My first 12 years were lived in a magically warm home at 145 Columbia Ave. in the Mayberry-like town of Elyria, Ohio, just west of Cleveland. My parents bought the house in the early 1950s. It was beyond their means, but they were frugal and my dad was extremely on top of the family’s finances. He told me once that, after paying the bills one month, the remaining balance in his checkbook was 98¢. But he knew when he would get his next paycheck, and the family would be all right.
It was a three-bedroom, two-story frame house, painted white with black shutters on a quiet street at the edge of a newer part of town. I was the youngest of four. My two sisters and I shared a bedroom with three twin beds and one chest of drawers which my dad had made. We each had one small drawer for our socks and underwear, and two larger drawers for our tops and pants. We also shared a small closet. My dad had made wonderful headboards for our beds with places for books, and sliding doors for our treasures. They each featured a reading light in the center, but the bulbs were usually burnt out, and replacing them was a low priority expense. Of course we didn’t have air conditioning, and I would lie in bed with the top of the bed flush with the bottom of the window, and rest my head on the windowsill, trying to catch a night breeze.
My brother Chuck had his own room with a double bed and a chenille bedspread with a baseball bat and glove stitched on the top. A round chenille baseball rug completed the ensemble. He had a great big closet which we played in on rainy days, and a map of the world on the wall where we would find obscure countries and make the others try to locate them. Even though he had the luxury of his own room, he envied the camaraderie we three sisters enjoyed in our room. It’s true, we three girls shared stories and life lessons. I remember my oldest sister Jo Anne describing the boogie man in great detail to me in the dead of night. She also tried to teach me how to shimmy to Chubby Checker records in that room, but unfortunately it was before my breasts had appeared.
There was only one bathroom on the second floor for the six of us, but I don’t remember any conflict or tension about its use. Curiously there was a lone toilet in the corner of the basement, but it was rarely used as there were no walls around it.
The basement was a scary place, dark and the home to daddy-long-legs spiders. There were two rooms. At the bottom of the stairs, if you turned left you entered the “rec room,” complete with knotty pine paneling. The knots looked like eyes watching us when we played. A previous owner had built a knotty pine bar, but it was nonfunctioning. I never saw my parents drink anything stronger than coffee, so the bar liquor cabinet was dusty. Boxed gift bottles of scotch, whiskey, and bourbon my dad got from work were placed there and eventually covered in cobwebs.
To the right of the staircase there was a cement-floored room with the washer and dryer, and the clothes hamper under the clothes chute. We got in trouble for throwing our cat down the clothes chute from the second floor bathroom. A big concrete sink sat next to the dryer. Our pet parakeet escaped his cage only to make his way down to the basement, smash against the glass window in an attempt to gain freedom, then slide down into the standing water in the sink and drown.
The root cellar was off of this room. It was damp and musty, and housed glass jars of peaches or sauerkraut or something else. Though we never ate the contents, we would periodically remove all the jars and wipe down the wooden shelves and mop the floor, then replace the jars for another year. I hated this job because of my overwhelming fear of spiders.
The attic was another scary place to creep up to and dash down from. It was where Christmas decorations were stored, and where my dad had his office. He had a big desk up there, a file cabinet and a Royal typewriter. He was a fast two-fingered typist. There was a small window at each end of the attic, but they didn’t allow for much ventilation. It was incredibly hot up there in the summer. I can still see my dad working at his desk, sweat dripping off the end of his nose.
Our kitchen was large with a big breakfast nook. My dad built a table with a blue Formica top and leaves on each end which could be pulled out and raised up to enlarge the table. He built seat benches around the three sides of the nook. We would have to slide around on the benches to our places at the table. There were drawers under the benches for extra dishes, crayons, paper, etc. Once, when cleaning out the drawers, we discovered that one of us had slipped in a piece of unwanted toast.
My brother, sisters and I had to form two teams to wash dishes after dinner. My two older sisters teamed up with either my brother or me for a few weeks, then we would switch. If you were teamed up with Jo Anne, you got through the chore more quickly, as she wouldn't sweep the floor. If you had Jeanie as your partner, you had to drop the table leaves, pull the table out of the breakfast nook, sweep the floor and replace the table. But the conversation was better.
In a corner of the breakfast nook my dad had built a shelf for our dial telephone. Our number was FA2-0331. It was a party line, and sometimes we listened in until my mom caught us.
We had a dishwasher, but I never remember it being used. I don’t know if it didn’t work, or if my parents wanted to teach us how to wash and dry dishes. I really believe I can remember my mom giving me a bath in the kitchen sink when I was tiny. There was a garbage disposal in the sink and one sad day our pet turtle met his end when he fell in the disposal while it was running.
Our refrigerator was small and there was a tiny, maybe 18 x 12 inch, freezer in the middle of the top shelf. One of us kids turned the temperature dial off one day, so that the freezer completely thawed, ruining the small amount of ground beef and chicken my mom had stored in there. When my dad got home from work, he gathered all of us kids together and said we couldn’t do anything until one of us confessed. My sisters and brother convinced me that, being the youngest and the spoiled favorite, I wouldn’t get into trouble if I just confessed and said I was sorry. I went to my dad, confessed and said I was sorry. He told me he was glad I had come to him, but he wanted to know why I had done it. Of course my siblings didn’t give me a complete script. All I could do was sheepishly declare I had no idea. Years later my brother owned up to turning the dial.
Our Egg Lady, a farm wife, would walk through our back door in her overalls and baseball cap, open our refrigerator and leave a dozen eggs each week. We also had a milkman who delivered glass gallon bottles of milk with paper caps into the wooden crate on our screened-in back porch.
The back porch was a great place, big with a concrete ground level floor and floor-to-ceiling screens around the outer three walls. My dad made a huge wooden picnic table with attached benches and installed it there. One summer we kept a continuous Monopoly game going on that table. I remember my dad carrying me out to the porch when thunderstorms brewed. We would watch the sky darken, and listen to the approaching rumble of thunder. At the peak of the storm, with flashing lightning and booming thunder, he would laugh and cheer the show. Hence, I was never afraid of storms.
The dining room was almost too small for our large, dark, heavily carved table, chairs, buffet, and china cabinet. Here was were we had Sunday dinners of my mom’s fried chicken or pot roast, and holiday dinners with turkey and candied yams, and her incredible apple pie. It was also Homework Central, and I can remember writing school reports using our set of encyclopedias, which was displayed in its own bookcase in the living room.
The living room featured a gas fireplace with a couple of cast iron logs. We never used it. It probably wasn’t even hooked up to the gas. The living room brings back memories of Christmas. We always had a live tree which we all decorated with big colored light bulbs and bubble lights, and familiar ornaments. On Christmas morning we would have to line up in the upstairs hallway and march down the stairs in pairs with my parents bringing up the rear. We each had our own chair where our stocking and presents would be placed. We made Christmas last as long as possible by watching each family member open one gift at a time. I never understood the method used by some families where everyone tore into their presents as fast as possible.
At the foot of the staircase was a closet with a glass doorknob. A full-length mirror hung inside the door. I can still see Jo Anne standing in front of that mirror dressed for her high school prom in a beautiful green empire waist formal.
The garage was big, and my dad’s workshop was housed in the adjacent boat house. I spent most of my time there, watching him build things. He made two dollhouses, exact replicas of our house, for my two sisters. Our family often wonders what happened to those fabulous dollhouses. I had my own special brush that he let me use to brush sawdust off of his circular and band saws. Lumber and a couple of steel L-beams leaned against the garage walls. One day when I was about five years old, I was tugging at my baby doll carriage and somehow dislodged an L-beams. It fell on top of my head. Jeanie screamed to my dad, who was washing the second floor windows. He sped down the ladder so fast he hit only two rungs on the way down. He rushed me to the hospital, but miraculously I was okay.
Our backyard was small, but we had an amazing swing set that my dad made out of three huge pipes sunk deep into the ground for the frame, and then equipped with two swings and a glider. On summer nights the neighborhood kids would swarm all over it. We also had The Field to play in, which was an empty house lot kitty-corner from our backyard. The Field had paths wandering through the weeds, and the sweetest tiny strawberries which we picked for the rare shortcake.
Dad built a two-story addition on to the house in the early 1960s. I honestly don’t remember anyone helping him. My Swedish grandfather had been a carpenter in South Dakota, and he must have taught my dad. The first floor was a family room with a powder room. The upstairs was a bedroom for Jo Anne and Jeanie. We enjoyed the addition for only a year or two.
When my dad held a family meeting and told us that he had accepted a new job in Homewood, IL, I was devastated. I couldn’t believe my life in Elyria was coming to an end, and I would have to face a frightening social future, just as I was discovering boys.
All of us remember the home on Columbia Ave. with so many funny and fond memories. We have all made the pilgrimage back to Elyria, and have fortunately been allowed by the current owners to enter the house. Of course, the rooms are smaller, and the front tree we climbed is gone. But I now live in a house in Illinois with glass doorknobs and a clothes chute, on a quiet street, and if I close my eyes, I can feel I’m back in our old house in our old neighborhood.
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