All You Ever Wanted to Know
(and didn't want to know)
About Me

          My Childhood Home & Neighborhood

Here is a picture of our house, the house that my dad built for us in 1950, the year I was born. Our dad was always so proud of that house. Here we are in front of it, I am the tiny one in the back of the toy fire truck. This was a few years before the Interstate was built right next to us. It was fairly large with 3 bedrooms downstairs and 2 upstairs. We had 2 bathrooms which was considered quite extravagant in those days.

Our basement was huge, with it divided up into several rooms. One large one was our playroom, with room to ride tricycles, toy fire engines, tractors,  and even bicycles around. I included a picture (right) of four of us on our various riding toys that we played with in the basement during the Winter and bad weather days. My dad put up two swings and I think they were mostly used by my younger sister, Kathy, and I. (I remember carrying the old record player downstairs and putting on Beatles and Herman's Hermits songs and swinging for hours.)

 Our basement also served as our tornado shelter.

On our east side - Front and back yards

My parents built their home when they were expecting me, their fourth child (out of 6.) On one side of us was the place that sold monuments. Here is our neighbor's front, or really, their business. (Left) Their house is next to it. (Conveniently located right across the street from the entrance to the cemetery.) On the right is just behind that building showing some of our neighbors' yards that we played in and explored. That's my brother, sister and myself holding bats.

 And here is another one without us blocking the view. You can barely see the back sheds some of them had. Those were great places to break into and explore. Luckily our neighbors didn't mind us kids trespassing.

Here is another view of the back yards and the sheds. I am on the bar on the swing set which I climbed and played on as much as I used the swings themselves. That's my brother, Dick, hanging on beneath me. Once again, I will tell you that the larger view is much better. If I remember right, my older sister, Mary,  took this picture.

On the other side there was one house next to us and then you were in the country with cornfields that came up to the rear part of our backyard. It's kind of hard to describe it, but the neighbor's yard was much shorter than ours so the field was against both our yards. We played in the corn and my sister even managed to get bitten by a Brown Recluse spider while in our forbidden playground. (They are rare around here, but she managed to find one, or should I say it managed to find her.) We found Indian arrowheads in our yard. The back third of our huge yard was left to grow like a meadow most of the time. We would make forts and trails in the tall grass.

On our west side - front and back yards
Even though this picture isn't real clear you can see that there is a big empty space behind my brother and his friend. That is where the corn was planted during the growing season. You can also see our "see-saws" in this picture to the right. There was a small and a large one. You can barely see the houses way back in the picture. Those are dog houses on the right, where our neighbor had three dogs. Eventually he built some running kennels for them. His yard ended just beyond those, and that is where the corn was planted each summer. That family moved away and a middle aged couple moved in. 

The guy had an interest in Ham radios and built towers for his antennas. If you look closely at the picture on the right you can see one of his towers, in between our fruit trees. 

Our yard extended past that, with the corn being next to our back yard at that point. One of those houses way off in the distance had chickens and a rooster. We used to hear the rooster crow if our windows were open.

This picture on the right shows more of our backyard. This is looking southwest with our swing set and teeter totters, and our fruit trees in the view. There was a bicycle riding path along that property line with a circle turn around at the end of it, just beyond the line of fruit trees. My garden was about 30 feet beyond the circle part of the path. In the larger view you can see some of the corn stubble in the field to the southwest of our yard. 

You can barely see that same neighbor's front yard in the background, behind my siblings and cousin, who thinks he is out of the picture. The cemetery border is on the right of the picture. You can see corn growing just beyond our neighbor's yard. You can see this (and the other pictures better) if you click on it for the larger view.

A year or two later the interstate was started and the road we lived on was where traffic exited after leaving the highway. While they were working on it they built a road that went right along the hedge at the border of the cemetery. If you look closely you can see an indentation in the hedge where a car crashed into it. That's me standing there holding a paper airplane I had made with a string of yarn to hold it. I was about 5 so it was around 1955.

North, as seen from our front yard
Living across the street from the town's cemetery had advantages and disadvantages. There weren't any kids or adults either living across the street from us. (Just dead people!) It was lonely. One nice thing though was we could go there whenever we wanted to have a peaceful place to walk or ride our bikes. (Except when the caretaker caught us playing tag around the gravestones and made us leave!) It was cool in the summer with lots of shade trees and with the flowers put on the graves and wild flowers growing around the edges of the cemetery it was beautiful and peaceful.

Here are my siblings and myself in our bathing suits sitting in front of our house posing before we left for the city swimming pool. The camera view shows you the front entrance to the cemetery. Aren't we cute! I'm on the right.

Now a days though, I don't think I would let my kids walk alone in the cemetery for hours and hours. Living across the street from the cemetery also meant that we had very few kids at our house on Trick or Treat night. I guess they were too scared.

Southeast, all the way to the edge of our yard
This is part of the back yard. You can see the baseball foul ball catching fence (backstop) and our swing set is just to the right of it, just out of the picture. We had a little league regulation baseball diamond in our yard. On the left you can see the snow fence my dad put up. Way in the back you can see the houses that were nearest to our back yard. They had small back yards so most of the yard was actually ours. You can see much more in the larger view and I marked where the property line was. To the left of the snow fence, was another field, usually with soybeans in it. Our neighbor to our east had their garden up against the field's north line, horizontal to our houses. My garden was on the far right, out of this picture, and went perpendicular to our house, along the east edge of the cornfield.

There was one family that lived near us that had kids. Larry and Gwen Bateman were my sister's and my only friends. Larry's birthday is in September, one month before mine. We started kindergarten together. His sister was the same age as my sister and sometimes the four of us would hang out. Usually though it was Larry and me and Kathy and Gwen.

Their grandmother lived next door to them and rented her upstairs out to various interesting people. One time there was a young man who called himself Dallas. He was probably 21 but to me he was the wisest and nicest man in the world. I was maybe 13. He called me Magnolia, after the southern tree, and told me I was pretty and would grow into a beautiful woman. This was when I was being taunted at school and at home and told daily by my brothers that I was "dumb, stupid, and ugly." He taught me to walk with my shoulders still, up until then I had an annoying way of moving them with each step. He made me feel like perhaps I wasn't hopelessly ugly.

When I was 14 two things happened. One was that we sold our house and land to a major gasoline company (as I mentioned above) and they put a gas station where I used to ride my bike, play, and swing for hours. Our apple and cherry trees were left unattended. The baseball field my dad had so perfectly designed with regulation Little League measurements went to weed. We moved our house back across our large yard, through the former cornfield to the next block. Now there are storage buildings in the rear of our former yard behind the gas station. I guess that's progress.

The other thing that happened was that Larry and Gwen moved away. I heard they moved to Atlanta, Georgia, so if you ever see them tell them to email me, I'd love to hear from either one of them. Their parents names were Ron and Myrtle Bateman. I was so lonely after that. Larry was my best friend. I remember hours and hours of playing with him.

We had a "secret" clubhouse behind a shed in their yard. We dug up the earth and it was about as deep as our shoulders when his father decided it was too dangerous for us to play in anymore and filled it all in. We also had a tree in his grandmother's yard that was spread out like a little house. Some days we pretended it was a boat and we were sailing the ocean. To be sure of good nutrition for our long journey we would bring along some M&M's, pretending they were vitamins that would save our lives. Some days it was a house, you know, the usual kid stuff. I am glad I had a best friend for those first 14 years. I spent most of the rest of my life trying to get another best friend.

One good thing about getting older, even though it meant losing my childhood was I got my older sister's bedroom when she went off to college. Since there would be Christmas and other holidays that she would be back home the room had to be arranged for both of us. Since Mary was older and wiser (and had a bit of money to spend) I basically let her decorate it. She asked my opinion too, about things like the color of the matching bedspreads we got and the color we painted the walls. Here is a picture of our homemade dressing table. She bought the cute chairs and we each had a side. My side was on the left, which was towards the door. In the long mirror you can sort of see the reflection of my bed and one of the windows.. I wish we had a picture of that area. Somewhere I do have a partial and hope to find it and scan it soon.

Hey, when I said "All about me," I really meant it!

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This page was created October 26, 2001,
and last revised July 29, 2002.

(C) Copyright 2002 Maggie Rose. All Rights Reserved