(As it was then)
Within the walls of this house I spent early part of my childhood. It’s one of the smaller houses in the 4500 block of Grand Avenue, located between Tulane and Princeton in southwest Little Rock. It doesn’t look very big and, in truth, it wasn’t.
The big window was formerly flanked by two conical cedar trees, which were eventually cut down for the flower bush you see here. That window opened into the living room. On the west side of the big window were the three bedrooms where Mom, Dad, four boys and three girls daily fought for the one bathroom located in the center of the hall. I still remember the day we installed the showerhead over the tub. It made Saturday night bath time go a lot quicker.
A floor furnace was situated in the little square hall around the bedroom doors, where on particularly cold mornings you would find most of us straddled over the grate, the rising heat blowing up our pajamas and nightgowns. In the summer, there was a single large air conditioner on the east side that cooled the whole house. The rest of the time, we relied on open windows.
The porch window to the east gave us a view of the street from the dining table, while those looking in could see past it into the galley kitchen and washer/dryer hookup before exiting out the only other door to the outside world, our backyard.
For the record, it wasn’t always pink. Sometimes it was a dark brown. It depended on my dad’s mood and his relationship with my neighbors. Fortunately, there wasn’t much to paint... just the porch, the east side of the house and the framework around the windows and under the roof. The rest of the walls of the house were made up of a material similar to our roof, meaning it was covered in tiny glass-like granules, meant to reflect the heat of the sun away from the interior of the house. A friend of mine recently said that material might have been a form of asbestos…always good to know 30 years after the fact.
My first memory in this house was climbing out of a crib in the front bedroom to catch my mom watching her afternoon soaps. This is also where the only phonograph record player and radio were located. Sometimes the TV was directly underneath the main window, other times, it separated the living room from the dining area. Since it then faced away from us, we soon became acclimated to eating in the living room and the dining table was relegated to laundry, homework and the occasional game board. I remember the occasional times I couldn’t sleep and snuck out for some late-night viewing. Back then, of course, there were only four stations to choose from and they all signed off after a certain point. Then I was forced to stare at either an Indian-head test pattern or static. I would turn the set off, watching as the glowing screen shrank to a tiny dot before fading away completely in the dark.
Other times, I woke up extra early. Usually it was on a Saturday, where I had to suffer through farm reports before the cartoons commenced. On rare occasions, my parents were watching something of special interest. One morning in July of 1969, I poked my head around the corner to see Apollo 11 take off from the Kennedy Space Center on its way to the moon. A few days later man set foot on another astral body for the first time ever. Since it was late at night, I don’t remember if we were allowed to stay up and watch.
There was a lot of growing up in that house, not just for me but for all of us, parents included. We learned to cook, some better than others. One time, Mom tried a recipe that called for beer to sauté hamburgers. There was a little too much beer in the mix, so on at least one occasion, some poor cow died in vain. A sister once tried to make brownies that literally bounced off the floor. Another sibling was doing Lord knows what with tomatoes and at least one found its way to the ceiling, where I think it stayed until the day we moved.
I still don’t know how Mom and Dad were able to get all us kids up for school without killing at least one kid a day. The girls were allowed first dibs on the bathroom, then the boys. We made our way to the dining room where, depending on the time of year, we had cereal, buttered toast, oatmeal and, occasionally, eggs and bacon. My parents not only cooked for us, but would sometimes feed some kids down the street who they felt didn’t get the nutritional start they thought they needed. We were then all packed into the family station wagon and taken to a nearby parochial school, listening to the Mighty 1090, KAAY, along the way.
Not everything was indoors, mind you. There was plenty of play time in the front or back yard or further down the street to play with the Lehmans, the Tedders, the Swindells, the Pattersons and the Greens. Often was the time the grass under the shade of the house was worn down to dirt level by the scamper of growing feet. In the winter, the same shade kept a sliver of ice-hardened snow on the ground long after everything else had melted. Among our favorite games was ‘Hot Lava’ where we took advantage of the two or three swing sets at our disposal and swung off them to stay off the ground, lest we burn our feet. Variations of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘World War II’ often had one or both parents stepping outside to see at least two children lying in a heap on the ground, not daring to show any sign of life until the all-clear was given by the winners. ‘Red Rover’ was also a big hit when there were enough of us, which was often. We got pretty tough trying to break through each other’s line. Street football was also a big hit. We pretty much kept to the ‘touch’ rules, but couldn’t resist the occasional foray into someone’s soft grassy yard where a full tackle was too impulsive to resist.
We moved from the neighborhood in the summer of 1973. Rarely was the time we ever found our way back there, but it did happen. This past weekend, I took my family to the Old Mill in North Little Rock for our annual holiday pictures. As we looked for a place to have lunch, the attraction was simply too great for me to pass up. I crossed the Arkansas River to 12th Street and turned at my old Catholic school. As an anchor-reporter in Little Rock two years before, I attended the official closing down of the school after over 100 years of parochial education. The church where many of us received our First Communion remained open, but the windows of the classrooms were now covered in black paint.
Finding the house from there will forever be imprinted in my head, having walked that mile or two to the house every day for seven years. A few blocks later, we came into the neighborhood. I mentally noted passing a LRPD squad car doing some investigating before we hit our old street.
It had been over 30 years since we stayed longer than a few minutes, but I couldn’t help staring. So much had changed. I expected the row of tall pine trees down the street to be gone or at least pruned to some degree, but not removed completely. Many of the formerly pristine lawns were threadbare and dirty. Cars were parked not only in the driveways, but on the lawns of many houses. City trash bins were left out on the curb, regardless of what day pick-up was. Nearly all the houses had a fence. The street was barely wide enough to allow two cars to pass each other.
I pulled into a house at the end of the street to turn around and noticed the place where our neighborhood ‘old lady’ lived. Every street had at least one lady who would yell at the kids to get off their lawns and was never home on Halloween, then would surprise us by being legitimately nice to you around Christmas. Ours was named ‘Old Lady Lydle’.
I looked at her house…or rather, where it once stood. I saw a grass-and-debris covered plot of land with a walkway leading to two concrete steps going nowhere.
I stopped the car in front of the Patterson’s old house and looked across the street. The house I grew up in was no longer there, not as I knew it. The new owner(s) had expanded the front porch east, enclosed it, replaced the walls with some sort of rock/shale siding and allowed Mother Nature to cut loose on everything else. Where there was a front lawn was now a forest. My wife tugged at my sleeve, motioning forward. Three rather tough-looking guys were sitting on the corner of the Green’s house (now a dirt mound surrounding a fire hydrant) glancing our way. I quickly took a shot of my past with my cell phone and drove off.
(As it looks now)
