365 Facts: #85 (Childhood--Byron)
For a number of years, my whole world was the 6200 block of West Byron Street. Sure, I left it to go to school or to see my grandparents, but there was so much to do on that block when I was a child that there wasn't much point in leaving it.
Byron is about a mile south of Montrose, and our house was about a mile west of Central. Our cross street was Melvina, between Narragansett on the west and Austin on the east. I was just west of the Bungalow Belt; somehow our patch of city missed those houses. In fact, our patch was different even from the houses across the street from us. There, you had houses of differing shapes and sizes. It's possible the developers simply sold off the lots and let people build whatever they felt like as long as they fit and had the garage on the alley. For our side, we had no alleys. We also had a lack of privacy, because we were in duplexes. Much of the block shared a wall with one neighbor and a driveway with the other. We got lucky. Our house was the second from the corner, and the corner house shared its wall with a house facing Melvina. We weren't close enough to share a driveway. We each had our own. The only other house on our block to have its own driveway was the other corner house all the way down the street. For that reason, our house seemed better than most of the others.
We moved in around the fall of 1980. We had this story of issues while moving that caused my father and I to have matching shiners; I think we both fell down the stairs, something like that. I haven't heard the story in a while. But this was huge, my parents having their own house. It cost $60,000. It was this little Georgian, a boxy sort of house, built in the 1940s. The house on the corner held an old man whose name escapes me; he'd always pass out pennies for Halloween and would have the financial TV shows on constantly. Sharing a wall for a number of years, until I was ten, was a family with four boys. The youngest, Terry, was my best friend; it would be years later--as in, about when I graduated from high school--that I realized he was mentally retarded. No, I'm not kidding. I always just thought he was weird. But I liked him, and he was fun, and he knew literally everyone on the block. He's the one that introduced me to Jim, the guy who lived in the house on the opposite corner. If it wasn't for Terry, I would never have gone past the halfway point on the block. I didn't really know Terry's two oldest brothers, but I did know Jimmy (Jimmie), who was a few years older than us and a talented artist. There was some local show called "Kidding Around" on at like 6:30 on Saturday mornings, and a drawing Jimmy did was featured on there. I thought that was cool. I sort of had a crush on him, as much as any six-year-old could.
Oh, but my heart did not belong to Jimmy. It went to Claudio, who lived at that halfway point down the block. Up until his house I knew everyone; the people with whom his family shared a driveway? Not a clue. Claudio was a year younger than me. Yeah, I guess I've always had a thing for younger guys. ;) He had an older sister named Lisa and he'd let me ride her bike with the banana seat. It was yellow and green and said Sweet Pea on it. Their garage had a funky storage area to it, like it was a screened-in porch on the back of it. It smelled kind of musty but there were old patio chairs we could sit in. And, the piece de resistance, someone had thrown up in his sewer and he showed me. Really. He lifted up the manhole cover in his backyard and I got to see the vomit. Realize he was five or so. That's like the equivalent of a friendship ring.
Next door to Claudio were two families, though not at the same time. The first had two little girls, Jamie and Jenny; they were younger than me, but we played together for a few years before they moved to the suburbs. Then came the blended family; Robin was the daughter. She was four years older than me, I think the same age as Claudio's sister, and she was bad. I think she was the first person I knew who had a truly wild streak. I remember being with her when we tried to flood the bathroom at the park, and when she tried to pull practical jokes involving fake vomit and dog poop at Chuck E. Cheese. She had this poster of Prince in her room where his pants were dangerously low, and I was shocked that her mom allowed her to have it. She also had one of those bed tents, which I thought was so cool. It's like you were camping, yet you were still in your room. Hers was camouflaged. I think I wanted a pink one. But her family had tragedy. Robin's mom and her second husband were having a baby, a boy, around Halloween. They'd picked out a little outfit for him to wear and everything. But there was a complication, and his umbilical cord tangled around his neck, and he was stillborn. Even now, thinking about it makes me horribly sad. They had been so excited and now...nothing. I forget which neighbor broke the news to us, maybe Terry's mom. I think, had he lived, Adam would be about twenty. But about a year later they got pregnant again, and this time the baby, a little girl named Samantha, made it. She was the apple of her father's eye.
Across the drive from Robin's house were Jesse and Sheila. They were good friends with my parents and I was good friends with Jesse's daughter, Emily. She was two years older than me, and when she, Robin, and I would get together, watch out. Luckily, perhaps, Emily only visited her dad every two weeks (she actually lived out this way, believe it or not), and sometimes she'd actually have to spend time with her family, but she was probably my closest friend on the block. I was always over at her house. Always. And I'd spend the night a lot, too. Even after Jesse and Sheila moved when I was in junior high, I'd still go over and see her sometimes. It was right around when they moved that Sheila had her own daughter, Ashli. Sheila was always so cool to me--she liked George Michael, and she had three earrings, and then she spelled Ashli's name with an I. Awesome. She was always very sweet, and Jesse was a nice guy, too. I always felt very welcome in their home.
Of all the houses on our part of the block, the house next to Jesse and Sheila's had the least amount of stability. I don't know why. The first people I knew there had two little girls, Christina and Carrie. Again, they were younger than me, but we still played for a bit. They weren't there for too long before they moved to the suburbs; I think I was maybe six at the time. Then came a family with two young boys. I don't think that was a happy house. I want to say the wife divorced her husband. Then came God knows who, possibly a mom with a couple of college-aged boys. All I remember was hearing about these raucous, drunken parties with people peeing where they shouldn't have been. I don't think they were still there when we moved in 1991, but I couldn't tell you who was, maybe some random modern married couple.
That house shared a driveway with Terry's family. They moved in 1988, and in came Marjorie. She was an older woman, single--not sure if she was divorced or widowed--with an adult daughter and a college-aged son. The son wasn't around very often, but we knew when he was there; he was a pianist, and his playing would bleed through the walls. That was really the only sound we ever heard from her house. Marjorie would always apologize for that, as well, but we didn't care. The kid wasn't a bad player. No, in fact, we should have apologized to her. Our dog, Gizmo, loved to chase her cat, Sukie. Terry's family had this funky covered patio behind their house, but when Marjorie went in she put in a door from her kitchen and built a deck in the yard. That deck abutted our property, and Gizmo was able to jump from our yard onto her deck to chase Sukie. Sometimes we'd catch him; other times, we'd get a phone call or a knock on the door. At least our yards weren't terribly big, so it's not like we had this huge swath of land to cover in chasing him.
Originally we did have a decent-sized yard, for the city at least. We had these towering trees back there; it made me think of a forest. Of course, I was four, and that wasn't terribly true. Years later, when I asked my dad why he'd cut down all but the apple trees along the fence line, he told me it was because I was afraid of the other trees. Really? No kidding. Frankly, I'd have rather gotten rid of the apple trees, which only grew green, wormy apples that you really couldn't eat unless you were Joshie, my Labrador. And even he wouldn't eat those much; he preferred the crabapples from the tree toward the back of the yard. I loved spring, because that meant the tree would blossom. It was so pretty. I'd make bouquets and stick them in the basket of my Strawberry Shortcake bike.
Dad got ambitious with the house as the years went on. In '87 he put in a 2.5-car garage that he built himself, along with a new concrete driveway. As the only place that would accommodate such a garage was at the back of our lot, there went much of our backyard, but that was okay. The new drive was so smooth, unlike the pebbly drive and sidewalks that paved much of the block. I loved to ride my bike or roller skate on it. Dad then set to work on our basement, eventually creating several rooms, a laundry area, and a bathroom. Whoa, it was so different to have two bathrooms in the house. The only problem was that we never put a curtain up in that basement bathroom, so anyone walking by that window could look down and watch us going about our business. I'd never use that toilet if anyone was in the yard.
The house itself was tiny. It's literally half the size of the house we live in now, maybe 1200 square feet. But it worked well for a family of three people. The bedrooms were surprisingly large. When we looked at the model homes for our new subdivision, I immediately ruled out the smallest floor plan because its master bedroom was the size of my current bedroom. Why my mother wanted to settle for that house, I'll never know. But anyway, our second floor had two good-sized bedrooms, a small hall closet, and what was for many years our only bathroom. The tiny hallway and the stairs were hardwood, but we carpeted the bedrooms not long after moving in. I loved my carpet. It was blue and soft. My parents, though, had this horrible matted brown stuff that I was always finding pins in, like sewing pins. I have no idea why they went with that.
Downstairs, we had a living room, dining room, and kitchen. They were small, but we packed stuff in. We kept our stereo in the dining room and that's where mom and I would listen to music and dance. The TV was in the living room, which had barely enough room to walk around in, what with the sofa, loveseat, chair, and coffee table. That's all we could fit in there. We had this bay window at the front but we never did anything with it, like, say, put in a window seat. I've always loved window seats. Instead, we had this odd area virtually unused except for Christmas, when we'd put the tree in the windows. Also, in the spring, we'd get flying ants there, which was horribly disgusting. Eventually we tuckpointed and that took care of the problem. Our kitchen was narrow, not quite a galley but along those lines. There was a small area in the back where we could have had a table and chairs, but that's where our roll-top desk and Commodore 64 went. We also had a dishwasher there, but it was a rolling one; when you wanted to use it, you'd attach the hose to the faucet and there you'd go. It's so strange to think of now. Our basement door was across from the refrigerator, so you had to be careful if you grabbed something to eat while, say, someone was attending to Josh, who lived on the basement landing. And we had to get a refrigerator with a door that opened to the right, because otherwise you'd have to stand in the living room to get food. And here I thought my grandparents had the funny fridge because their door opened on the left-hand side.
My parents had been looking to get out of the city for a number of years; we went on numerous treks around the suburbs looking for open houses and what-not. We mainly looked north, as dad worked in Waukegan for a while. Then he lost his job when I was in seventh grade. It took fifteen months (egads--hope my search doesn't take as long) but he found a job out in this area. We found this subdivision while looking for one in Aurora. That was it. My parents put money down on the house a few weeks before I graduated from the eighth grade; we moved in on Veteran's Day, just 11 days before my 14th birthday. It was kind of traumatic for me, as that was really the only house I'd ever known. Dad had put so much work into it; in fact, the house's worth had doubled. I had friends in the area, although by then most of our friendly neighbors had moved from the block. My school was basically around the corner...but, then again, it wasn't my school anymore. Everything was changing. I had to go with it. I survived. (I have to remember that, don't I?)
I still think of that house. For years, I would dream of that house. I don't do it so much anymore, but you'd have thought I still lived there for how much I would see it in my sleep. I think of the part of the driveway where my dad carved my name--I was still Jenny at the time--and a heart, next to the garage, and how I wanted to take that with me when we moved. There was our chestnut tree in front of the house, and you could take the pods and draw with them on the sidewalk, and the dark brown lines they'd leave wouldn't go away until it rained. There was the gate to the backyard, which I always thought was so nifty because of the way dad had built it, with the big part that swung open so you could get a car through it, and the holes drilled into the ground so that you could set the gate's metal bar into it to keep the thing from closing on you. Our little shed, which could have been a clubhouse for me, but dad kept tools and junk in there. The phone in the garage, which was great if you were swimming in our above-ground pool.
So many memories. So many. Luckily dad took lots of pictures.
Byron is about a mile south of Montrose, and our house was about a mile west of Central. Our cross street was Melvina, between Narragansett on the west and Austin on the east. I was just west of the Bungalow Belt; somehow our patch of city missed those houses. In fact, our patch was different even from the houses across the street from us. There, you had houses of differing shapes and sizes. It's possible the developers simply sold off the lots and let people build whatever they felt like as long as they fit and had the garage on the alley. For our side, we had no alleys. We also had a lack of privacy, because we were in duplexes. Much of the block shared a wall with one neighbor and a driveway with the other. We got lucky. Our house was the second from the corner, and the corner house shared its wall with a house facing Melvina. We weren't close enough to share a driveway. We each had our own. The only other house on our block to have its own driveway was the other corner house all the way down the street. For that reason, our house seemed better than most of the others.
We moved in around the fall of 1980. We had this story of issues while moving that caused my father and I to have matching shiners; I think we both fell down the stairs, something like that. I haven't heard the story in a while. But this was huge, my parents having their own house. It cost $60,000. It was this little Georgian, a boxy sort of house, built in the 1940s. The house on the corner held an old man whose name escapes me; he'd always pass out pennies for Halloween and would have the financial TV shows on constantly. Sharing a wall for a number of years, until I was ten, was a family with four boys. The youngest, Terry, was my best friend; it would be years later--as in, about when I graduated from high school--that I realized he was mentally retarded. No, I'm not kidding. I always just thought he was weird. But I liked him, and he was fun, and he knew literally everyone on the block. He's the one that introduced me to Jim, the guy who lived in the house on the opposite corner. If it wasn't for Terry, I would never have gone past the halfway point on the block. I didn't really know Terry's two oldest brothers, but I did know Jimmy (Jimmie), who was a few years older than us and a talented artist. There was some local show called "Kidding Around" on at like 6:30 on Saturday mornings, and a drawing Jimmy did was featured on there. I thought that was cool. I sort of had a crush on him, as much as any six-year-old could.
Oh, but my heart did not belong to Jimmy. It went to Claudio, who lived at that halfway point down the block. Up until his house I knew everyone; the people with whom his family shared a driveway? Not a clue. Claudio was a year younger than me. Yeah, I guess I've always had a thing for younger guys. ;) He had an older sister named Lisa and he'd let me ride her bike with the banana seat. It was yellow and green and said Sweet Pea on it. Their garage had a funky storage area to it, like it was a screened-in porch on the back of it. It smelled kind of musty but there were old patio chairs we could sit in. And, the piece de resistance, someone had thrown up in his sewer and he showed me. Really. He lifted up the manhole cover in his backyard and I got to see the vomit. Realize he was five or so. That's like the equivalent of a friendship ring.
Next door to Claudio were two families, though not at the same time. The first had two little girls, Jamie and Jenny; they were younger than me, but we played together for a few years before they moved to the suburbs. Then came the blended family; Robin was the daughter. She was four years older than me, I think the same age as Claudio's sister, and she was bad. I think she was the first person I knew who had a truly wild streak. I remember being with her when we tried to flood the bathroom at the park, and when she tried to pull practical jokes involving fake vomit and dog poop at Chuck E. Cheese. She had this poster of Prince in her room where his pants were dangerously low, and I was shocked that her mom allowed her to have it. She also had one of those bed tents, which I thought was so cool. It's like you were camping, yet you were still in your room. Hers was camouflaged. I think I wanted a pink one. But her family had tragedy. Robin's mom and her second husband were having a baby, a boy, around Halloween. They'd picked out a little outfit for him to wear and everything. But there was a complication, and his umbilical cord tangled around his neck, and he was stillborn. Even now, thinking about it makes me horribly sad. They had been so excited and now...nothing. I forget which neighbor broke the news to us, maybe Terry's mom. I think, had he lived, Adam would be about twenty. But about a year later they got pregnant again, and this time the baby, a little girl named Samantha, made it. She was the apple of her father's eye.
Across the drive from Robin's house were Jesse and Sheila. They were good friends with my parents and I was good friends with Jesse's daughter, Emily. She was two years older than me, and when she, Robin, and I would get together, watch out. Luckily, perhaps, Emily only visited her dad every two weeks (she actually lived out this way, believe it or not), and sometimes she'd actually have to spend time with her family, but she was probably my closest friend on the block. I was always over at her house. Always. And I'd spend the night a lot, too. Even after Jesse and Sheila moved when I was in junior high, I'd still go over and see her sometimes. It was right around when they moved that Sheila had her own daughter, Ashli. Sheila was always so cool to me--she liked George Michael, and she had three earrings, and then she spelled Ashli's name with an I. Awesome. She was always very sweet, and Jesse was a nice guy, too. I always felt very welcome in their home.
Of all the houses on our part of the block, the house next to Jesse and Sheila's had the least amount of stability. I don't know why. The first people I knew there had two little girls, Christina and Carrie. Again, they were younger than me, but we still played for a bit. They weren't there for too long before they moved to the suburbs; I think I was maybe six at the time. Then came a family with two young boys. I don't think that was a happy house. I want to say the wife divorced her husband. Then came God knows who, possibly a mom with a couple of college-aged boys. All I remember was hearing about these raucous, drunken parties with people peeing where they shouldn't have been. I don't think they were still there when we moved in 1991, but I couldn't tell you who was, maybe some random modern married couple.
That house shared a driveway with Terry's family. They moved in 1988, and in came Marjorie. She was an older woman, single--not sure if she was divorced or widowed--with an adult daughter and a college-aged son. The son wasn't around very often, but we knew when he was there; he was a pianist, and his playing would bleed through the walls. That was really the only sound we ever heard from her house. Marjorie would always apologize for that, as well, but we didn't care. The kid wasn't a bad player. No, in fact, we should have apologized to her. Our dog, Gizmo, loved to chase her cat, Sukie. Terry's family had this funky covered patio behind their house, but when Marjorie went in she put in a door from her kitchen and built a deck in the yard. That deck abutted our property, and Gizmo was able to jump from our yard onto her deck to chase Sukie. Sometimes we'd catch him; other times, we'd get a phone call or a knock on the door. At least our yards weren't terribly big, so it's not like we had this huge swath of land to cover in chasing him.
Originally we did have a decent-sized yard, for the city at least. We had these towering trees back there; it made me think of a forest. Of course, I was four, and that wasn't terribly true. Years later, when I asked my dad why he'd cut down all but the apple trees along the fence line, he told me it was because I was afraid of the other trees. Really? No kidding. Frankly, I'd have rather gotten rid of the apple trees, which only grew green, wormy apples that you really couldn't eat unless you were Joshie, my Labrador. And even he wouldn't eat those much; he preferred the crabapples from the tree toward the back of the yard. I loved spring, because that meant the tree would blossom. It was so pretty. I'd make bouquets and stick them in the basket of my Strawberry Shortcake bike.
Dad got ambitious with the house as the years went on. In '87 he put in a 2.5-car garage that he built himself, along with a new concrete driveway. As the only place that would accommodate such a garage was at the back of our lot, there went much of our backyard, but that was okay. The new drive was so smooth, unlike the pebbly drive and sidewalks that paved much of the block. I loved to ride my bike or roller skate on it. Dad then set to work on our basement, eventually creating several rooms, a laundry area, and a bathroom. Whoa, it was so different to have two bathrooms in the house. The only problem was that we never put a curtain up in that basement bathroom, so anyone walking by that window could look down and watch us going about our business. I'd never use that toilet if anyone was in the yard.
The house itself was tiny. It's literally half the size of the house we live in now, maybe 1200 square feet. But it worked well for a family of three people. The bedrooms were surprisingly large. When we looked at the model homes for our new subdivision, I immediately ruled out the smallest floor plan because its master bedroom was the size of my current bedroom. Why my mother wanted to settle for that house, I'll never know. But anyway, our second floor had two good-sized bedrooms, a small hall closet, and what was for many years our only bathroom. The tiny hallway and the stairs were hardwood, but we carpeted the bedrooms not long after moving in. I loved my carpet. It was blue and soft. My parents, though, had this horrible matted brown stuff that I was always finding pins in, like sewing pins. I have no idea why they went with that.
Downstairs, we had a living room, dining room, and kitchen. They were small, but we packed stuff in. We kept our stereo in the dining room and that's where mom and I would listen to music and dance. The TV was in the living room, which had barely enough room to walk around in, what with the sofa, loveseat, chair, and coffee table. That's all we could fit in there. We had this bay window at the front but we never did anything with it, like, say, put in a window seat. I've always loved window seats. Instead, we had this odd area virtually unused except for Christmas, when we'd put the tree in the windows. Also, in the spring, we'd get flying ants there, which was horribly disgusting. Eventually we tuckpointed and that took care of the problem. Our kitchen was narrow, not quite a galley but along those lines. There was a small area in the back where we could have had a table and chairs, but that's where our roll-top desk and Commodore 64 went. We also had a dishwasher there, but it was a rolling one; when you wanted to use it, you'd attach the hose to the faucet and there you'd go. It's so strange to think of now. Our basement door was across from the refrigerator, so you had to be careful if you grabbed something to eat while, say, someone was attending to Josh, who lived on the basement landing. And we had to get a refrigerator with a door that opened to the right, because otherwise you'd have to stand in the living room to get food. And here I thought my grandparents had the funny fridge because their door opened on the left-hand side.
My parents had been looking to get out of the city for a number of years; we went on numerous treks around the suburbs looking for open houses and what-not. We mainly looked north, as dad worked in Waukegan for a while. Then he lost his job when I was in seventh grade. It took fifteen months (egads--hope my search doesn't take as long) but he found a job out in this area. We found this subdivision while looking for one in Aurora. That was it. My parents put money down on the house a few weeks before I graduated from the eighth grade; we moved in on Veteran's Day, just 11 days before my 14th birthday. It was kind of traumatic for me, as that was really the only house I'd ever known. Dad had put so much work into it; in fact, the house's worth had doubled. I had friends in the area, although by then most of our friendly neighbors had moved from the block. My school was basically around the corner...but, then again, it wasn't my school anymore. Everything was changing. I had to go with it. I survived. (I have to remember that, don't I?)
I still think of that house. For years, I would dream of that house. I don't do it so much anymore, but you'd have thought I still lived there for how much I would see it in my sleep. I think of the part of the driveway where my dad carved my name--I was still Jenny at the time--and a heart, next to the garage, and how I wanted to take that with me when we moved. There was our chestnut tree in front of the house, and you could take the pods and draw with them on the sidewalk, and the dark brown lines they'd leave wouldn't go away until it rained. There was the gate to the backyard, which I always thought was so nifty because of the way dad had built it, with the big part that swung open so you could get a car through it, and the holes drilled into the ground so that you could set the gate's metal bar into it to keep the thing from closing on you. Our little shed, which could have been a clubhouse for me, but dad kept tools and junk in there. The phone in the garage, which was great if you were swimming in our above-ground pool.
So many memories. So many. Luckily dad took lots of pictures.