Like some other contributors here, I moved a few times during my childhood, and kind of think my childhood homes would be the best way of thinking about this. But then, I can’t honestly say when my childhood ended, assuming it has. So I’ll just focus on the heart of childhood. Seven years old to thirteen years old.
I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and don’t have a single memory of that. My first “home” then would be in Springfield, Pennsylvania, in Delaware County (there is a Springfield in Pennsylvania County, too). We moved there from Ann Arbor when I was four.
Our house was brick, located on a corner in a residential neighborhood. We could walk to school. There was a basement that was pretty clean where Gussy, our pet Beagle, slept and Mom did laundry. My three brothers and I shared a room with bunk beds. Dad would put jars (with holes in the top) full of lightning bugs on the dressers so we could watch them glow as we drifted off to sleep. We took turns with top bunk and bottom bunk, but whoever got the bottom would usually kick the mattress of the top bunk. Then the top-bunker would reach across and shake hands like it was the coolest thing going.
If one of us got sick, he would have to relocate to the upstairs extra bedroom - it was the quarantine room. If you needed something, you rang a little bellhop bell and Mom or Dad would come up to see what was needed. It really felt special to be up there, even if a little lonely.
I don’t have too many memories from Springfield days. Big orangish-red cardboard bricks to build things with, in Kindergarten, a big slate chalkboard on wheels in first grade. I remember riding in a Vote-For-Nixon caravan around the neighborhoods. Dad was a good Republican, and we joyfully chanted, “two-four-six-eight, who-do-we-appreciate? Nixon, Nixon, Nixon.'' Kids like chanting.
When the mosquito sprayer truck came around, we ducked inside. It was stinky.
At school we played in concrete culvert pipes on the playground and in “the gully,” a drainage ditch on the side of the road. We had pictures taken with the four boys on a forest green couch. When I was in first grade, I stepped on a bee in the yard (ouch) and Mom made me feel better. Gussy died on her bed in the basement. My dad worked for the University of Pennsylvania, so we got to go to the annual picnic on a farm where they students learn veterinary medicine. We took hayrides and drank sodas from a giant metal tub of ice. One time, we saw a dissected cow. The cow had died, mysteriously, and the students performed an autopsy. It turned out that she had swallowed a nail. All those exciting memories are from when we lived in Springfield.
In the summer of 1962, we moved to Salt Lake City where I entered second grade. We lived at (and I still remember this) 1774 South 26th East Street. I’d say this was the home I grew up in, mostly. My Mom, Dad, my three brothers and I rode from Pennsylvania to Utah in a blue station wagon towing a baby blue wooden trailer that Dad built. It had one-wheel and two-wheel hitches and was festooned with decals on the sides from the many places we’d gone traveling as a family. The presentation was completed with an army tarp pulled tightly over the top and secured with hemp rope. We three brothers took turns sitting in the back and the way-back of the station wagon. My mom’s mustard-yellow Volkswagen Beetle convertible was driven out by a couple of college students who wanted to get from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City. Go figure; do people still do that?
What are my memories from my home in Salt Lake City? The house was built at the edge of SLC near the base of what we thought of as a mountain but was really a giant rock, maybe slate or some other cleaving type of rock. The face of it had a big “H” painted on it and was known as the “H Rock,” a reference to Highland High School. Occasionally, kids from South High would sneak up at night and paint an “S” on it. That rock is currently immortalized in Google Maps. It says right there, “H Rock.” I remember poor Sam, our short-lived Norwegian Elk Hound puppy. He died of “brain fever,” whatever that is, before he was one year old. But his loss led to Schultz the Weimaraner. Everybody loved Schultz, and he lived a long, healthy life. But he killed my pet rabbit. I found “Pinkeye” one day while hiking up toward the H Rock. I took care of him a lot but not enough to keep Schultz from eating him.
About two blocks downhill from our house was US 40, also called Foothill Blvd., and after another couple blocks was my school, Beacon Heights Elementary. At school one day, the neighborhood bully hit me in the head with his math book when I wasn’t looking. Man that hurt! I saw stars, seriously. But I digress, that isn’t exactly about my childhood home.
Our house was a three-bedroom ranch with a finished basement and detached garage. I loved growing up on 26th East. The front yard is where we took the family pictures. We’d line up in our spiffy sports jackets and say, “cheese.” There was a narrow strip of dirt and bushes between our yard and the neighbors’ yard where I would run the hose until there was a good amount of mud. Then I would play with my green plastic army men for hours. I don’t remember the next-door neighbors being very sociable. They had no kids, and they kept their grass cut short, so short that it was prickly and hurt to walk on with bare feet.
On the side of our house and around the back yard, a chain-link fence separated our home from the neighbors. Concrete stairs on our side led to the back yard. On those steps, me and my friend Greg made rockets. You make rockets by cutting off about 20% of the short side of an index card. Twist that piece into the shape of a cone, tape it, and put it aside. Then you roll the rest of the index card into a cylinder and tape that. You fold some triangles into fins and fasten those to make the rocket stand up. Next, you taped the cone to the end of the cylinder. Finally, you take a couple packs of matches from your chain-smoking mom’s stash, tear the heads off the matches and stuff them into the cylinder. Light the open end with a fuse (a piece of paper) and watch it fly. . . if you are lucky. Sometimes, they would actually behave like store-bought rockets and shoot into the air.
Once you opened the gate to the back yard, you stepped into a new world. A giant weeping willow tree greeted you, begging you to climb. Dad created a path between the two main yard levels so that he could push the lawn mower between the upper part and the lower part more easily; we called that the middle level. It was a grassy space between the house, where there was a patio under a long balcony, from the steep part of the slope into the lower level. That slope was covered with day lilies and flowers (and a couple short dirt paths you could run down if you didn’t want to take the longer lawn mower path). One Fourth of July, I stepped on a hot sparkler on that upper level. That hurt more than the bee in first grade.
The lower level of the back yard was the best. There were trees: apple, peach, apricot, pear, and plum trees. There were berries and a few vegetables: raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, green grapes, rhubarb, radishes, and honest to God I don’t remember what else. Shultz dug a hole under one of the trees that was so deep a kid could climb into it and disappear. All that fruit bordered a nice, large rectangle of grass that we use for football and games of all kinds.
Dad dumped the trimmings from the lawnmower basket over the back fence and, in the summer, the pile got hot. I can still smell the hot, cut grass to this day. If we climbed over that fence, we’d find ourselves in a vacant lot, a large area of scrub oak, weeds and grasses, and grasshoppers. The scrub oaks were great places to build forts and to hide. The grasses were great for sticking seeds into your socks that would prick your ankles until you got every last one of them out. The grasshoppers were awful. They were constantly flying in front of you and hitting you. The vacant lot also had paths that would take us to the crosswalk on our way to Beacon Heights Elementary School, where I had a crush on Terry Lynn Tempest. Terry Lynn is now Terry Tempest Williams, a well-known popular environmental activist and author. I like to think my affections led her to find her purpose.
I had my own room when we moved to Salt Lake City. The bunk beds we’d had in Pennsylvania ended up in my room, so I could have whichever one I wanted every night. I usually slept on the bottom so I could see the city lights out the window. Tod and Peter shared a room (the beds were singles to avoid bunk-bed arguments), until Peter moved downstairs to his own room and bathroom off the rec room. That rec room has some memories. It was where we would play ping-pong and practice our piano lessons. The air was always cool in the summer, and a fireplace kept us warm on cold winter nights.
Chris had a bedroom and his own bathroom, too, in a mother-in-law apartment that was also downstairs, and Mom had a sewing room there, too. Mom and Dad must have had a bedroom, but I don’t have a memory of what it looked like.
Speaking of Chris’s bathroom, one day I wanted to stay home from school, but I wasn’t sick. I’d heard that if you guzzle a glass of salt water and stick your finger down your throat you could throw up. Throwing up = being sick and being sick = staying home. So, I was up for giving it a try. I guzzled, I gagged, I hurled. I ran upstairs to tell mom, “I threw up!” She said, “I’m sorry, here’s your lunch,” and ushered me out the door.
Our morning routines were right out of a 50s TV show. Mom would hand us our lunch bags and kiss us goodbye on our way to school. In the afternoon, we would bring back the lunch sacks, and the baggies to be washed and used again. My mom washed and reused everything, even plastic wrap.
One Christmas, all four of us boys got new bikes from Santa. Mine was a royal blue, two-speed automatic Schwinn. My friends and I would ride up and down the street, throwing crab apples at each other.
Those were fun days at my childhood home.
In late 1968, my dad got a teaching job in New York City. We moved during the Christmas vacation during my seventh-grade year. Since it was winter, we didn’t do our usual camping-style road trip; we stayed in motels. We had Christmas in motels. We loved it!! At each motel, we got to open a gift. We ate in restaurants and had new stuff to play with. Right before leaving Salt Lake City, we stayed with our friends the Thomases for a couple days. Greg Thomas was my best buddy and Chuck Thomas was friends with Chris. We always exchanged gifts with the Thomases. Greg is still a good friend.
While we were there, Chuck came up to me and confessed he forgot to get gifts for me and my brothers. He asked if I’d help him. The only solution was to “re-gift” or give something he already had. So, one brother at a time, we went through all his stuff. Chris? Something from his bookcase, Peter? A baseball, Tod? A transistor radio, ME? Well, nothing he suggested interested me, so I left it in his hands. In some motel, off some road, in some state, I was given the present Chuck had selected for me. It was a mini samurai sword, really a letter opener, that I had admired. At the time I’d been going through Chuck’s belongings, it was not available for gifting, making it even better to me when I saw what it was. Maybe Chuck did that to surprise me. I remember that like it was yesterday.
When does childhood end anyway? Somers, New York, upstate from New York City, was the location of my next childhood home, where we lived in a split-level home on one-and-a-half acres in West Somers Park. I had many adolescent adventures there until I left home for college. There were many relationships and many changes; many firsts, and many onlys: triumphs, disasters, great ideas and bad decisions, and after all of it, here I am. I like where I am.
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