living in Garrison, Iowa, and who owned four farms nearby, took responsibility for the family of five, settling them on their smallest farm, located about seven miles from Vinton, Iowa. But because the farm’s rural location made it hazardous for the children to walk to the local school during harsh Iowa winters, each year the family spent January through mid-May living with Grandma and Grandpa Umry in Garrison, and finishing the school year in town. Relatives of all ages lived near both of the children’s homes, and they also populate “Little Heathens” with their original stories and viewpoints.
The Umry house in Garrison was spacious, with eight large rooms. However, the seven members of the family spent most of their waking hours in the kitchen and living room because they were the only heated rooms. The freezing upstairs bedrooms were used just for sleeping. Mildred writes that Grandma and Grandpa put the kids under constant surveillance and “were critical about how we spent our days, how we spoke and dressed, and how we behaved.” The elders gave them many new rules to follow. “The whole family had to go to bed at a set time every night, and get up at a set time every morning. We all had to be fully dressed for the day before we ate breakfast. We all had to sit down at a properly set table three times a day and we all had to eat what was served on that table.” They were allowed no say in matters of food, and anything they didn’t finish was put aside and served to them at the next meal.
Mildred’s grandparents’ austere lifestyle had allowed them to acquire four debt-free farms in very hard times, but the severity of their imposed habits seemed unfair to the children, who didn’t understand the financial burden of property taxes, and the threat of that era’s disastrous economy. As an adult, Mildred came to understand how scared the Umrys must have been when they suddenly became responsible for their daughter and four young grandchildren at the beginning of the Great Depression.
However, life changed completely each year in mid-May when Mildred’s mother and siblings left the Garrison house for the country, a welcome break from the strictness of the Umrys. At the farm, her overwhelmed mother “didn’t mind when we went to bed or rose in the morning, if it was not a school day. She didn’t care what, when, or if we ate. She didn’t object if, in my nightgown, I trotted out to the henhouse to gather a couple of eggs and then, still in my nightgown, cooked a fried egg breakfast and ate it sitting outside on the sunny cellar door with my favorite cat.” At dinner their mother dumped food and utensils in the middle of the table and let the kids serve themselves, until, at about age 8, Mildred established a more regular cooking schedule.
Farm chores (gardening, harvesting, shocking oats, husking corn, canning, milking, feeding animals, and gathering nuts, berries, and honey) were required, but the children were allowed to create their own routines for their work days. When she grew up, Mildred was grateful for the impressive stores of knowledge and ingenuity she had acquired on the farm, where their world was the whole outdoors. She says that under their mother’s “lenient, perhaps even negligent dominion, we kids felt unburdened” every summer during the months they spent away from their grandparents.
“Little Heathens” toggles back and forth between the siblings’ regimentation in Garrison and their freedom on the farm. With admiration and respect for her grandparents’ ability to stretch every last bit of usefulness from everything, Mildred writes about their epic thrift: sock darning, DIY dentistry, collar- and cuff-turning, egg shampoo, homegrown cosmetics (tomatoes and oatmeal were used to soften their skin), and catalog pages or corncobs used as toilet paper. Household cleaning supplies consisted of vinegar, Bon Ami, cream of tartar, baking soda, table salt, and mops handcrafted from strips of old socks. “Recycling was second nature.” All threads, strings, buttons, jars, bags, bottles, paper bags, and tin cans were re-used, along with cooking grease, and even the previous year’s calendar, which they rolled up, tied a ribbon around the middle, and hung in the closet for another shirt hanger.
In the summers, as “free-range farm children,” Mildred and her siblings routinely experienced injuries like knife and axe cuts, stone bruises, blood blisters, and oozing scrapes, which never seemed to perturb the adults in their lives. The kids simply “went to the barn or corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound” to stop the bleeding and pain. They applied a chaw of tobacco to especially deep cuts. In the chapter titled “Medicine,” Mildred explains dozens of effective (and ineffective) treatments and remedies, and acknowledges that “some of the home cures we used sound like voodoo.” She had remarkable success removing warts from a neighbor boy’s hands by following her Aunt Belle's instructions and placing a peeled raw potato on a stone in the road, stomping it flat, and leaving it there. The crucial part of the cure was everyone's agreement to not look at the stone or visit the site for two weeks. By the fourteenth day, the boy's hands were clear.
Chapter 16, “Outhouses,” will answer all your questions about them, and some you didn’t know you had. School days come alive, thanks to Mildred’s remarkable memory for lessons, teachers, special events, and social dynamics. She describes the family’s social life, holidays, religious gatherings, scandals, practical jokes, gravesites, recipes, their pragmatic relationships with farm animals, and the beauty of Iowa though the seasons with so much brio that your own early years will seem notably run-of-the-mill.
I can’t remember how I discovered “Little Heathens,” but maybe I first read about it in Elizabeth Gilbert’s enthusiastic New York Times review (link below).
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Gilbert-t.html
I’ve touched on only a a tiny sample of what Mildred, who is now 100 years old, remembers and shares in her remarkable book. The overall experience of reading it is like spending time with a delightful, perceptive companion who can remember and tell you about her fascinating childhood with crystal verisimilitude. You will miss her company when you’ve finished it.
Can you recall any quirky family customs, unique recipes, or unusual childhood chores? A single detail might open a store of memories about where and how you grew up, and provide the start of a childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read and post your story. Send it to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com or if you prefer not to write it, let us know if you’d like to be interviewed, and we’ll go from there.
Best,
Susan
Photo: randomhousebooks.com
Photo of Mildred Armstrong Kalish by Doug Kalish
Stephen Colbert's Childhood Home
Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show” on CBS since 2015, and star of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” from 2005-2014, grew up in two very different homes near and in Charleston, South Carolina.
His parents, James and Lorna Colbert, were childhood sweethearts and devout Roman Catholics who married in 1944 and had 11 children, 9 of whom lived to adulthood. Stephen, born in 1964, was the youngest. James embarked on a successful medical career, eventually working for the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C. In 1969, when Stephen was 5, James took a position as the first vice president for academic affairs at the Medical University of South Carolina. The family moved to 728 Willow Lake Rd. on rural James Island, South Carolina, which is near the Atlantic coast in the Charleston metropolitan area.
The family worked to acclimate to smaller-town life in the South. In Lisa Rogak’s 2011 biography of Colbert, “And Nothing But the Truthiness,” Stephen describes the extreme change from Washington D.C.: “James Island was like moving to the moon. It was very sleepy, with dogs sleeping in the street. … It had dirt roads and some really ramshackle neighborhoods where the black people still lived, essentially in houses where their ancestors had been slaves. And there were cotton fields and peanut fields and tomato sheds.” Catholics were considered “strange people.” Businesses were closed on Sunday because of strict blue laws. In the grocery store parking lot, a woman told Lorna, “It was perfectly fine before all you Yankees got here.” Billboards advertised the Ku Klux Klan.
But Stephen’s father loved his new job, the family was drawn into the culture of MUSC, and soon they began to feel at home in the Charleston area. Stephen, however, decided soon after arriving in South Carolina that he would not have a southern accent. “Because when I was a kid watching TV, if you wanted to use a shorthand that someone was stupid, you gave the character a southern accent.” He wanted to seem smart, so he patterned his speech after news reporters and anchors.
In this 30-second video, Stephen talks about life on James Island, and you can hear an unaccustomed touch of southern accent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yMI0ZZ1Zz0
The family’s life changed forever on September 11, 1974, when James Colbert and Stephen’s older brothers Peter and Paul were killed in an Eastern Airlines commuter plane crash near Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina. The three were on their way to the boys’ new boarding school in Connecticut. Ten-year-old Stephen was the only child still living at home. Rogak writes, “Overnight, the home on James Island had gone from a raucous, chaotic, busy mix of two parents, three smart, rambunctious boys, and frequent visits from nearby siblings to an unearthly quiet house that contained one grieving mother and a traumatized, hurting child.”
Stephen and his mother stayed one more year on James Island before moving to 39 E. Battery in downtown Charleston, a short distance but a world away. (The Colbert home on James Island is no longer there. A quick google of the address now shows a newish, nondescript, white 4400 sq. ft. frame house with an estimated selling price of $1.2 million.)
Stephen hated leaving all his boyhood friends and neighbors, especially at that time of mourning. Their new home on “the Peninsula,” as downtown Charleston is called, was and still is known as the George Chisholm House, a 6000 sq. ft. Federal-style building with five bedrooms and a carriage house in the back. Designed by the famous Scottish architect Robert Adam and constructed in 1810, it was the first house built on the landfill project that formed Charleston’s Battery (defensive sea wall) and was recognized as a historic showcase for a 19th century 3-D molded decorative art form called composition ornament. Above one of the six fireplaces in the home is a scene of Cupid bound by the Graces, and the dining room mantel is decorated with a relief of a boar hunt.
Stephen’s mother ran a bed and breakfast in the carriage house, and he struggled to fit in at his new private school and later on at high school. Science fiction and the role-playing game of Dungeons & Dragons helped him escape from his misery. He especially loved assuming different personas during D&D. “We were all complete outcasts in school, beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school, that’s how outcast we were,” he says about his fellow D&D fanatics. There was a happy ending to his school days, however. In his junior year, he blossomed into a confident, colorfully dressed, musical, witty member of the debate team, the glee club, and the high school newspaper staff, and also became an actor in a local theater group. (For much more about his subsequent brilliant successes, I recommend Rogak’s biography.)
Did a traumatic event cause you to leave a beloved home during your childhood? Maybe you had no choice but to go along with a more routine family relocation when you would rather have stayed put. If so, you have the seed of an interesting childhood home story that Laurie and I would love to post on Our Childhood Homes. Send your story to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you’d prefer not to write everything down, we can interview you and write it ourselves!
Best,
Susan
George Chisholm House, 39 E. Battery, Charleston, SC
Photo: Wikipedia
The Yellow House: A Memoir
by Sarah M. Broom
“Yellow is the color of divine clarity.” – Vincent van Gogh
New York Times bestselling author Sarah M. Broom was ashamed of her childhood home. Making friends at school was difficult because she was not allowed to invite anyone over for play dates or sleepovers. “You know this house not all that comfortable for other people,” Sarah’s mother Ivory Mae often said. After years and years of hearing her mother repeat this phrase, Sarah came to understand that no one outside her family would ever be welcome inside the Yellow House.
At age nineteen, Ivory Mae bought the diminutive shotgun house at 4121 Wilson Avenue in East New Orleans with money from an insurance settlement. She had twelve children, and Sarah was the youngest. Ivory Mae was raised to create a beautiful home, and she was always scrubbing the bathroom, the kitchen countertops, the linoleum floor—a floor pocked with holes—even as the house was decaying around her. The family was too poor to maintain the Yellow House, but Ivory Mae and her husband Simon Broom worked hard to make sure the children had nice clothes and food on the table. She taught her children how to carry themselves with dignity and pride.
In their one small bathroom, Ivory Mae soaked in rubbing alcohol mixed with Epsom salts to ease her weariness, and Sarah used the space as a playroom. A piece of sheetrock leaning against a wall was Sarah’s chalkboard, and bright green lizards crawling in and out through holes in the moldy walls were her students. Sarah stood on two bricks to look through the window and over the back fence, hoping to get a glimpse of her friend Kendra playing in the trailer park nearby. One day after work, her father passed away in that bathroom, sitting on the toilet.
“After my father died,” wrote Sarah, “the room folded in on itself: its dark-blue-painted walls peeling, the tub transformed into a storage bin, the socket hanging from the wall with pieces of electrical tape showing, the sink collapsing. No one tried to fix it back up. The house becoming, around this time, Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.”
Reminders of Sarah’s deceased father could be found everywhere in the house—a door sanded but unpainted, holes cut for windows, the panes uninstalled. He never finished the upstairs that was the boys’ room; the ceiling and the walls had no sheetrock, only the framing. Simon had started constructing a second bathroom, the only room in the house with a lock, and Sarah used that room to escape her volatile brother Troy. Eventually Ivory Mae refinanced the house, and contractors installed yellow siding over decaying green wood. Around that time, rats infested the house, entering through holes in the kitchen cabinets, and buckets underneath the sink caught dishwater from a leaking pipe. The bathroom faucets were broken, so pliers were needed to turn on the water.
Sarah’s sister Lynette, five years her senior, was careful not to let anyone know where she lived. But once, Lynette was visiting relatives who had a car, and they wanted to drop her off at the Yellow House. Another child along for the ride needed to use the bathroom, and Lynette couldn’t refuse. “The nightmare! Of somebody seeing our house falling apart and people like us lived there! . . . The kind of people that we were made it worse,” said Lynette. “Because of the way Mama made us look, people began to have expectations. It’s better to look homely if you live in a house like that. . . We looked like people who had money. In how we dressed but more than that, in the way we carried ourselves. . . The house, unlike the clothes our mother had tailored to us, was an ungainly fit.” Later in life, Ivory Mae confessed, “I was living a lie, you know?”
Sarah wrote, “This is how your disappointment in a space builds, becomes personal: You, kitchen, do not warm me. You, living room, do not comfort me. You, bedroom, do not keep me. . . To describe the house fully in its coming apart feels maddening, like trying to pinpoint the one thing that ruins a person’s personality. . . Nobody really wanted to fix the house.”
Near the Yellow House’s final days, the roof had collapsed, and rain poured into the bedroom where Ivory Mae slept. They covered the roof with a tarp and caught rainwater in a tub. Sometimes she had to push the bed close to the closet where there was a least some shelter from bad weather.
In August of 2005, Katrina delivered the death blow to the Yellow House. Most of Sarah’s family members evacuated to other areas; the few who stayed behind were rescued after seven days. Katrina had split the house in two, and a tree lay on the floor in the living room. “Birds were now living in our childhood home. When we approached it with its broken-out windows, they flew away, en masse,” wrote Sarah. The Yellow House was one of 1,975 houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina and razed by the New Orleans Demolition Task Force. Sarah wrote, “I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. . . When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”
Did you or someone you know grow up in a house you were ashamed of? And you wouldn’t (or weren’t allow to) invite friends over to play or for an overnight? We want to know! As always, if you don’t want to do the writing, Susan or I can interview you, transcribe the interview, and post with your approval. Contact us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
During this holiday season, gratitude for your continued support, and best wishes, peace, and joy.
Laurie
Photos: Sarah M. Broom
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Growing Up in an Orphanage
When I was around 10 years old, I remember being fascinated by a 1952 children’s novel called “Nancy and Plum” by Betty McDonald. It was about two orphaned sisters who were sent to a girls’ home run by a cruel woman, and from which they escaped to a happy ending. My cousin Linda remembers a favorite childhood pastime of drawing fancy dresses for "girls in orphanages" and thinking about how delighted the imaginary recipients would be. I bet many children wonder and worry about what it would be like to live in a Dickensian orphanage (the only kind we knew about) and what it would be like to be “rescued” from it.
While there are few traditional orphanages left in the United States, their complicated history is well-covered in “Alone in the World—Orphans and Orphanages in America” by Catherine Reef (2005, Clarion Books). During the 19th century, when many orphanages were established, children who had lost one parent were called “half-orphans” and they made up the majority of residents in orphan asylums, as the homes were first called. Even poor children with two living parents sometimes spent time in asylums so that their families could survive.
In 1800, there were only seven orphanages in the United States, but they became more common by 1830, and by 1888 there were 613, housing more than 50,000 children, many orphaned by wars. The homes were usually run by religious or charitable groups, and were overseen mainly by women, ostensibly so that the women could function as “mothers” to the residents.
Reef does a great job of describing daily orphanage life through the decades, taken from institutional records, and gives us a history of "substitute care" for the past two centuries. Conditions varied among the asylums and homes; some were good places, but many of the most unfortunate orphans slept two or three to a bed (often infested with bedbugs), rarely bathed, were expected to be silent during meals, endured raging contagious illnesses, had few clothes, attended schools of uneven quality inside the asylums, and were kept busy doing chores to prevent them from getting into trouble. Punishments seem cruel by our standards: spankings, extra chores, no supper, shaming, and solitary confinement. Bullying was common. During the 1960s, foster care within a family became the preferred way of caring for orphans and abandoned children, but increasingly, this has led to a system in which the children must move from one home to another, worsening already unstable situations, and resulting in high rates of physical and sexual abuse.
Economist Richard McKenzie (b. 1942) argues that in the shift to foster care, no one had asked the orphans themselves what they think about their time in orphanages. In his moving and eye-opening book, “The Home—A Memoir of Growing Up in an Orphanage” (1996, Basic Books), McKenzie shares the story of his ultimately beneficial if sometimes austere and harrowing upbringing at the Barium Springs Home for Children in North Carolina.
In 1952, Richard, age 10, and his older brother were taken to The Home by two aunts who decided this would be best for the boys when they suddenly became half-orphans after their troubled and alcoholic mother committed suicide. Their father was generally absent, and was also an unstable, abusive alcoholic who made everyone’s life miserable. Young Richard started down a dangerous path, doing poorly in school, playing hooky, writing on walls, stealing from garages, and shoplifting.
Richard’s story of his traumatic early years reveals the contrast between his former life and the new one he began at The Home. When the brothers arrived, Richard was distressed to be there, “but not all that distressed at what I had left. One of the reasons I look fondly at my life at The Home is shared by many other boys and girls who passed along its fences: it catapulted me from a life course that had no good end.
I was given a chance to start anew.”
Children at The Home were divided into cottages by age. Larr’s Cottage, near a huge playground, was where the 10- and 11-year-old boys lived. It was an old, institutional looking building, “but it was clean, with wood floors shiny and yellowing from too many heavy coats of wax applied without precision by the children.” There was minimal furniture, and no private or semi-private rooms. They had “sleeping porches,” rooms that extended from three sides of the second floor, with eight beds in each, but no pillows or bedspreads, just a quilt per bed. The boys made up their beds so tightly "that a quarter would bounce off.” While the concept of a sleeping porch may sound grim to us, Richard was thrilled at the prospect of having a slumber party every night. “Going to bed was fun, most of the time. . . As soon as Miss Bauer, the housemother, went downstairs, we would break loose with jokes, farts, and giggles. Objects, from dirty underwear to an occasional water balloon, would sail through the air.”
Before bed, and while Miss Bauer watched, the boys lined up outside the bathroom for the ritual of brushing teeth, with emphasis on orderliness rather than hygiene. In the bathroom there were three toilets in a row, three sinks in a row, and three tubs in a row. On Wednesdays and Saturdays after dinner, the boys got a set of clean clothes and then took baths, three to a tub. The water was changed every two to three shifts. “I didn’t mind the dirty water nearly as much as I minded Miss Bauer at the door patrolling what we were doing.”
Once Richard adjusted to routines at The Home, he began to appreciate the grit he was gaining by “growing up from the bottom,” and knowing that he would be succeeding on his own merits, not because he started with many advantages. He and his fellow residents actively avoided any chance to be adopted, feeling they were better off where they were, because The Home “was there, and we knew it would always be there.” In the epilogues we learn that he and a large percentage of children he lived with went on to lead successful lives, and most of them attended regular reunions in Barium Springs to celebrate the deep sense of family they shared.
When I started McKenzie's heartfelt book, I planned to only skim it for information about what it’s like to live in an orphanage. But his colorful and authentic account had me turning the pages quickly and rooting for him and his fellow residents. While in popular literature the orphanage is portrayed as a place to be rescued from, in reality, orphanages and children’s homes have rescued many lives that started out poorly. McKenzie, seen in a brief 2010 YouTube clip below, argues for overhauling the child welfare system, relying less on the idea that a “family situation” is always preferred, and reestablishing good orphanages like the one that set him on a productive path away from the family that failed him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NImCJpXSQo8
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Though there are now far fewer traditional orphanages in the U.S. than there were many years ago, in a recent conversation I learned that a friend’s father was a “half-orphan” who grew up in a children’s home. Did you or someone you know grow up in a “substitute care” environment? Laurie and I would love to have the story. We could even do an interview and transcribe it for the blog. Send us an email at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com and we’ll go from there.
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Best,
Susan
Photo: Susan Matthews
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The October 2022 Greetings can be viewed here:
October 2022 Greetings (wix.com)
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Gary Sweeney Says Good-bye to his Childhood Home
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When we cleared out my childhood home in Fort Worth, Texas, and ownership was about to shift to my brother, who planned to begin renting it out, lifelong friend Laurie suggested we meet there and do an impromptu farewell ritual. She and I sat on the floor in the empty living room, and she used Acutonics tuning forks to produce tones that connected us with frequencies to help us prepare to release this space that had meant so much to us. Then we walked around the house three times in a clockwise direction, a Chinese good-bye practice which also meant we would come back some day. When we finished, about 30 minutes later, we were ready to close the front door for the last time, leaving the house to its future inhabitants and the new lives that would unfold there.
San Antonio artist Gary Sweeney (b. 1952) took a lot longer to say a much more complex and well-documented good-bye to his childhood home in Manhattan Beach, California. For over 70 years, his family owned the frame house at 320 35th St., two blocks from the beach. The house was built in 1922 and his mother bought it for $5400 (furnished) in 1945 when Gary’s father Mike returned from his Navy service during WWII. At that time, houses near the beach were not as desirable or expensive as they are today, and the neighborhood was middle-class and relaxed. Gary, his sister, and their friends enjoyed a carefree Beach Boys lifestyle.
Mike Sweeney was a serious amateur photographer who lovingly documented all major and minor family events. He processed his photographs in a darkroom he had added onto the house. He was an involved community member all his life, serving on the city council, as president of the PTA, and as mayor. He also owned the local hardware store.
After Gary and his sister grew up and moved away, and their parents died, the house was used as a rental property. When Gary decided to sell, he knew it would be torn down, so he made a stipulation in the sales agreement that he would be allowed to mount, on the exterior of the house, a giant temporary 3-D “album" of family photos.
Gary selected over 100 photographs from the hundreds of meticulously dated and catalogued images he found in his father’s old darkroom. He had them enlarged and inkjet-printed on weatherproof MDO board (also known as signboard). He and an assistant installed the huge photos on the exterior of the house, using intuitive placement (Gary compared it to solving a jigsaw puzzle) and covering every surface except doors and windows (see photo).
Old friends, neighbors, and curious strangers dropped by to see the farewell tribute to the Sweeney family’s time in the house, and to talk with Gary, who had moved back in for the duration of the exhibit. The art installation, titled “A Manhattan Beach Memoir: 1945-2015,” remained on view during the month of February, 2016. The house was then demolished. A quick Google search shows that a new house constructed on the site sold for $2,960,000 in 2018.
Many local, national, and international news outlets picked up the story because of its powerful, universal resonance. Here is a link to a beautifully done 7-minute video that follows Gary as he creates and explains the installation. It describes the project much better than I can.
Gary went on to release a book in 2018 (A Manhattan Beach Memoir: Gary Sweeney Says Goodbye to his Childhood Home), available on Amazon, link below:
He even did a TED Talk, “How To Say Good-bye to Your Childhood Home”:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_sweeney_how_to_say_goodbye_to_your_childhood_home
I’m sure this is the most elaborate and documented childhood home leave-taking in history!
Have you found comfort and closure in a ritual, an art project, or some other memorialization of your life in your early home? If you were moved to create such a tribute, we’d like to have your account of it for the blog. Please send your idea or story to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Susan
photo: Gary Sweeney
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The September 2022 Greetings can be viewed here:
September 2022 Greetings (wix.com)
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Wonder City Studio
If you have ever dreamed of owning a small-scale reproduction of the place where you grew up, or where you live now, you might contact Wonder City Studio in Chicago, where Phillip Thompson and Katie Lauffenburger recreate current and past homes for clients in two and three dimensions, respectively. A substantial part of their business is the memorialization of childhood homes. I visited the two artists at their shared studio in the Ravenswood neighborhood to talk with them about their work and to look at recent projects.
Phil and Katie, both native Pennsylvanians, met online in 2006 after both had moved to Chicago for graduate school. While getting to know each other before they were married, they enjoyed long walks exploring the many architectural styles of their new city. They appreciated the design and craftsmanship of Chicago’s great variety of buildings, especially of classic bungalows and two-flats. They felt that the architecture was uniquely harmonious and “fit” Chicago perfectly.
Though he has loved drawing since childhood, Phil studied international trade at the University of Chicago, eventually working for a consulting firm. He made an early drawing of Katie’s family home as a gift for her father and started a side business of drawing Chicago homes. Then he began selling hand-drawn maps of craft beer bars in Chicago which Katie digitized, colored, and printed. The side business took off soon after his prints of three two-flats in the Lincoln Square neighborhood appeared in the 2017 movie, “The Big Sick.”
Katie studied fine arts all her life and concentrated on animation at the School of the Art Institute before becoming a digital specialist. Later she took a ceramics class, fell in love with the process, and began sculpting houses and classic Chicago two-flats from clay.
In the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was in full swing and people started focusing on their homes more than ever, the couple’s creative mission blossomed. They offer a way to celebrate the well-loved places owned, remembered, and often missed by their growing list of clients.
Phil says that people who order drawings of childhood homes often have old photographs and want something that looks like the places did when they lived there. If only contemporary photos are available, Phil asks his clients to trust him to visualize what they describe to him about the way the home looked in the past. Because visual memories are so specific to each home, he provides a first draft of the drawing to make sure it’s right. Sometimes a client will show the first draft to a sibling or a cousin who will remember something like “Grandpa had a swing here,” and they will keep changing or adding things as the process goes on. And sometimes even the first draft causes a tearful emotional reaction when the client first sees it. When I asked about the more challenging projects Phil has completed, he told me that newer homes with less-coherent designs (e.g., “gables for no reason and four garages”) are the most difficult to draw. His ink and graphite drawings sell for $500 to $800.
Katie’s sculptures take longer to execute than Phil’s drawings; she works for about a month on each one. She told me that not many ceramic artists use as much precision as she does. A January, 2022, WGN News story and video about the couple (link below) shows her meticulous mitered slab-building technique. Like Phil, she works from photographs and sometimes Google street view. She sends video updates to her clients as she works, and shares progress on Instagram. Her favorite part of the process is the carving stage when the clay is pliable enough for creating exterior details like windows, bricks, stone, and ornamentation. As long as the client identifies any changes during this stage, Katie can make them. The finished, fired pieces are usually about 12” to 18” tall. They are hollow, with open tops, and are meant to be used as planters or vases, allowing the owner to continue the creative process with flowers and greenery. She says about a third of her business is childhood homes. Most of the rest of her clients want to memorialize their current residences. Katie pointed out that all Wonder City Studio clients have happy, nostalgic memories of the past homes they want recreated or a good relationship with their current homes. “Customers will not pay for tough memories.” Her pieces start at $5000.
Clients find out about Wonder City Studio through art shows, the media, and by doing online searches. Phil observed that sometimes his and Katie's pieces are not something people want or need until they see one. Happy owners of their work have inspired friends and relatives to order their own.
Have you commissioned or attempted to create a work of art based on your own childhood home? The process might be a good stepping off point for a childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to hear about it. Send your story to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you’d prefer to be interviewed, let us know and we’ll go from there.
Best,
Susan
Photos by Susan Matthews:
-Wonder City Studio in Chicago showing samples of Phil’s and Katie’s work.
-Katie Lauffenburger carving a ceramic reproduction of a classic Chicago 2-flat.
-A key photo that Katie is using for reference.
-Phil Thompson working on a drawing of a Chicago bungalow.
WGN News story and video by Patrick Elwood, January 2022:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuLWnCq3qMI
Block Club Chicago story by Mack Liederman, January 2022:
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The August 2022 Greetings can be viewed here:
August 2022 Greetings (wix.com)
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H.P. Lovecraft’s Childhood Home
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Providence, Rhode Island, is the birthplace of writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, born on August 20, 1890, who is famous for his fantastical, strange tales, and what is now referred to as “weird” fiction (the reinterpretation of traditional supernatural horror stories). H.P. Lovecraft was not well known during his lifetime but gained cult status during the 1960s and, in the early 1980s, enjoyed a major revival with the rise of the goth subculture. A popular TV series called Lovecraft Country takes place in a mysterious location that appears in many of his fictional tales, and Necronomicon Providence hosts a convention that celebrates the greats of weird fiction, including Lovecraft, his predecessors, and contemporaries.
In the 1970s, I attended Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design prior to the city’s revitalization that started toward the end of the decade, and the many neglected buildings and abandoned, depressed areas within walking distance of College Hill, where we students lived, occasionally figured in the work of my cohort. While visiting Providence, in June, I began to wonder if Lovecraft ever reflected on the influence that his childhood home and the city of Providence had on his own psyche and his writing. A fantastically helpful librarian at the Providence Public Library directed me to the definitive biography of Lovecraft I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi, and this is what I discovered.
Lovecraft lived in a large Victorian home at 454 Angell Street near the campuses of RISD and Brown University. Clearly, he was a child prodigy who could read and write at an advanced level by age four and had an uncanny memory to rival Marcel Proust. Joshi writes that Lovecraft remained “passionately devoted to his birthplace. . . One of the first things that came to his notice was his immediate surroundings. Lovecraft frequently emphasized the quasi-rural nature of his birthplace, situated as it was at what was then the very edge of the developed part of town.”
Lovecraft himself wrote that “ . . . I was born . . . in a section of the town which during my childhood lay not four blocks (N. & E.) from the actually primal & open New England countryside, with rolling meadows, stone walls, cart paths, brooks, deep woods, mystic ravines, leafy river-bluffs, planted fields, white ancient farmhouses, barns & byres, gnarled hillside orchards, great lone elms, & all the authentic marks of a rural milieu unchanged since the 17th & 18th centuries. . . . My house, tho’ an urban one on a paved street, had spacious grounds & stood next to an open field with a stone wall . . . where great elms grew & my grandfather had corn & potatoes planted, & a cow pastured under the gardener’s care. . . When I was 3 years old I felt a strange magic & fascination (not unmixed with a vague unease & perhaps a touch of mild fear) in the ancient houses of Providence’s venerable hill . . ., with their fanlighted* doorways, railed flights of steps, & stretches of brick sidewalk . . . It was a magic, secret world, & it had a realness beyond that of the home neighborhood.
"At home all the main bookcases in the library, parlours, dining-rooms, and elsewhere were full of standard Victorian junk, most of the brown-leather old-timers . . . having been banished to a windowless third-story trunk-room which had sets of shelves. But what did I do? What, pray, but go with candles and kerosene lamp to that obscure and nighted aerial crypt–leaving the sunny downstairs 19th century flat, and boring my way back through the decades into the late 17th, 18th, and early 19th century by means of innumerable and crumbling and long-s’d (stored) tomes . . . “
According to Joshi, it was the “black, windowless attic room at 454 Angell Street which proved to be the gateway to a remarkable intellectual development.” Lovecraft was profoundly influenced by both the unlit attic room filled with books and the enchanted mix of urban/rural environment outside, the perfect metaphor for a mental and physical state that was tenuous his entire life.
Did you have a special room in your childhood home or live in a neighborhood that sparked certain feelings or creative impulses in you? That evoked happiness, made you feel safe, roused your imagination, or even inspired fear, unease, or dread? Susan and I would like to know. We can help with light editing, or we could interview you, transcribe your interview, and post with your final approval. Please get in touch at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Laurie
*A fanlight is a semi-circular window above a doorway and is designed to look like the slats of an open fan; it’s also called a transom window.
Quotes taken from pages 16 through 30, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft by S. T. Joshi. Interestingly, Lovecraft's tombstone is inscribed with the words, "I Am Providence." Photo of Lovecraft's tombstone by Susan Matthews.
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Growing Up in a Funeral Home
Not everyone grew up in a traditional dedicated house or apartment. Among many possible alternatives to more standard residences, one of the most interesting is the funeral home. As of 2019, over 89% of American funeral homes were family businesses and in many cases a family lives on the premises.
Funeral businesses began to take over during the Civil War when many casualties occurred, often far from home, necessitating the embalming and transport of bodies instead of the home-based ministrations of the past. These establishments were called “funeral parlors” at first, out of respect for the tradition of preparing the body at home, moving it from the bedroom, and "laying it out” in the parlor for visitation.
Because death happens around the clock, directors commonly live at the funeral home, and are able to respond immediately to families who need the body removed and made ready for burial or cremation. After the body arrives at the funeral home, it’s often a comforting thought that the loved one will not be “alone” in the building. In the old Victorian style funeral homes, many of which still exist today, the body is prepared in the basement, the viewing and services are held on the first floor, and the family lives on the second floor.
Comedian and writer Celeste Donohue grew up in a Philadelphia funeral home run by her father. Her story is posted on The Order of the Good Death website (link to her entry below), an organization whose mission is to make a good death accessible to all. Donohue is matter-of-fact about her childhood home. "It wasn’t scary for any of us, because we never knew life without dead people. I always looked at the dead as though they were temporary guests in our house — and I guess they were. My dad always treated them with respect, so we followed suit. They were like guests I’d never met before, but was completely comfortable around — and they seemed to enjoy my entertainment. I kind of liked them in a way; I didn’t know anything about their lives — whether they were nice or mean or crazy — each one was just someone who died and ended up in our basement."
The HBO series Six Feet Under (2001-2005) took place at the fictional Fisher and Sons Funeral Home in Los Angeles, and gave viewers a fair, if stylistically tweaked, look at what it might be like to grow up in and even take over the business of such a place. In a 2002 Newsweek interview with funeral director Todd Van Beck (link below), he says the show did a good job of normalizing people in the funeral business, and of portraying the surprising variety of causes of death. He objected to the antiquated but picturesque equipment in the basement, however. "The only thing that bugs me is that I don't think they have portrayed the physical facilities of the funeral parlor accurately. It didn't look very realistic. The lay-out and the really, really old stuff--even old funeral homes are much more modernized.”
Comic artist Alison Bechdel’s brilliant, original, and meticulous 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home (link to book review and photo below) is far more than the story of growing up as part of a funeral home family in small-town Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, though the early sections are a vivid portrayal of what it was like for her. Her grandmother lived in the funeral home (nicknamed “the fun home” by Alison and her two brothers) on Main Street, where the Bechdel children spent lots of time, had chores to do, and enjoyed many opportunities for play. They were forbidden to climb into the caskets, but had fun with the folding chair trolley, car flags for processions, packages of smelling salts, and nesting flower stands. In “Fun Home,” using words and explicit pictures, Bechdel describes her initial indelible childhood encounter with a body being embalmed by her father. “The man on the prep table was bearded and fleshy, jarringly unlike Dad’s usual traffic of desiccated old people.” Most of the memoir takes place after her childhood and is a vivid account of coming to terms with her father’s secret homosexuality, and her own identity as a lesbian. It was made into a Broadway musical and won 5 Tony awards in 2015.
Susan Portelance, a contributor to Canada's The Globe and Mail, gave readers a lively description of growing up in her family’s Quebec funeral home in a 2012 piece for the "Facts and Arguments" column (link below).
"Imagine trying to explain to a two-year-old and a four-year-old that they must be very quiet and have no running or screaming lest they disturb the mourners downstairs? …I also couldn't see why it was a poor idea to open the parlour door for Cindy, our ornery basset hound. Nothing says mourning like a howling pooch among the bereaved.” She remembers that no one came to their house for candy at Halloween, and that no one would stay in a funeral home if the power went out. About dead bodies, she says "I often found myself gazing at the deceased, mesmerized, wondering why the skin always seemed so orange. I guess we needed a better makeup person.”
Did you grow up in a non-traditional residence? If so, your experience is bound to be interesting, especially to those of us who lived in more conventional places. Laurie and I would love to have your story, and we’d be happy to help you with gentle editing, or even interview you and post a transcript. Send your idea or your story to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com and we’ll go from there.
Best,
Susan
Celeste Donohue’s story:
https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/article/growing-up-in-a-funeral-home/
Newsweek interview with Todd Van Beck:
https://www.newsweek.com/qa-how-accurate-six-feet-under-148159
New York Times book review of Fun Home by Alison Bechdel:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/books/review/18wilsey.html
Susan Portelance on growing up in a funeral home:
Page 38, "Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel:
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Anjelica Huston’s Childhood Home
Model and movie star Anjelica Huston, daughter of legendary film director John Huston, spent her early childhood in Craughwell, County Galway, Ireland, living in St. Clerans Manor house, an isolated country estate that John and his fourth wife Ricki bought in 1954. At that point in his career, Huston could buy a house anywhere in the world, and he chose this rugged part of western Ireland and the seventeen room, three storey Georgian house which was in need of extensive repair. St. Clerans had been built in two phases; the rear of the house was constructed in 1784 and the façade in 1807. The Hustons bought the property from the Irish Land Commission for ten thousand pounds, about $133,000 in today’s dollars.
Prior to marrying John Huston, Anjelica’s mother Enrica (Ricki) Soma was a model and ballet dancer known for her enigmatic “Mona Lisa” smile. When Anjelica, born in 1951, and her older brother Tony were toddlers, John left New York for Paris to direct the film Moulin Rouge, leaving his family behind. Several months later, Ricki took the children to France and John packed them off to a castle in Chantilly. In 1953, he moved his family to Ireland, first to a stone Victorian manor in County Kildare and then to St. Clerans. Two structures were on the property, one called the Big House—the seventeen room Georgian estate—and the other, a few hundred yards away, the Little House—a limestone, slate-roofed two storey cottage. Working largely on her own, Ricki spent the next seven years restoring the Big House while living with the children in the Little House. When he was not directing or shooting a film, the Big House was John’s domain, while Ricki and the children continued to live in the cottage.
Anjelica remembers her childhood home with fondness.
"The rooms were comfortable and cozy, the hall under the stairs hung with hats, and two orange Sheffield porcelain dogs sat atop a side table in the entryway. The sitting room, with its salmon walls, green carpet, and brown silk curtains looking onto the garden had a huge stone fireplace. . . Upstairs was Mum’s room, with wallpaper of fig leaves on a pale blue background. The windows looked out over a giant yew in a walled garden filled with exotic trees and shrubs that its former master, an explorer named Robert O’Hara Burke, had brought back from his world travels during the mid-nineteenth century. . . Tony and I shared the front bedroom overlooking the courtyard. Mum had decorated it like the interior of a circus tent: gray-and-white-striped wallpaper, with painted papier-mâché animals that Dad had brought back from India. . . Our beds were French antique candy-striped four-posters, Tony’s blue and mine pink, with a white organza frill on top."
But Anjelica was a lonely child with few companions. She was schooled by a succession of tutors, and her mind was occupied by a rich fantasy world. In the prologue to her autobiography, she wrote:
"There was a shrine in my mother’s bedroom when I was growing up. The built-in wardrobe had a mirror on the interior of both doors and a bureau inside, higher than I was. . . Standing between the glass doors, I loved to look at her possessions, the mirrors reflecting me into infinity. . . My life was mostly fantasy—wishing that I were Catholic so that I could have a Holy Communion, and wearing my mother’s tutus on the front lawn, hoping a husband would come along so that I might marry him."
At age six, Anjelica was still dreamy and had difficulty concentrating. The long periods of time she spent in front of mirrors helped determine her fate. Inspired by the cartoons of Charles Addams, she pretended to be Morticia Addams—a role she played at age 40 in the 1991 film—and experimented with the plasticity of her face. She believed there were lots of things to do in a mirror besides admiring one’s own beauty.
Ricki and John (joining her when available in between production on his 60+ films) painstakingly restored the Big and Little Houses, taking out extra walls that had partitioned the large, formal rooms in the Big House. Ricki designed the interior, choosing colors and fabrics to create a background for John’s extraordinary collection of objects collected during his many travels: Greek marbles, Venetian glass, Japanese screens, Indian gods and goddesses, Louis XIV furniture, and important pre-Columbian works from Mexico. Their isolated country estate was transformed into a personal museum. But according to Anjelica, her mother was out of her element in the rough west country of Ireland. The seven years of restoration kept Ricki and John together but, their marriage failing, Ricki moved herself and the children to London.
Did you or someone you know grow up in an extravagant or eccentric home? Did objects that your parents acquired make a lasting impression, inspire fantasy, and maybe even inform who you became as an adult? If so, please let us know! Susan and I can help with light editing, or we could interview you, transcribe your interview, and post with your final approval. Please get in touch at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Laurie
Photo of St. Clerans from the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, Dublin, Ireland. Text quoted is from Anjelica Huston's autobiography A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York.
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Growing Up in a Haunted House
What is it like to grow up in a haunted house? Understandably, there is not much in-the-moment childhood documentation, but many who experience the fascinating phenomena of haunting want to talk or write about them after they become adults.
Looking through a variety of online recollections, I discovered the main haunting “hallmarks" are the ones we’ve heard of: the sound of footsteps on stairs or elsewhere, especially on upper floors, the faint sound of conversations, a phantom smell (like cigar smoke in a non-smoking household, or an unfamiliar perfume), electric lights or appliances turning on or off “by themselves,” an unexplained cold spot in the house, a feeling of hair standing on end or static electricity, pets reacting oddly in certain areas, objects showing up in places they’re not supposed to be, and most obviously, the appearance of an apparition. Apparitions can look like solid “normal” humans, or seem as insubstantial as a mist, with variations in between. The energy can be described as a benevolent presence, a neutral oddity, or a pernicious threat.
The most vivid descriptions I found were produced by writers, and there are lots of fascinating stories online and in print. When she was a girl, Natalie Kirby, now a writer for House Beautiful, moved with her family into a Connecticut house owned formerly by her grandparents, who had lived peacefully there for years with a ghost they referred to as “The Captain” and whom they blamed for trivial things like tilted picture frames, TVs turning on when no one was home, and objects found in unexpected places. But after her parents bought the house, the trickster “Captain" started to evolve into something more sinister, becoming especially active at night, when his presence in her bedroom would terrify her, sometimes manifesting as the feeling of a pile of bricks on her chest. “It felt impossible to ever really be alone in that house," she writes. A link to her story is below.
Writer, New York Times columnist, and English professor Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of I’m Looking Through You (Broadway Books, 2008), an especially sensitive and detailed memoir about growing up in a haunted house in Devon, PA, during the 1970s. The first time the family visited their vintage three-story home before moving in, 13-year-old Boylan, who was then called Jim and whose gender transition would happen much later, saw what she calls a “sentient blue mist” in the basement. The mist seemed to be aware of him. Jim’s bedroom was on the third floor, where she says things were “nuttier” than on the lower floors. Unintelligible conversations could be heard. Footsteps would descend and ascend the stairs. Doors opened and slammed on their own. The family dog growled aggressively for no reason. The red swivel chair at Jim’s desk would spin around by itself, and sometimes he’d return to his room to see the chair balanced on top of the desk. A woman with wet hair who wore a white nightgown appeared in a hall mirror.
One night when Jim’s father was in the final stages of a terminal illness, a unique entity appeared to Jim on the third floor. Boylan writes, “The entity emerged from the closet in the corner, a blacker shadow within the darkness of the room. There was something shiny and dense about it, like oil. I had the sense that if I touched it, my hand would emerge shiny and wet. It was vaguely human-shaped, and fine white streaks, like kite string, moved through it.” It had two armlike appendages but no legs, and a head with a face concealed by a hooded shadow. It didn’t float, but moved in a series of “clicks” that seemed to make it disappear and reappear as it moved closer to Jim’s bed, and it was holding a baton in its hand. The next day, Jim’s father told the family he’d been scared by a visitor the night before, a conductor who had told him to come with him and “conduct his orchestra.”
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Thanks to our cultural passion for celebrity revelations, it’s easy to find famous people who have lived in haunted houses, especially as adults (e.g. Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Aniston, Octavia Spencer). But a little more digging brings up a few who experienced paranormal occurrences at home as kids. Jenna Bush Hager, President George W. Bush’s daughter, was “freaked out” when she heard what she described as "1920s music” coming out of the fireplace in her White House bedroom. Kendall and Kylie Jenner used to hear footsteps on the roof of their childhood home in Hidden Hills, California. Demi Lovato saw a spirit named Emily many times while she was growing up in her family’s haunted house in Colleyville, Texas. Comedian Jenny Slate first talked publicly about her family’s haunted house in Milton, Massachusetts, during a 2014 appearance on Ellen, and opens up about her paranormal experiences during her 2019 Netflix comedy special, Stage Fright.
In general, the older the building is, the more owners it will have had, and chances are higher that a death or a traumatic incident occurred there. Researchers agree this seems to be a key to many hauntings. Until recently, there was no way to find out if a house has the potential to be haunted because of an on-site death. Sensing a need, because he himself unwittingly bought a haunted house, software engineer Roy Condrey developed a website called Diedinhouse.com to offer, for a fee of around $12 per address, official records of deaths tied to the addresses his curious and/or haunted customers enter, sometimes even before they sign a real estate or rental contract.
Whether or not your childhood home had a history of death or trauma, you may have experienced paranormal occurrences there, or are wondering about unexplained past events. Laurie and I would love to receive our first story about a haunted childhood home, and we encourage you to write down your memories. (And of course, even if your home wasn’t haunted, we’d love to have your story!)
All the best,
Susan
Natalie Kirby’s story from House Beautiful:
Jenny Boylan shares some good details about her childhood home in this 2007 New York Times piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/31iht-edboylan.1.8129534.html
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The cover of Boylan’s 2008 memoir:
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Re-visiting Your Childhood Home as an Adult
The urge to visit a childhood home long after you’ve moved away is a common one. Social psychologist Jerry M. Burger studied adults who made the effort to return to their early dwellings and has written about the findings in his 2011 book, “Returning Home." I read it with great interest, knowing already how powerful and indelible our earliest memories of place can be, thanks especially to this blog.
Burger discovered that the desire to visit a former home was something psychology had yet to study. The first wave of research subjects replied to an ad he placed in the local newspaper in Santa Clara CA, where he teaches at Santa Clara University. In the ad, he asked to interview people "who have ever made a trip to visit a place they once called home." His phone started ringing right away, and he and his research assistants were eventually able to gather a large pool of respondents between the ages of 21 and 79, half of them men and half women, with the average age of 49.7 years. When they heard about his study, even his friends and professional colleagues wanted to participate.
There are three main reasons why we make the trip home, says Burger. Most of the participants in his study, no matter how happy or unhappy their childhoods were, sensed that they needed to get back in touch with their core selves, the people they had once been. Many of us try to do this on a daily basis, by listening to the music that was popular when we were young, by purchasing a favorite candy of our youth, or by cooking familiar recipes. But some of us want a more profound connection, which we can only get by experiencing the specific features of our early environments.
Others claimed that a crisis or turning point triggered the wish to go back to the setting where their values were established. They wanted to relive important moments, or revisit the place where romance began, hoping to become better able to deal with what was going on in their current lives.
And some people had unfinished business, had endured an unhappy childhood, suffered physical or emotional abuse, or lost a parent. They hoped the visit would be a way to heal. These subjects usually had left home relatively early and were among the most emotional participants.
Burger found that even though many of his subjects had lived in several different places during childhood, there was usually one residence that each person considered “home.” This unique attachment seemed to be formed during the ages of 5 and 11, the elementary school years. Some of the subjects felt the strongest attachment to a place where they’d lived only a short time, but almost invariably during those years. Without exception, study participants reported a flood of memories when they returned to their homes, typically not of dramatic events that occurred in these places, but of forgotten, mundane occurrences.
Not surprisingly, Burger says the most common impression people reported was how much smaller everything seemed. Once they allowed for a new adult perspective, many people found, sometimes with great joy, that the places matched closely with their original mental images. Burger also noted that all of his subjects who had knocked on the doors of their former homes were invited inside by the current owners.
The book’s variety of personal stories of visits and their aftermath makes it a lively, relatable read. A subject named Arthur, 70, reported, “A lot of things came together… When you look back like that, it’s like the whole thing—I guess you could say my whole life—just made sense.” Another subject, Roseanne, felt “violated” and “really sad” after seeing dramatic changes the new owners had made to the inside of her childhood house. But her feelings evolved when she realized she’d been living too much in the past, and that change is inevitable and necessary. Rudy, 50, had made his trip when he was 20 and thought at the time that he would recapture the happiness he had known as a child. However, the creek where he had played was dammed up, the people weren’t as friendly, and he’d forgotten about the mosquitoes. He considered his visit a mistake.
Burger follows the personal stories with enlightening statistics about how much moving Americans do, the effects of multiple childhood homes on adults (even their mortality), and how extraversion and introversion moderates these effects. Burger also cites movies and literature with plots that hinge on visits to childhood homes.
It is likely that the house or apartment you lived in as a child is still standing, along with former schools, the neighbors’ homes, trees, and parks. Have you made a pilgrimage to see it, and if so, what did you notice, recall, or relive? Your experience could be a natural prompt for your own childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read and post it. Remember, we can interview you and work from an edited transcript if you prefer.
Best,
Susan
For more reading:
Ronda Kasen, in her October 4, 2019 “Right at Home” column for the New York Times (link below), mentions Burger’s book and shares her own story, in which she discusses the effect of a nostalgic visit on the current owners of a beloved childhood home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/realestate/can-you-go-home-again.html?rref=collection/byline/ronda-kaysen&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&referringSource=articleShare
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Christopher Robin's Childhood Home
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Like many 20th century children, I grew up enjoying the adventures of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh, a boy and his stuffed bear who were the subjects of a series of books by Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1996) published in the 1920s. My mother, who had a beautiful voice, read the stories to us, and made up melodies for the songs. Christopher Robin (Robin is his real middle name) was A.A. Milne’s son, and Winnie-the-Pooh was Christopher’s real toy bear. All of the stories and poems about these two, and their well-known friends, Tigger, Eeyore, Owl, and the others, were set in a not-too-fictional place called the Hundred Acre Wood.
The real Christopher Milne (1920-1996) grew up in London and at Cotchford Farm, just north of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England. A portion of Ashdown Forest was the inspiration for the landscape where the famous adventures of Christopher Robin and Pooh took place. Illustrator E.H. Shepard (1879-1976) made the scenes come alive for children all over the world by drawing from reality the actual places in Ashdown Forest where the stories were set. Even Cotchford Farm itself is seen in the background of an illustration for the poem “Buttercup Days,” in Now We Are Six published in 1927 (see below).
Christopher’s parents Alan and Daphne Milne bought Cotchford Farm in 1924 as a country retreat from their main home in London. The building dated from the 1600s, and needed lots of work before the family could start to enjoy it. In Ann Thwaite’s 1990 biography of A.A. Milne, A.A. Milne—The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh, an account of the renovation describes a new servants’ hall being built next to the kitchen, attic rooms being converted to servants’ rooms, adding a dressing room for Alan, and converting a barn into a garage with a flat above it. The family moved to Cotchford Farm permanently a few years after they bought and renovated it.
In his poignant 1974 childhood memoir, The Enchanted Places, Christopher Milne remembers his mother’s enthusiastic decorating of the house and her dislike of dreary “brown polished wood.” Most of the furniture was stripped and brightly painted, even antiques. Daphne liked what she liked, and didn’t worry about being in good taste, but the results were beautiful, especially in the drawing room, and in her second floor bedroom which spanned the width of the house. Christopher writes, “As a child I specially loved her bedroom. I loved to sit on the soft carpet in front of the gas fire drying myself after a bath. It was on top of her wardrobe that the Christmas parcels were put; and day by day I would watch the pile grow until at last, about a week before Christmas, I was allowed to start opening. One a day . . . Oh unforgettable bliss, never to be recaptured."
His father’s bedroom had a different atmosphere. “It was a very dark room and consequently only a dim impression of it survives: an impression of ugly, heavy, Victorian, mahogany furniture, and of very little floor space in between.” Christopher describes two pictures on the wall, one of which seemed to be the only item in the house that really belonged to his father, the rest of the things being put in that room "because they had to go somewhere.” His father’s armchair by the fire in the drawing-room was the rare household item that wasn’t maintained. Christopher recalls that his father “had a slightly restless habit with his right elbow and over the years this had worn a hole not just through the cover, but deep into the flock padding. Nothing was ever done about it.”
A talented young woodworker, and the fixer of various things around the house, Christopher had his own private area on the attic level, known as the Carpenter’s Shop, “a room whose floor and beams were so eaten away by woodworm that visions of it have haunted my dreams ever since. Yet it was a room I loved, because here I could be alone with my chisels and my saws.” There he worked on projects, and even invented a burglar alarm, using tools he’d bought in London with his own saved money.
After she finished decorating the house, Daphne poured most of her energy into the garden and employed a gardener named Mr. Tasker to help her execute her plans. Christopher writes, “My mother in her garden. Trowel in hand planting Darwin tulips by the hundred. Secateurs in hand snipping at roses. Crouched down weeding, weeding, weeding. Pouring jugs of hot water over the ants. Exhorting Tasker to ever greater efforts. Teaching me the names of the flowers . . . But mostly I remember her just quietly, happily, brooding over it all, alone in the half dark.” A.A. Milne took pride in his son’s knowledge of the names of all the plants in the garden, boasting in a letter to a friend that Christopher “can spell Eschscholtzia, which nobody else can do."
The Pooh books’ popularity made Cotchford Farm a mecca for journalists and lovers of the stories, even when Christopher was still growing up there. He describes feeling ”slightly sick" when he was told he would have to meet yet another writer who was working on a piece about his famous father and family. But he also enjoyed the feeling of specialness that being a famous literary character gave him.
A.A. Milne died at Cotchford Farm in 1956 and the place was sold. The subsequent owners installed an outdoor swimming pool. Rolling Stones band member Brian Jones bought the home in 1968 and tragically drowned in the pool in 1969 at age 27. The next owner, who bought it in 1970, sold it for £1.8m in 2017. Fascinatingly detailed real estate photos and current floor plans, which I urge you to look at if you’re interested, are still online, link below:
https://media.onthemarket.com/properties/2513823/doc_1_4.pdf
When you think of your childhood home, do you remember the personalities of the people, maybe your parents, who created the space and put their imprint on it? Did they find self-expression in the design of your home, or were they more pragmatic, and less interested in the creative aspect of the structure and its surroundings? These memories could be a good jumping off point for your own childhood home story. Laurie and I would like you to send us your story (or let us interview you) so we can post it on the blog. We’re happy to do gentle editing. We hope you’ll create your story and send it to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Susan
Illustration by E. H. Shepard for the verse “Buttercup Days,” from Now We Are Six, 1927.
Cotchford farm photo by Savills from the 2016 real estate listing.
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Julia Child's Childhood Home
Julia Child (1912-2004), chef, writer, teacher, television star, and icon of the mid-twentieth century American culinary awakening, grew up in Pasadena, California. Her parents, Caro and John McWilliams Jr., briefly lived with their children at 693 S. Euclid Avenue, a house that is now a Montessori School. Julia was the firstborn, followed by her brother John III in 1914. Her sister Dorothy was born in 1917, after the family had settled into a large brown-shingled wood house at 1207 South Pasadena Avenue (now 1199 South Pasadena Avenue) which was built in 1911.
The Arts and Crafts Movement of California had influenced many Pasadena buildings constructed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the McWilliams house. This aesthetic promoted architectural harmony with nature, and encouraged a philosophy of simple living and elevated thinking. According to the wonderful and fast-paced 1997 biography of Julia Child, “Appetite for Life” by Noel Riley Fitch, the McWilliams house “had a sleeping porch across the back of the second floor, a laundry room behind the garage for the children to wash their Airedale dog, and a playhouse, tennis court, shed, rose garden, large lawn, and small orchard of citrus and avocado trees.” Years later, Julia described her childhood home as “right out of Upstairs, Downstairs," referring to the popular 1970s British television drama shown on PBS. The family had a maid, a Scottish nurse for baby Dorothy, an Irish cook, a well-loved household manager named Willy, and a gardener.
In the large attic the McWilliams siblings put on plays written by Julia, and they reared white rats in the playhouse. Their best friends, Babe and Charlie Hall, lived across the street and the children formed a gang they called the McHall Gang. Bicycles and roller skates were their modes of transportation; they wheeled through the neighborhood all the way to the western edge of the city. Babe and Julia enjoyed stealing John McWilliams’s cigars and smoking them in a huge oak tree next door, for the thrill of getting away with it. The girls also made and smoked pipes containing prunes, cornsilk, and other material. They kept their pipes in cigar boxes mounted in the tops of trees or buried in a remote area. Babe and Julia also mail-ordered a blank cartridge gun, firing it from the roof when their parents were away. They dropped rocks on the Santa Fe passenger train, and sneaked rides on streetcars, trucks, and milk wagons. They made friends with the tramps at the railroad tracks, and every New Year’s Day hung around the preparations for the Tournament of Roses, just a block away.
Though the house still stands, it has been vacant for over 35 years, and is deteriorating. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) bought the McWilliams house and many other Pasadena houses, some of them architecturally significant, to make way for a planned 710 Freeway expansion which is now unlikely to be built. Pasadena Heritage is a group working to preserve the Caltrans houses, and hopes to have Julia Child’s early home listed in the National Register of Historic Places. A 2018 story by Steve Scauzillo in the Pasadena Star-News (link below) describes their efforts and features good photos of the house’s current condition.
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2018/03/11/such-a-shame-julia-childs-family-home-now-owned-by-caltrans-is-vacant-deteriorating-in-pasadena/
More recent local reports highlight the city’s complicated plans to turn the other crumbling houses into affordable new and rehabilitated homes, starting this year.
Have you witnessed the deterioration of your childhood home, or its destruction by new owners or even eminent domain? If so, this could be powerful inspiration for a childhood home story. Write your memories and send them to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you don’t consider yourself a writer, Laurie and I would be happy to interview you and create a transcript. We’d love to have your story!
Best,
Susan
Photos by Sarah Reingewirtz, Pasadena Star-News
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The January 2022 Greetings email can be viewed here:
January 2022 Greetings (wix.com)
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Dolly Parton's Childhood Home
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Beloved singer and songwriter Dolly Parton grew up in a small cabin on Locust Ridge, near Sevierville and Gatlinburg, in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. This cabin, where the family lived during the late 1940s and early 1950s, is pictured on the cover of her 11th solo studio album, “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” released in 1973 (see photo).
Here is a link to the title song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG2kL4ojylk
In her 1994 autobiography, “My Life and Other Unfinished Business,” Parton writes that she was born in a one-room shack, but the family moved to the larger two-room home in the photograph when she was about five. Her father bought it for $5000. She remembers being excited to see the newspapers that covered the walls because they provided “something new to read and new pictures to look at.” She and her ten siblings “would go all over the house reading an episode of 'Dick Tracy,' or ‘Blondie.’ Sometimes you’d have to stand on your head to read something that had been pasted on upside down.”
The land around the cabin became the children’s playground. Every spring, their mother would let them run barefoot, toughening up their tender white feet into brown “shoes with toenails” by the end of summer. Parton writes about the creative activities they enjoyed outdoors, explaining that they were too poor to own store-bought toys. “The most fun for us kids were the pokeberries. They are dark purple and when you mash them, the juice is like a dye. We used to paint our skin with pokeberries to look like we were wearing bracelets or wristwatches. Sometimes we would paint what we called 'Jesus sandals' onto our feet.” Then the kids would dress up in gunny sacks and pretend to be disciples. They also loved to catch June bugs, tie them to strings, and fly “what we called our ‘lectric kites.” This is a tiny sample of many detailed memories Parton shares in her charming autobiography, a must-read if you’re a fan.
Dollywood, the theme park co-owned by Parton, opened in 1986, though the site in Pigeon Forge, TN, had been an amusement park for decades. There was some infrastructure in place, ready for a Dolly-centric makeover. The park was a huge success from its beginning. Dollywood now hosts over 2 million visitors annually and has tripled in size from the early days.
A recreation of Parton’s childhood home is one of the main attractions at Dollywood, and is set close to the entrance, as if encouraging visitors to see it first. The cabin was constructed by her brother Bobby, and her mother reproduced the interior. A sign outside claims that “most of the items on display are original family treasures. The original cabin still stands at its location in Locust Ridge.”
Inside the replica, visitors move through a narrow hallway to view the space through a plexiglas wall (see photo). Newspaper covers the kitchen walls that surround a table set with plates and coffee cups, a stove, a butter churn, a broom, and a 1946 feed store calendar with Dolly’s birthday circled. Iron skillets, saucepans, and an enamel basin hang near the stove. Vintage photos of her parents decorate the bedroom area, and wooden toys can be glimpsed under the bed. If you’d like to see more, here is a 2-minute video of the replica cabin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwq6YuVts0I
To see more photos, videos, and reviews, do an online search for “Dolly Parton’s Childhood Home." There are even a few Youtube videos featuring fans trying to visit the REAL original childhood home on Locust Ridge, which Parton bought back and restored to its 1950s appearance.
Do you still own some of your “original family treasures” and carry them with you from home to home? Thinking about a well-loved detail of your early space might spark a good childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read and post your memories. We can even help with editing, or interview you and create a transcript if you’d rather not write your story. Send your story or interview request to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
All the best,
Susan
Image credits:
"My Tennessee Mountain Home" album cover, RCA, 1973.
Replica of Dolly Parton's childhood home, exterior. Photo courtesy Dollywood.
Kitchen in the replica home. Photo courtesy of Dollywood.
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The December 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
December 2021 Greetings (wix.com)
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Diego Rivera's Childhood Home
On a recent trip to Guanajuato, México, I learned that renowned muralist Diego Rivera’s childhood home was located in GTO, as the city is popularly called, and had been converted into a museum. Being a big fan of the Méxicano muralist, I decided to visit.
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez was born on December 8, 1886, and lived at Positas 47, Zona Centro, Guanajuato, for the first six years of his life. In 1971, his daughter Guadalupe Rivera Marin initiated the restoration process of the Rivera Barrientos home and, to recreate the atmosphere of the era, furnished the downstairs spaces with pieces contemporary to the 19th century. The sole original article of furniture is baby Diego’s crib. The rooms that were restored include the dining room, studio, changing room, the room of his parents (which includes their portraits), and his Aunt Vicenta’s room.
On the building’s upper floors, early works of Diego’s demonstrate his precociousness, including an oil on canvas, Academy-style painting of a head, called the Cabeza Clásica, expertly rendered by twelve-year-old Diego.
The years spanning 1896 through 1921 are considered his formative years, and the museum’s walls are replete with examples of works from this era that chronicle his quest for a personal style. Before finding his own artistic voice, Rivera experimented with Cubism and Post-Impressionism, and the influence of other artists’s styles can be seen in his work. One of his lithographs, from his well-established mature period, called La maestra rural (The Rural School Teacher, grease pencil on paper, 1932), is included in a book read by Mexican fourth graders. One of the museum guards told me that every Mexican child knows this image.
Rivera’s father himself was a rural schoolteacher and his mother an extraordinary cook who knew ancient regional dishes. Diego had a twin brother who died at age one-and-a-half, and little Diego began drawing a year-and-a-half later at the age of three. According to Wikipedia, “when he was caught drawing on the walls of the house, his parents installed chalkboards and canvas on the walls to encourage him.”
When Diego was six, the Rivera Barrientos family moved from Guanajuato to México City to take advantage of better opportunities, both economic and artistic. At the age of ten, Diego began to study at México City’s Academy of San Carlos. His work—primarily his murals—his many love affairs, and his third marriage to artist Frida Kahlo are all well known.
Some children see their childhood homes as one big canvas, and many were scolded by their parents for drawing and painting on the walls. How many more of us would be in touch with our creativity, if only our parents had allowed this behavior? Was your childhood home environment one that emboldened creativity, in whatever form it emerged, or stifled it? How did your home itself inspire (or discourage) creative expression? Susan and I would like to know, and if you have a story to share, please email us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you prefer, one of us can interview you, transcribe, and post your story.
Sending best wishes,
Laurie
image credits:
Cabeza Clásica, Reproducciones de Bellas Artes Diego Rivera/Wahooart.com
La maestra rural (The Rural School Teacher), Google Arts & Culture
Diego Rivera's house, photos by Laurie McDonald
Diego Rivera, age three, National Photo Library of México
Diego Rivera at work on a mural, Wikipedia
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The November 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/d9NqVHc0s?languageTag=en&cid=b1bd4b21-a094-40f9-a6c1-758dc14f3c96#/main
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Bart Simpson's Childhood Home
The iconic cartoon childhood home of Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson at 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, has been a familiar image on Fox TV since 1989. While “The Simpsons” was an extremely popular show in the early 1990s, by 1997 viewership was slipping a bit, and sales of ancillary products were decreasing. Fox needed something to renew interest in the show and its merchandise.
According to an article by Jake Rossen on the Mental Floss website (link below), one origin story credits the solution to Jeff Charney, who had the idea to build a replica of the Simpsons’s house. He was then the marketing head of Kaufman and Broad, a home builder with a new housing development going up in Henderson, Nevada, about 16 miles southeast of Las Vegas. When the builders decided it was actually feasible, they pitched it to Fox. Fox and Pepsi then came up with a sweepstakes to be promoted through Pepsi products. Viewers who bought Mug Root Beer, Slice, or Brisk Iced Tea would get a numbered game piece. The winning number would be announced during an episode of “The Simpsons,” and the holder would become the new owner of the replica house.
https://www.tyla.com/life/life-news-the-simpsons-house-real-life-visit-kaufman-and-broad-builders-nevada-20210115
Designers studied over 100 episodes of "The Simpsons" to get the house details exactly right. Simpsons fanatics are familiar with every aspect of that home, so the replica had to be as close as possible to the cartoon version. They essentially built a regular 2200-square-foot tract house using a floor plan of the imaginary space (from a Simpsons CD-ROM game), and added important features like the two bay windows, front facing garage, and side chimney. The exterior was painted bright yellow, to match the cartoon exterior.
Inside, a Hollywood production designer made sure the rooms looked exactly right, adding 1500 styling props, including corncob curtains in the kitchen, Bart’s identical shirts and shorts in his bedroom closet, Lisa’s saxophone in her room, Duff Beer cans, mouse holes painted on the walls near the floors, and perfect replica furniture. Rossen writes, “The team’s goal was to be 90 percent normal, with occasional lapses into cartoon continuity. Door frames were widened and lengthened to accommodate Marge’s hair and Homer’s girth. The stairs leading to the second floor were slightly steeper than normal. The downstairs floor was poured and painted concrete rather than hardwood or carpet, the better to mimic the show’s flat colors. Bart’s treehouse was erected in the back yard.”
Here’s a link to a great 3-minute video about the creation of the replica house, which still stands at 712 Red Bark Lane, Henderson, NV. You’ll see the construction process and meticulously crafted interior props. Interestingly, the origin story here differs a bit from the Mental Floss article’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAG6BEELc0k
For a cost of $120,000, the house was completed in 49 days. Simpsons creator Matt Groening even sprayed some Bart graffiti on the garage, and signed a square of fresh concrete. Fans swarmed to the site, waiting hours to tour the house. Neighbors became frustrated and filed complaints.
When the winning number was announced on September 21, 1997, no one claimed it. Weeks went by, and in December Fox held a drawing to determine a new winner: Barbara Howard of Richmond, KY. Fox flew her and several family members to Henderson for a look at her grand prize. Because it would have been impossible for her to move to Nevada, she turned down the house and accepted $75,000 cash instead, per contest rules.
The exterior of the house was then repainted to fit in with the rest of the neighborhood, but the interior stayed wildly colorful until the house was finally sold in 2001 to a secretary at Kaufman and Broad. She repaired the damage from all the visitors and repainted the interior. Below are photos of the original exterior, Bart’s bedroom re-creation, and what the house looks like now.
Did your childhood home fit in with the neighborhood, or did it have some unique feature that made it stand out? Whether you lived in a cookie-cutter house, or in the weirdest place on the block, you probably have a strong idea about what your home looked like. This could be a great spark for a childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to have your story, and we’ll even edit it for you, or interview you if you prefer. Send your story or interview request to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
All the best,
Susan
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The October 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/fdNo5_o1M?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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Kanye West's Bizarre Childhood Home Replica
Recreating childhood homes is definitely in the trendosphere! Last month we told you about three recreations in three media, and just a few days later on August 26, Kanye West (now to be known as “Ye”) came to Chicago and built a full-scale model of his childhood home in the middle of our local NFL stadium, Soldier Field. The house was the centerpiece of his (third) public listening party for his newest album “Donda” which was released three days after the Soldier Field event.
If you read our January 2021 newsletter, you already know about the Chicago home at 7815 South Shore Drive where Kanye lived for eight years with his mother Donda (1949-2007) who bought it in the early 1980s. Last year, West bought the house for $225K.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Plan A was to move the actual house to Soldier Field for the listening party, but the city denied West permission. The replica built there seems to have followed the basic size and appearance of the original exterior, featuring faux siding, jumbled roof tiles, and fabric hanging in the windows, but with the addition of a cross installed on top (see photos below). West’s original intention was to burn the replica house down during the performance, but evidently he couldn’t get permission from the fire department and had to create the illusion of combustion by combining theatrical smoke with orange lights.
Soldier Field has a natural grass surface, preferred by the Chicago Bears, and it is always carefully maintained. For West’s performance, workers installed Terraplas, a thick plastic floor covering which would protect the grass, and there was no on-field seating that night.
Ticket prices started at $185. Almost 40,000 fans filled the stadium. Once admitted, attendees waited hours for West to play the most recent draft of “Donda.” The event was orchestrated by Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s creative director. Commenters and reviewers disagreed about the sound quality, some raving and some disappointed. A post-performance review by the Chicago Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli (link below) called it a “remarkable, frustrating, bonkers experience.” Here’s what Borrelli said about the house:
"At the Soldier Field 50-yard line — delightfully, with attention to peeling paint and ill-fitting curtains — Kanye had his childhood home rebuilt. Not a facade of the South Shore house. The whole damn thing. Then it was fixed with a large neon cross and placed on a hill surrounded by dozens of candles. Apparently, some people go to a therapist and some people reconstruct their childhood homes inside of an NFL stadium.”
https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-kanye-soldier-field-20210827-f6fppemdwrdtpn7mdtjdw2opim-story.html
As the performance unfolded, West appeared wearing a Maison Margiela mask over his face the entire time as he danced along with the record. Biblical chapters and verses, plus many images of Donda and West were shown on screens. A choir wearing pentagrams chanted as they circled the structure/stage, bowing to West. Controversial musicians DaBaby and Marilyn Manson joined West on the recreated front porch. Black SUVs, paramilitary soldiers, trucks, and vans also circled the structure. West eventually burst into flames and walked out of the orange-lit smoking house (a stunt he performed wearing a fire suit). After he was extinguished, he removed his mask and participated in a marriage-like tableau with heavily veiled Kim Kardashian, who wore a Balenciaga Couture wedding dress that seemed to impede her ability to walk on the Terraplas surface. If you’d like to experience the wackiness of the performance for yourself, just go to YouTube and enter something like “Kanye Donda Soldier Field” and it’ll pop right up.
What did your childhood home mean to you? Was it an indelibly powerful sanctuary, a place you’d prefer to forget, or are your feelings somewhere in the middle? Figuring out where you are on the spectrum might inspire a childhood home story. Laurie and I would like to read and post yours. If you want us to gently edit it, or if you’d rather be interviewed, let us know by sending an email to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Best,
Susan
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The September 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/27NjG4QX7?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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Recreating a Childhood Home
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Laurie and I have a former classmate who installed his 1960s boyhood bedroom in his current house. He has the actual furniture and accessories arranged just as they were in his youth, like a time capsule. I wondered if there are other people who had recreated a childhood room, or even an entire childhood home. Yes, there are, and three examples follow.
Kathy Smith from Coralville, Iowa spent decades crafting a miniature model of the three-story Cedar Rapids home where she grew up, according to an interesting 2017 story by Dick Hakes in the Iowa City Press-Citizen (link below). The project is not a “doll house,” has no open sides, and is not meant to be played with.
“Using the scale of 1/2 inch equals 1 foot, the model reproduces in meticulous detail the exact room sizes and locations, stairways, cabinets, countertops and shelving from the original family home—even doorway and baseboard trim.” Smith made all of the double-hung windows with screens in the exact sizes they needed to be, and they actually open and shut. She replicated the original paint, wallpaper, carpet and curtains in each room, and made every piece of furniture from scratch. A key item is a reproduction of her father’s piano with 88 keys, pedals, and a music rest she devised using plastic “shrink art." Miniature framed photos hang on the walls, the same ones the family displayed in the house. The picture below of the little kitchen fooled me at first; I thought it was life size.
As of 2017, the model was still a work in progress. Use the link below to read the article and see more photos of Kathy Smith’s labor of love.
Not all home recreations are traditionally hand crafted. A YouTube content provider called Cordless 7 painstakingly “constructed” his childhood home in the popular RPG (role playing game) Fallout 4, and he posted it last year on YouTube. Fallout 4, developed for Windows, PlayStation and Xbox, encourages user creativity by providing thousands of manipulatable images of building materials and props, like a massive digital set-design warehouse. A few of the many materials categories are aluminum, ceramic, cloth, Fiberglass, glass, leather, rubber, steel, wood, and many more esoteric substances.
Cordless 7 narrates a cheerful fast-paced video tour through his imaginary house, which he created from memory using only the digital images of building materials and props provided by Fallout 4. The aesthetic of the game is post-apocalyptic, so the rooms have a blasted, rusted, textural appearance. Cordless 7 was most interested in getting the layout right, positioning the furniture, and reproducing the look of the yard. At one point, as he leads viewers through the house, he mentions how challenging it was to find everything he needed (e.g., there is no treadmill in Fallout 4, so his parents’ room has an empty spot where their treadmill sat). He tells us, not surprisingly, that his house was the site of much video game playing. He also offers glimpses into his actual boyhood home life and the neighborhood culture.
Below is a screen shot of the exterior from YouTube. The video is about 10 minutes long. Here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnM4Cu9ek8
A much more mainstream, mass-market, and corporate childhood home reproduction can be experienced through the 2019 HGTV series called “A Very Brady Renovation.” Show creators decided to buy and re-design the interior of the 1959 Studio City, CA, house which had been used as the exterior of the Brady home in the TV series “The Brady Bunch” which ran on ABC from 1969 to 1974.
Eight HGTV hosts led the project with the surviving Brady Bunch cast members as consultants. According to an excellent 2019 Los Angeles Times story by Carolina A. Miranda (link below), it took 9000 hours to convert the interior of the house into a combined facsimile of the studio sets the show was shot on. The building had to be gutted and completely reconfigured to resemble all the rooms that had become familiar to viewers. So that the signature façade would remain unchanged, a huge addition was attached to the back and is not visible from the street. The show even details how the many decorative items on the original sets were scrounged from resale sites. If you were a Brady Bunch fan and if you like renovation shows, “A Very Brady Renovation” is streaming on Prime, Hulu, YouTube, and other platforms. Click on this link to read the LA Times story about the original architect of the house and the challenges of transforming it:
Do you remember a room or aspect of your childhood home well enough to create a believable reproduction? And do you believe this reproduction would help you recapture old feelings and memories of earlier times? If you’ve considered or completed a project like this, your ideas about it would make a good starting point for a childhood home story. We can help you write it, or we can interview you and post a transcript, if you prefer. Laurie and I invite you to get in touch with us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Susan
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The August 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/43NjC6yqo?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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John Belushi's Childhood Home
Brilliant performer John Belushi (1949-1982) grew up at 104 East Elm St. in Wheaton, Illinois, with parents Adam and Agnes, and younger siblings Jim (actor, comedian, and cannabis farmer), Billy, and Marian. John’s sad trajectory is well known to fans of a certain age, who enjoyed early Saturday Night Live and remember his many successful characters and his later movie roles.
The Wheaton house still stands but looks nothing like it did when the Belushi family lived there (see photos below).
Adam Belushi arrived in the U.S. in 1934 at age sixteen, and had worked his way up in the restaurant business from dishwasher to manager and then owner. Both Adam and Agnes were Albanian Americans with ties to several Albanian families in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago where they lived after they married, and where John was born.
They were the first family to move out of the old neighborhood after John’s father opened the original of his two restaurants, both called The Fair Oaks. One of the waitresses who worked for Adam had a brother who wanted to sell his house in Wheaton, and he sold it to the family without requiring a down payment. John was six years old.
It was not a happy home. John’s father spent weeknights in an apartment above the restaurant “returning to Wheaton only on the weekends to issue decrees and orders for the coming week” according to Bob Woodward in “Wired,” his 1984 biography of John. When Adam’s father died around the time of the move, John’s grandmother, Vasilo Belushi (called Nena) came to live with them and was a second mother to the children.
John’s wife/widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, whom he met at Wheaton Central High School, said in her 2005 biography of John (written with Tanner Colby), “When I first went over to John’s house I was struck by how different it was. The house was small but comfortable. Most of the activity took place in the disproportionately large kitchen. His grandmother, Nena, was a stereotypical immigrant; she wore a housedress with an apron, hairnet, and slippers.” Nena didn’t speak English, and John’s physical approach to comedy may have begun from his habit of acting out ideas to communicate with her. Friend Sue Keller said, “He seemed to be ashamed of his home. Whenever one of us would go over to pick him up, he would say, ‘Just honk the horn.’ We never went inside his house, ever.”
Judith also says, “I don’t think either of John’s parents was very happy.” As a child, he picked up on the tension and it made him sad. Being funny was a way to make his mother laugh. Agnes looked to John, the oldest son, to solve the family’s problems, but he knew he would never be able to. Other than Nena’s presence in the kitchen, Judith says, “the house felt empty and depressing. I think John’s survival instincts told him it was best to get out, and get as far away as possible.”
John did get away as soon as he graduated from high school, first attending the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, then transferring in 1968 to the College of DuPage, a 2-year college in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. His father offered him the restaurant, but he refused. One night John stopped by the Elm Street house. His brother Jimmy, 14, had just started high school. Bob Woodward writes, “Jimmy lay in his pajamas on the bed in the little alcove by the chimney, between the kitchen and the garage—the spot where John and Jimmy had shared bunk beds for years. There was a religious icon hanging in the corner, and the only light came from a 60-watt bulb in a wall lamp John had built in wood shop half a dozen years earlier. ‘Just use this place to sleep,’ John told his brother, indicating that’s what he had done.” He advised Jimmy to shield himself “with sports and school and absence. Most of all, keep busy.”
Agnes and Adam Belushi sold the Wheaton house in 1979. A subsequent owner added a second story in 2006 which expanded the living space to 2330 square feet, upgraded the kitchen, added a concrete patio in the back yard, and reclad the exterior. The house now has three bathrooms and a second floor laundry. According to a 2018 article in the Chicago Tribune, the house was listed that year for $395,000. It had last sold for $450,000 in 2008. I couldn’t find a record of a more current sale, so possibly it is again off the market. To see photos of the interior at the time of the listing in 2018, use link below.
Did your childhood home feel different from your friends’ homes? Was there an aspect or a feature you wanted to hide? If so, this might be a good start to a childhood home story, and will probably result in a more interesting one than a typical “sunshine and rainbows” approach. Send your story to Laurie and me at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. We can help edit your writing if you’d like, or we can interview you if you’d rather tell your story that way. We look forward to hearing from you.
All the best,
Susan
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The July 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/43NghfyOy?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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Taylor Swift's Childhood Home
Outrageously popular and prolific 31-year-old music star Taylor Swift’s childhood was just a few years ago, and her first home can be easily seen right here on your device. In fact, she wants you to know how she felt about the place, and she wants to give you a look at herself and her family moving around right there in that specific environment. Swift’s songs are uncritically autobiographical, so it’s no surprise she wrote and recorded one about where she spent most of her childhood.
Named after James Taylor, she was born in West Reading, PA, in 1989 and spent the first ten years of her life with parents Andrea and Scott and younger brother Austin at Pine Ridge Farm, the family’s Christmas tree farm in Cumru, PA. Her parents both worked in finance, and her father purchased the farm from a client as a “hobby farm” and home for his young family.
Here are selected lyrics from “Christmas Tree Farm,” Swift’s 2019 song based on personal nostalgic feelings about her earliest home. It begins with a retro orchestral introduction meant to evoke the sound of classic holiday pop songs, and then vaguely describes an idealized imaginary visit to the farm.
"My winter nights are taken up by static
Stress, and holiday shopping traffic
But I close my eyes, and I'm somewhere else
Just like magic
In my heart is a Christmas tree farm
Where the people would come
To dance under sparkling lights
Bundled up in their mittens and coats
And the cider would flow
And I just wanna be there tonight
In my heart is a Christmas tree farm
There's a light in the barn
We'd run inside out from the cold
In the town, kids are dreaming of sleighs
And they're warm and they're safe
They wake to see a blanket of snow. . ."
The official music video, link below, was created from family videos taken at the farm, and directed and produced by Swift. Among many scenes, some with automatic camera dating, you can see baby Taylor in her parents’ arms and being pulled on a sled, toddler Taylor in her playhouse, and preteen Taylor unwrapping a new guitar and surrounded by some wacky sofa upholstery. There are several good establishing shots of the house and a snow-covered tree field. You’ll get a look at both parents and brother Austin. Screen shots below, and link to the video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3rDTAdM2o
After ten years at the farm, the family moved to a more conventional rented house at 78 Grand Blvd. in Wyomissing, PA, where they lived until 2004 when Taylor was 14. That year they relocated to Hendersonville, TN, which is near Nashville, so that Taylor could get a start in the music business.
Of course when almost any home goes on the market these days, it’s easy to have a look at it thanks to online listings. In 2013, Taylor Swift’s second childhood home in Wyomissing was listed by the then-current owners and sold. According to an August 5, 2013, article in the online Philadelphia Magazine, the 5000 sq. ft. house was built in 1929, has 6 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, and sits on 2/3 of an acre. The asking price was $799,500. If you’re interested, the 2013 listing photos are still viewable on Redfin, link below. Looks like it sold for $700K.
https://www.redfin.com/PA/Reading/78-Grandview-Blvd-19609/home/38874444
A little more online checking shows that in December, 2020, TikTok user Sydney Redner posted a brief look at the Wyomissing house in a video that quickly went viral, even though the Swifts moved out 16 years earlier. The Redner family has lived there since the 2013 sale. If you’d like to see Redner’s short video, a link to it is in the middle of an online "House Beautiful" piece about it, link below. Interestingly, here the bed and bath counts and square footage are different from Philadelphia Magazine’s report. "House Beautiful" says there are 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths and only 3560 square feet.
https://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/a35025810/taylor-swift-childhood-home-tiktok/
Do images of your childhood home live on in photos, videos, or maybe an online real estate listing? How you feel when you spend time looking at those bygone scenes could be a good starting point for a childhood home story. Laurie and I would like to have your story. We can help with light editing, or we could interview you and write it ourselves with your final approval. Please get in touch at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. Send your story, or ask to be interviewed and we’ll go from there.
Best,
Susan
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The June 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/e5NeN5NkJ?languageTag=en&cid=882fd461-adfd-4a1f-b706-1202df0f82c4#/main
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Ronald Reagan's Childhood Home
One of Ronald Reagan’s many childhood homes, the officially recognized one, stands at 816 South Hennepin Ave. in the heart of Dixon, Illinois (current pop. 15,000), a continuing place of pride for many residents of the town. Ronald and his family lived in the house from 1920 to 1923. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
Reagan was born in 1911 in the smaller town of Tampico, Illinois. The family moved several times before settling in Dixon when Ronald was 9. Rent was $15 per month for the white 2-story clapboard house built in 1891 on a parcel of land owned by town founder John Dixon. “All of us have to have a place we go back to; Dixon is that place for me,” Reagan says in his first autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? (1981).
I took a detailed tour of this house recently. Our enthusiastic docent shared some good trivia about Reagan’s boyhood. Ronald and his brother Neil (1908-1996) called their parents by their first names, Jack and Nelle. Ronald and Neil were known by the nicknames Dutch and Moon. Jack was a charming but unreliable breadwinner who sold shoes at the Fashion Boot Shop in Dixon. He was also an alcoholic who loved to carouse. Nelle was an active leader in the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), taught in the Sunday School Bible program, led prayer services, did local missionary work, sang in the choir, and wrote and performed in church plays. The family home had a guest room where Nelle sometimes let newly released prisoners stay for a night or two.
The boys slept in a double bed next to a window in a small bedroom upstairs. Our tour guide told us that Ronald and Neil would take turns sleeping on the window side. During the winter, a heat register near the foot of the bed (see photo) warmed the feet of the brother on that side. We learned that the boys enjoyed moving through the house without touching any rugs or carpeting, playing an early version of “the floor is lava.” The original bathtub is still in the home’s upstairs bathroom (see photo).
The first floor parlor was off limits to the boys, and used on special occasions only. But young Ronald discovered that one of the fireplace tiles was loose, and he secretly stored coins under it. Our docent told us this was his “movie money” (see photo). Above the fireplace is a photo of President Reagan’s 1984 visit to the then newly restored home/museum that shows him removing the still-loose tile and adding some pennies.
One of Ronald’s chores was to empty water from the kitchen icebox drip tray. His mother made him mop the entire floor if he didn’t stay ahead of the melting. He was also responsible for displaying a cardboard sign in the kitchen window to alert the ice man that they needed a delivery. The docent pointed out three vertical pipes beside the zinc-lined kitchen sink, explaining that when indoor plumbing was added to older houses, there was not enough room for them in the walls, which were kept intact.
Nelle grew vegetables in a garden, and raised rabbits and pigeons in the yard. The brothers went through the neighborhood selling the animals for meat. Ronald and Neil loved playing in a dilapidated barn close to the house. Ronald loved to hunt and trap muskrats, possum, and rabbits, keeping them in cages in the garage.
Our docent also told the fascinating story of the creation of the museum site. Reagan was in office as the 40th POTUS by the time the house was undergoing its meticulous restoration during the early 1980s. It had been a rooming house, then a duplex, but when it was bought by a group of local residents, they committed to making it look as it would have when Ronald and his family lived there. Each room had been wallpapered several times since the original construction, and all the layers were amazingly intact. Samples of each layer were sent to Ronald and Neil so they could identify which patterns were on the walls in the early 1920s. Then the patterns were reproduced at great expense and installed in the correct rooms. Using vintage Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, the brothers selected furniture styles that matched the pieces their family owned. None of the furniture (except one rocking chair) is original, but it all now closely resembles what was there during the family’s residence.
In February, 2021, Young America’s Foundation, a conservative organization promoting college student participation (slogan: “The Conservative Movement Starts Here”), became the new owner and caretaker of the Dixon home in addition to YAF’s ownership and management of Rancho del Cielo, President Reagan’s former home in the Santa Ynez Mountains of California. Both sites are privately funded in keeping with conservative reluctance to use taxpayer dollars.
The volunteers who run the Reagan family home still feel a warm connection to the boy who was well known in town as a Lowell Park summer lifeguard who rescued 77 local swimmers, and a star college football player. For more information about the Reagan family home in Dixon, here’s their website: https://reaganhome.org/
Is your childhood home still standing, possibly inhabited by strangers? If so, have you visited it and experienced an altered sense of familiarity when you saw the changes made since you lived there? Maybe you still visit this home regularly, and the changes are less drastic. Your current relationship with your childhood home could make a good starting place for a childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to read and post your story. We can help you with editing, or even interview you if writing it all down is not appealing. Send your story or interview request to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com and we’ll go from there.
All the best,
Susan
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The May 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/d5NbrnVgE?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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Marlon Brando's Childhood Home
Actor Marlon Brando (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the youngest child of Marlon and Dodie Brando. In 1930 when he was six years old, the family moved to a rented two-story house at 1044 Judson Ave. in an attractive neighborhood in Evanston, Illinois (see photo), a city bordering Chicago on the north. He had two older sisters, Jocelyn (b. 1920) and Frances (b. 1923). Back in Omaha, bored by the drudgery of housework and struggling with alcohol addiction, his mother Dodie had helped to found the Omaha Community Playhouse, a semi-professional theater group. Even though her husband had landed a better job with the Calcium Carbonate Company of Chicago, she hated to leave Omaha and her position as the theater group’s biggest star.
The Brando house on Judson is described by Charles Higham in his 1987 book, Brando—The Unauthorized Biography, as handsome, with marble fireplaces and spacious living and dining rooms. There was an “extensive icebox” in the kitchen, and a "fat-bellied stove," plus a boot room with a wood chest for winter storage. Higham writes that Marlon’s favorite refuge was a salt box in the garage where raccoons and possums nested. The children liked to run up and down the hardwood staircase, and “invaded the maid’s room and fooled around with her sink, toilet, and bed.” They also “relished the attic, an unfinished, rustic, musty place with low ceiling boards jutting out at irregular angles,” a treasured haven for the children which Frances wrote about in the block newspaper. The current Zillow selling price estimate for the house is $954K.
Marlon, known as “Bud,” was part of an adventurous group of neighborhood children who enjoyed digging through trash cans, roller-skating, sneaking into abandoned houses, playing scrub, kick the can, and several versions of hide-and-seek, and “risking their necks over scary trails on high clay mounds along the Metropolitan Sanitary District canal.” During the summer, wearing bathrobes and slippers, they walked east to the beach at Greenleaf Street. If Marlon was placed in his room for misbehavior, he skillfully removed the window screen and escaped, no matter how firmly it was hammered to the frame by his father. In the late afternoons and evenings, Marlon and his sisters loved listening to The Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, and Little Orphan Annie on the family’s radio.
In his autobiography, Brando—Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon writes about his parents’ unstable relationship and the family's “lonely, friendless household.” About his mother, he says, “I have a few good memories of lying in bed with her…while she read a book to me and we shared a bowl of crackers and milk.” He says she “knew every song that was ever written” and possibly to please her, he memorized as many as he could and remembered them for the rest of his life.
Several sources say that the Brandos also lived in an apartment in a pretty red-brick three-flat at 524 Sheridan Square in Evanston (see photo), but dates are unclear. It is understood that Dodie’s scandalous drinking (she continued to buy alcohol during Prohibition), and the senior Marlon’s womanizing caused the couple to separate when young Marlon was 11, and then to leave the decorous community of Evanston. The children and their mother moved to Santa Ana, California. After about two years there, the couple reconciled and settled the family on a farm in rural Libertyville, IL, about 27 miles north of Evanston.
Like the Brando attic, did someplace in (or outside) your childhood home become a sanctuary for you and your siblings or friends? Where did you go when you felt the need to retreat and ponder? Thinking about this area and what it meant to you might be a good starting point for a childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to know yours. If you need some help with writing, or if you’d rather be interviewed about your childhood home, let us know at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
All the best,
Susan
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The April 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/01NZLZ8fp?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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Ernest Hemingway's Childhood Home
Most childhood homes of famous people are regular-looking places you might not even notice. But some become museums, tourist attractions, and even meccas for devotees. Ernest Hemingway’s first home in Oak Park, IL, is now a restored, well-maintained, and popular museum. Recently I had a wonderful virtual room-by-room tour led by docent Carla Mayer of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.
Built in 1890 for Ernest Hemingway’s widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall from Sheffield, England, the English-inspired Queen Anne house at 339 N. Oak Park Ave. stands in a neighborhood then known as Quality Hill where every house was required to have at least 5 bedrooms. Ernest’s parents, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway (a physician known as Dr. Ed) and Grace Hall Hemingway (a classically trained singer and composer), lived there with Ernest Hall for 6 years. Their first 4 children, Marcelline, Ernest, Ursula, and Madelaine were delivered by their father in Grace's upstairs bedroom. When first son Ernest was born in 1899, Dr. Ed joyfully blew a trumpet from the front porch to announce the arrival, but neighbors, fearing a fire, showed up with buckets of water.
Ernest’s mother Grace gave voice lessons in the parlor, sometimes making as much as $1,000 per month, a great sum in 1900. She forced all her children to learn to play an instrument. Ernest studied the cello and he claims to have hated it, but acknowledged music’s importance to his later work. Photographs were on display of little Ernest dressed by his mother in feminine clothing, a 19th century practice that was going out of favor. Eventually these photos added to the resentment Ernest developed towards Grace as he grew up.
The first floor home library was filled with books. Ernest and his older sister Marcelline read everything available to them: Shakespeare, Victorian novelists, and Ernest’s favorites, the books of Horatio Alger. The library was also the home’s “man cave” where men were allowed to smoke and drink away from the women and children. During the day, Ernest and Marcelline had permission to play games there, but no card games, because gambling was prohibited.
The home featured ample evidence of the family’s originality. Throughout the house, light fixtures were of the “ups and downs” type, a short-lived style that combined sconces for both old-fashioned gas and modern electricity. The Hemingways were one of the first families in Oak Park to have a telephone. Dr. Ed owned a skeleton used for teaching, which was actually stored in a closet. The children named it “Susie Bone-apart.” The third-floor attic was used as a workroom for family hobbies and Dr. Ed’s taxidermy projects. Because all the children learned to shoot at age 3, we can guess that some of their kills were preserved and displayed in the house.
Ernest and Marcelline shared a small bedroom on the second floor (see plan) that would have been the sewing room in a smaller family. Marcelline’s original toy box is still standing in the room. Coincidentally, art pieces by then-popular artist Maude Humphrey Bogart, Humphrey Bogart’s mother, decorated the bedroom wall. Much later, Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart got to know each other during the production of Howard Hawks’s 1944 film of Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not.
In 1906, when Ernest was six, the family moved to a more modern house in Oak Park. Two more siblings, Caroline and Leicester, were born there. Ernest finished his schooling at Oak Park and River Forest High School (he never attended college) before going on to an adventurous life and an important literary career. For more photos, a good timeline, and to learn much more about Ernest Hemingway’s life, visit the excellent EHFOP website:
https://www.hemingwaybirthplace.com/
What were some of the idiosyncrasies of your childhood home? How did your family put its original stamp on your earliest living spaces? Thinking about the features that set your home apart could be a good starting point for your childhood home story. Laurie and I would love to have your story, and are happy to help with gentle editing, or we can interview you if you prefer talking instead of writing. Contact us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
All the best,
Susan
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The March 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/ddNWZQSaj?languageTag=en&cid=b1bd4b21-a094-40f9-a6c1-758dc14f3c96#/main
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Hillary Clinton's Childhood Home
Have you googled “celebrity childhood homes” in your area? You may be surprised to see who grew up nearby!
Finding celebrity childhood homes in and around Chicago is easy. Here’s another one: Hillary Rodham Clinton spent most of her childhood in the corner house at 235 Wisner Street in Park Ridge, a suburb just northwest of the Chicago city limits (see photos below). A small honorary street sign posted at Elm and Wisner calls it “Rodham Corner."
In her autobiography, Living History (2003), Hillary describes Park Ridge as “white and middle class” and with “excellent public schools, parks, tree-lined streets, wide sidewalks, and comfortable family homes." Born in 1947, HRC spent her earliest childhood in a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago, but by 1950 her father was doing well enough in his fabric printing business to buy and move the family (father, mother, Hillary, and younger brothers Hugh and Tony) to the attractive two-story brick house with "two sundecks, a screened-in porch, and a fenced-in back yard where the neighborhood kids would come to play or sneak cherries from our tree.”
Snowy winters provided excitement. The father of the family next door flooded that home’s back yard to create an ice rink for the nearly 50 kids who lived in the immediate neighborhood. As a toddler, brother Hugh pushed open the door to the sundeck and “happily tunneled through three feet of snow” until their mother rescued him. Because her mother didn’t learn to drive until the 1960s, they walked everywhere, and Hillary remembers her mother pulling her on a sled to the grocery store.
A natural leader of neighborhood kids, during the summers Hillary organized “games, sporting events, and back yard carnivals both for fun and to raise nickels and dimes for charities.” She remembers her mother encouraging her brother Tony to pursue a dream of digging his way to China in the back yard. During that project, her mother would occasionally put a fortune cookie or chopsticks in the hole he worked on every day.
In Living History, she admits that she grew up in a “cautious, conformist era,” and recognizes that “this benign cocoon was an illusion, but it is one I would wish for every child.”
How is your adult home different from your childhood one? Have you “rebelled” against a conservative or traditional early home by choosing an unconventional dwelling after you left? Or did you yearn for more tradition after growing up in an eccentric place? This could be an interesting starting point for a Childhood Home Story. We would love to read and post your story, and if you’d like help writing it, let us know. We can also interview you and create your story from a transcript. Contact us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
All the best,
Laurie and Susan
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The February 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/c3NUcOamk?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
Kanye West's Childhood Home
January greetings! I’m writing from Chicago, where dozens of childhood homes of famous people are an easy drive from my house. Recently I visited the vacant, deteriorating blue-painted frame house at 7815 S. South Shore Dr. where Kanye West lived with his mother from age 3 to approximately age 12. In April 2020, the house was featured in local news when its fate took an interesting twist.
Kanye's mother, the late Donda West, bought the house in the early 1980s. In her memoir, “Raising Kanye” (2007), she describes the area. “We were within walking distance of Lake Michigan and our backyard backed up to Rainbow Park. It’s in the kitchen of that house that Kanye [in his 2005 song "Hey Mama"] talks about kneeling on the kitchen floor and saying, ‘Mama, I’m gonna love you ’til you don’t hurt no more.’” Kanye introduced “Hey Mama” in 2005 on Oprah’s show, YouTube link below. His proud mother is in the front row:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCiwTy8LeDY
Donda West says in her book that when some “pretty tough kids” slashed Kanye’s bike tire in Rainbow Park, she decided the neighborhood was unsafe, and she and Kanye moved to suburban Blue Island.
Records show that Donda West sold the South Shore house in 2004. It eventually went into foreclosure until a foundation created by Kanye and his longtime collaborator Rhymefest (AKA Che Smith) bought it. They announced a plan to establish an “arts incubator” there, but the foundation struggled, and the plan was abandoned. According to the Chicago Tribune, the house landed in demolition court in 2019 after the city pronounced it “dangerous and unsafe.” However, in a short WGN News story (link below), Dennis Rodkin of Crain’s Chicago Business reports that Kanye West bought the house for $225K in early April 2020. According to Rodkin, West has taken out city permits for renovation, but the ultimate plan for the house is still a mystery. Here is video from the story’s broadcast on April 24, 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXJ_x4oQWBQ
Though many of our own childhood homes are still standing and occupied, some have deteriorated, become vacant, or have even been destroyed since we lived there. If your early home has undergone drastic changes or demolition, how did this affect you? Your observations might make a great Childhood Home Story. Laurie and I would love to read and post your story, no matter how it “ended.” We are happy to help with gentle editing, or we could interview you and write your story from a transcript if that’s better for you. Contact us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Sending all the best at the beginning of 2021,
Susan
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The January 2021 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/a3NRz1Xz_?languageTag=en&cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
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Michelle Obama's Childhood Home
Chicago is a big metropolitan area, so it’s not surprising to learn that many famous, accomplished people spent their childhoods here. First Lady Michelle Robinson Obama grew up at 7436 S. Euclid Ave. in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood (photos below). She and her family (mother, father, and brother Craig) rented the second floor apartment of a sturdy brick bungalow owned by her mother's Aunt Robbie, who taught piano lessons with exacting authority on the first floor. “The music was never annoying, just persistent,” says Obama charitably in her well-written and fascinating 2018 autobiography, Becoming. When
she was four, she began learning to play the piano from Aunt Robbie. “It felt natural, like something I was meant to do,” she says.
“I loved my room,” writes Obama. “It was just big enough for a twin bed and a narrow desk. I kept all my stuffed animals on the bed, painstakingly tucking them around my head each night as a form of ritual comfort.” A thin partition separating her space from her brother Craig’s “was so flimsy that we could talk as we lay in bed at night, often tossing a balled sock back and forth through the ten inch gap between the partition and the ceiling as we did.” They sprayed Pledge on the hall floor to make it as slippery as possible when they slid on it in their socks. The siblings had received boxing gloves from their father, and enjoyed practice matches in the kitchen. At night the family played board games, told jokes and stories, and listened to Jackson 5 records.
Downstairs seemed “like a mausoleum” in comparison. Aunt Robbie kept the furniture covered in plastic, and her shelves were loaded with porcelain figurines the kids were not allowed to touch. Obama came to think of upstairs and downstairs as “two separate universes, ruled over by competing sensibilities.”
When you think of your childhood home, do you also remember another dwelling, maybe a friend’s, or a grandparent’s, that offered subtle or even extreme contrasts? Did this other place affect the way you felt about where you were living? If so, an exploration of the differences could provide a good approach to your childhood home story.
We would love to have your story, and would be glad to offer gentle writing help if you’d like it. Email it to us at the blog, childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. We can also interview you, ask you questions, and create your story from a transcription,
if that is better for you. Just let us know and we’ll schedule a time at your convenience.
Wishing you inspiration and a great holiday season!
Laurie and Susan
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The December 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
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Walt Disney's Childhood Home
Last month Laurie and I suggested googling “celebrity childhood homes” to see interesting images from all over the United States and the world. Here in Chicago, that Google search produced a wonderful surprise: Walt Disney spent the first four years of his life only three miles from my current home on the northwest side.
The Disneys lived in a frame house at 2156 N. Tripp Ave. (photo below) built in the style of thousands of other houses in Chicago. Walt’s mother Flora drew up the plans, and his father Elias, a carpenter, completed the house in 1893. They moved in that year with their two sons, Herbert and Raymond. A third son, Roy, was born in June, 1893. On December 5, 1901, Walter Elias Disney was born in a second floor bedroom. His sister Ruth was born in 1903. When Elias sold the house in 1906, the seven Disneys had lived there together longer than they would in any other place.
The house changed hands several times over the years. Alterations obscured much of the original appearance. However, an enthusiastic and dedicated group acquired the property and is restoring it to the way it looked in 1901, when the Disney family lived there. Here is a link to The Walt Disney Birthplace website, where you’ll see profiles of the organizers, information on their progress, and their exciting and ambitious vision for the future of this fascinating cultural landmark.
http://www.thewaltdisneybirthplace.org/
When I reached out to the Walt Disney Birthplace team, they sent a beautiful colorized photograph (below) of young Walt and his sister Ruth standing on the front porch of the house, and I learned a little about the neighborhood's atmosphere during Walt’s four years there. North Tripp Ave. was one of the only paved roads in the community, then called Northwesttown. The unpaved excavated streets would flood and freeze during the winter, and neighborhood children ice-skated on them. The Schwinn Bicycle Company was close by. Children used discarded hoops from the factory to race up and down Tripp. The milkman enjoyed special popularity. During the winter, he allowed the kids to hook sleds to his open bobsled and be pulled along the route.
What unique features of your childhood home or neighborhood do you remember? We would love to read and post your story, and we are happy to offer editing help, or we can interview you and write your story for you from the transcript. Send your story or your questions to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
Laurie and I look forward to hearing from you. We wish you a happy and safe Thanksgiving!
Susan
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The November 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/8dNNHmSlK?cid=006c0269-08cc-4009-95bf-5e2b43ac94cc#/main
Michael Jackson's Childhood Home
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Some childhood homes become public destinations because great men and women lived in them when they were boys and girls. Though a few of these places are now museums, most early houses of the famous remain unmarked. Googling “celebrity childhood homes” will produce images of surprisingly ordinary places to drive by for glimpses of the original environments of the world’s most fascinating people (e.g. Martha Stewart’s early home in Nutley, NJ; Bob Dylan’s parents’ house in Duluth, MN; Muhammed Ali’s boyhood home in Louisville, KY; Madonna’s teen home in the suburbs of Detroit).
Michael Jackson’s childhood home at, coincidentally, 2300 Jackson Street in Gary, IN, is not a museum, but it’s not exactly unmarked, either. Behind a black iron fence with a locked gate is the small two-bedroom house where Michael and his 8 siblings spent their earliest years and where they honed their musical skills. It stands out as the best-maintained house in a modest neighborhood. The Michael Jackson estate bought the house next door, too, maybe for storage. Both houses feature nice lawns and trim shrubs. Though a polished granite memorial disappeared from the lawn in 2017, makeshift memorials sometimes left by visitors produce a special feeling of reverence. Attached to the fence are a pair of whiteboards on which fans write messages to Michael. The interior is not open to the public.
The Jacksons’ childhood was different from that of most other kids. In addition to their schedule of nonstop practicing, rehearsals, and performances, the Jacksons were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and did not celebrate holidays. In his memoir, “You Are Not Alone: Michael Through a Brother’s Eyes,” Jermaine writes about seeing seasonal decorations in the neighborhood when he was eight years old and Michael was four:
“We observed all this from inside a house with no tree, no lights, no nothing. Our tiny house… was the only one without decoration. We felt it was the only one in Gary, Indiana, but Mother assured us that, no, there were other homes and other Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not celebrate Christmas… But that knowledge did nothing to clear our confusion: we could see something that made us feel good, yet we were told it wasn’t good for us.”
Many of us have some or a lot of ambivalence about our childhood homes. If you hold mixed feelings about where you grew up, exploring them might produce a great story. Remember, we are happy to help you, do gentle editing, or even record your story if that’s easier for you. Your memories can be brief, too. Maybe a certain room stands out, or you’d simply like to record your impressions of your childhood yard.
Send your story to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. We look forward to reading it and including it in the collection!
Best to you,
Laurie and Susan
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The October 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/1cNKullEy?cid=b1bd4b21-a094-40f9-a6c1-758dc14f3c96#/main
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Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House
Have you ever counted up the total number of places you’ve lived? We did this again recently and came up with 27 between us (16 for Laurie and 11 for Susan). What we noticed is how strong the memories of our childhood homes remain, even if we lived there for only a short time. Most of us live in one or more places much longer as adults, but memories of later homes seem to be less visceral, less intense. We hope you’ll tap into those vivid recollections of your childhood home, and send them to us. We are happy to offer gentle editing, or to interview you if that’s more your style. Send your memories, stories, comments, or questions to childhoodhomestories@gmail.com.
If you’re in the mood to read about moving around, Meghan Daum’s memoir, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, is a charismatic and funny exploration of her passion for dwellings, and eventually for home ownership. A childhood move from Austin, TX, to Ridgewood, NJ, was an early cultural shock, followed by life in a dorm at a college chosen because Daum thought it would facilitate her ultimate goal: to live in a pre-war Manhattan apartment. After attaining that goal and beginning a successful writing career, she developed what she calls a “full-blown real estate obsession." It propelled her through many more moves into many more rented places, the obsession and the rentals described in fascinating detail. (We loved reading about one of her writing assignments which involved going back to her childhood home and seeing how much it had or hadn’t changed.)
In the final third of the book Daum chronicles her desperate search for a house she could afford (barely) to buy at the height of a real estate boom, and her sometimes triumphant, sometimes deflating purchase of a 900-square-foot bungalow in Los Angeles she bought for “four times the money my parents had paid for the two-story, four bedroom house I grew up in.” Ultimately, how Daum changes the house and how the house changes her life add up to a larger exploration of our earnest and often complicated human investment in where we live.
All the best,
Laurie and Susan
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The September 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/90NIH_QT7?cid=b1bd4b21-a094-40f9-a6c1-758dc14f3c96#/main
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"306 Hollywood"
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Many of us are still staying at home, or close to home, with thoughts of past summers often springing to mind. But thanks to streaming, we can experience spectator sports, socialize in big groups, armchair travel, and watch theater and music performances. We’ve discovered we can get equally interested in offerings that celebrate homes. One stands out in particular: 306 Hollywood, a film that shows how profoundly the co-directors, a brother and sister, were affected by the dwelling they knew intimately as children.
306 Hollywood is a magical realist documentary by Jonathan and Elan Bogarín, filmmakers who took on an important task: to clear out their beloved grandmother’s house after her death. Every Sunday for thirty years, Jonathan and Elan visited grandmother Annette Ontell in her New Jersey home, and as adult filmmakers, they also regularly interviewed her on camera. When she died, the siblings convinced their mother to postpone the sale and to let them do an “archaeological dig” through the contents of the house, making a filmed record of their discoveries. Layer by layer, image by image, they examined, arranged, and cataloged thousands of objects; in estate sale terminology, it was a "packed house." Months became years, and their early documentation grew into a lively, creative, and surprising visual exploration of Ontell’s environment of seven decades, her past as a fashion designer, and her philosophy of life. There is even a wild moment of suspense when her grandchildren attempt to persuade her on camera to undress and try on one of the cocktail gowns she’d designed decades before. The film was first shown on PBS’s POV series, and it’s available on Amazon Prime.
Here is the link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUIThTQgX8w
If you’ve gone through the profound experience of clearing out a childhood home, you may have the start of a good story. We would love to read memories of your early home, either while you lived there, or after you moved out and perhaps became responsible for its dismantlement. We are happy to do gentle editing if you’d like. Feel free to email us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com with questions or ideas.
All the best,
Laurie and Susan
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The August 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
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"I Capture the Castle"
We are still spending most of our time in our respective homes during the pandemic, and we suspect you are, too. Many of us are working on domestic improvements and thinking a lot more about our immediate environment.
Perhaps you’ve also experienced flashbacks to your childhood home. How does your current home's "design philosophy" differ from or replicate that of your earliest dwelling? A good story could come out of this idea. Was the look of your first living space something to rebel against, or to embrace and cultivate forevermore?
Lots of novels qualify as Childhood Home Stories. Susan reread a favorite recently: “I Capture the Castle” by Dodie Smith. Published in 1948 to immediate success, it’s about an eccentric English family living in a crumbling ancient castle. The uniqueness of the castle and the isolation it provides are the foundations of a wonderful story of expanding social lives, romance, and new interests after two American brothers inherit a nearby estate. The castle functions as an eccentric character, too; the story couldn’t have happened anywhere else. “I Capture the Castle” has almost a cult following, and it’s deserved! Below is a link to a 2017 essay about its continuing appeal. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/10/20/16503280/i-capture-the-castle-dodie-smith
We hope you’ll visit the blog and see the newest childhood home additions. We’ve posted our first dual-language (Portuguese and English) story about growing up in a home in Belém, Brasil.
If you have a childhood home story brewing, start jotting it down, and begin thinking about sending it to Our Childhood Homes. Your story can be short or long. We can offer gentle editing if you’d like. And we are also glad to interview you and transcribe your words, if telling your story is easier that way.
Sending best midsummer wishes!
Laurie and Susan
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The July 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/81ND9kaD9?cid=b1bd4b21-a094-40f9-a6c1-758dc14f3c96#/main
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June 2020 Greetings
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We hope you’ve been able to visit childhoodhomestories.com recently to check out our newest stories. This week we are thrilled to post two essays by Toddy Sewell and John Sewell, a sister and brother who grew up in the same house and shared their unique takes on the experience. You’ll also enjoy Miles Hawthorne’s story that includes an example of a toddler’s obliviousness to wrongdoing, and a triumph over floods.
Last month Susan’s book group chose to read The Yellow House, a memoir by Sarah K. Broom. Broom, born in New Orleans in 1979, was the youngest in a family of 12 children. Her heartfelt and fascinating account of the lifelong influence of her childhood home (the Yellow House was located in East New Orleans) reveals the mixed and intense feelings we can develop for our original spaces. She shows how her family loved and appreciated this frame “shotgun house" in the beginning, but later how they became so ashamed of it that no one outside of the family was ever invited inside again. It’s an epic “childhood home story,” an indictment of institutionalized racism in New Orleans, and a National Book Award winner.
Maybe you’re thinking about your own childhood home and sense a story percolating. Remember, we’d love to see it. Send it to us at childhoodhomestories@gmail.com. If you feel hesitant about your writing skills, we will help with gentle editing! If talking is more your style, we also would be happy to interview you and create an edited transcription. Just email us and we’ll set up a convenient time.
With appreciation,
Laurie and Susan
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The June 2020 Greetings email can be viewed here:
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