My father was a WW II veteran who attended college on the GI Bill and was able to buy our family’s first house using Veterans Benefits in 1955. Our house was a Cape Cod-style frame house (painted red until my parents sold it in the early-1980s), built in a typical post-WW II development, filled with precisely similar houses, with little or no landscaping. It cost $5,000.00. The area was wooded and swampy before it was flattened, to make the cookie-cutter building easier. As we grew up, the swamp, the sand pit on the edge of our cul-de-sac, and the wooded hill (we called it “the mountain”) that our street backed up to all provided excellent play areas for us.
This development, and others like it, was created for first-time buyers wishing to escape the congestion of the city of New Haven, Connecticut. Dad grew up in the “Italian ghetto” of New Haven, yet the town that he escaped to, East Haven, became filled with similar Italian-American families. My favorite story about the early years in the neighborhood was Dad’s description of how one family customized their house as it was being built. The family’s patriarch was a notorious made-man in the Mafia, who allegedly had been part of Albert Anastasia’s “Murder Inc.” crew in New York. His house was on a curve, had slightly more front footage, and so he demanded various custom upgrades. My father would tell us that it went down something like this: our neighbor to the builder: “You putta breezeaway ovah hee”; builder: “we cannot do . . . .”; neighbor, peels off several hundred dollar bills from a roll and says “YOU PUTTA!”. Breezeway is built, then a garage, an enormous TV antenna in the back yard, visible from the street, awnings for the windows, flag pole on the front lawn, etc. Moreover, the neighbor always had extra building materials in front, which seemed like a generous offer to neighbors to take, and customize their new houses; the houses were finished on the first floor, but not the second floor or basement.
For the first few years we lived in the house, my parents struggled to make ends meet, but I only remember the fun of sharing a small bedroom with my older sister, and the creative craft projects we would do, such as decorating match boxes with tiny plastic fruit and glitter, or customizing hand cream jars in a similar way. These were made as gifts for relatives. There were many children our age in the neighborhood, and we ran freely between houses, seeking playmates for games, riding bikes, “climbing the mountain,” and so forth. The swamp area provided plenty of opportunities to get muddy, but also to pick up turtles, find pollywogs, and try to catch bluegills with our bare hands. In the winter, the pond froze over, and we could ice skate on it.
The “mountain” was the backside of the local public water supply, Lake Saltonstall. It was considered verboten to climb over the mountain to explore the lake, which was protected due to its importance as our primary source of fresh water. Kids didn’t care. We dared to try fishing there, which always ended badly, with rangers confiscating fishing gear, or worse, calling parents to report our misbehavior. This was a time of corporal punishment, and failing to ask our parents’ permission to climb the mountain alone invited a whipping or similar punishment.
When my younger sister was born in 1959, my parents were forced to expand our living space to the second floor and basement. I don’t recall precisely the order of the renovations, but I do recall my father’s leg crashing through the living room ceiling one evening, as he was installing plywood underlayment in what eventually would become my bedroom. He missed the joist, much to our shock and amusement. The ceiling was patched, but forever showed the repaired spot because my parents were the types, due to their limited resources, who distinguished between seamless repair and good enough, always going with good enough.
Dads tended to be handy in those years, and my father did a lot of the work himself, hiring friends who were electricians and plumbers to do what they do best. Many of these tradesmen were musicians, as was my dad, and they all helped each other out with home repair and maintenance. Our basement became divided between the laundry and my dad’s disorganized and messy tool room, and a living space on the other side. At one point before my younger sister was born, my dad had a small room with soundproof tiles (probably asbestos), where he practiced his trumpet. One of his band mates was a graphic designer, and he made drawings to help us visualize what that space would look like. One of the most challenging things I did during my childhood was to help my father hang the drywall for the ceiling of our basement room.
When it was finished, the basement room had linoleum tile on one side, and indoor/outdoor carpet on the other side. The walls were covered with wood paneling from a home improvement store. We had a library area with an encyclopedia set, and a sleeper couch, where I generally slept when my maternal grandmother came for visits that lasted much longer than first announced. Eventually, we installed a wood burning Franklin stove in this space, which made it toasty warm during the winters.
In retrospect, our house was really small. The first floor had a kitchen—where we always ate our meals together—my parents’ bedroom, the only full bathroom (the second floor had a half-bathroom, and no shower), and two additional rooms. One was used as a bedroom shared by my older sister and me until we renovated the second floor, and the other was a living room/dining room space. I don’t remember how we were able to have our extended family over for Sunday dinners and holidays, but somehow my parents managed, and it became easier after two extra rooms were habitable on the second floor. These upstairs rooms had dormered spaces in front, and crawl spaces, or eaves along the length of them. It was always really fun to create fantasy rooms in the eaves, which also became storage spaces (dumping grounds) for family junk. Hand-me-down clothes, fabrics, seasonal décor, and similar items were stored in the eaves.
We spent so much time in the kitchen that I remember it most vividly. We always entered our house from the back door, walking right into the kitchen. On axis across from the door, you could see a stove and refrigerator, side-by-side on the facing wall. Along the perpendicular wall were cabinets above and below the counter, which was covered with thick green linoleum, and finished along the edges with strip metal, screwed into the base. The cabinets were probably birch wood and varnished to a warm tone. We had a kitchen table and chairs to seat all five of us, and this table was pushed against the wall in order to create more workspace. The one sink was set into the counter, and there was a window above it, giving us a view of the back yard. I learned to cook in this kitchen, watching and helping my dad (when I was old enough), as well as our Nonnie (paternal grandmother), who was a surrogate parent when our folks went away for the weekend.
Nonnie’s visits were the best, especially when she made bread. Her bread took three forms, including the rare treat of fried dough for breakfast (cooked in lard, no doubt), fresh loaves of bread, and her inimitable pizza. New Haven is famous for its pizza, and it is good. However, nothing compared with Nonnie’s pizza, which was simple and all about the bread. She made the pizza on half cake pans, or in Pyrex baking dishes (Sicilian-style), allowing the dough to cure and rise to a lofty delicate texture before adding a topping or two, and baking it. The best time of year for Nonnie’s pizza was late summer, when tomatoes were in season. She would slice them thick, let the seeds drain out, and layer the dough with fresh tomato, and a dusting of grated Parmesan and Romano cheeses, and oregano. Once in a while, she would add mozzarella, but nothing else. If she happened to visit the local produce stand, she might also make fried squash blossoms and fried sweet Italian peppers. I still recall the smells of proofing bread dough, oil or lard coming up to temperature in a cast iron pan, and the vivid transition of peppers frying, from the somewhat acrid smell of their first dip in the oil, to the soft sweet aroma of their finished scent.
This is rapidly degenerating into a food focus, but that’s a story for another blog. I lived at 12 Demeter Drive for the first twenty-one years of my life. While I was in graduate school, my parents decided to leave my hometown for a less congested area. The sale of their house happened so quickly, I was never able to return and reclaim the record albums I left behind, and some childhood mementos. I’ve never been too sentimental, so I don’t particularly miss the house or my hometown, but I do treasure memories of the place and the many friends I made there.
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