1 - Our Houses - Kentucky

1952

This "blogger" born

Elizabeth Queen of England

U.S. detonates first fusion bomb

Evita Peron dies

Oscars: An American In Paris best picture; Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen) best actor; Vivien Leigh (A Streetcar Named Desire) best actress

Louisville late ‘50s

A number of years ago now, I revisited Louisville, Kentucky for the first time in close to 40 years. Much had changed, of course, but it was amazing how many things seemed familiar. I had been following a weather pattern all the way from Minneapolis so that everywhere I went it was always in the 90s (F), madly humid, with thunderstorms and tornado warnings (this was a road trip I was calling "The Bloomington Tour" since it started with Bloomington, Minnesota and included Bloomington, Illinois and Indiana).  I had dodged tornado sirens in Minneapolis, in Wisconsin, and across Indiana. After getting caught on foot in a thunderstorm deluge after lunch in the charming city of Bloomington, Indiana, I arrived at my cousin’s house in Louisville just as the storm front hit again. But I was delighted because the muggy evening air was full of lightning bugs (also known as fireflies), which we never see out West.

From birth through most of my seventh year, I resided on a quiet suburban street in Louisville a couple streets over from where my father had grown up. We both attended the same elementary school, (not at the same time) which hadn’t changed physically in the interim.  Our house was mid-block and that block was my world for most of these years. I remember surprisingly little about that house (it had a screened in front porch where we would sit on hot evenings. There was a full basement, the last we would ever have,  and we added a new sink faucet with a flexible hose which I loved to play with). I remember our building an A-frame structure in the backyard but I don't remember what it was used for. My dad thought dumping hot BBQ coals on the roots of a tree we had cut down in the back yard would be a clever way to get rid of those roots but they were still smoldering several years later when we left. The subterranean wood fire produced a very interesting smell.

As a Boomer, the street was full of other kids around my age so even when I was very young we could roam the block from one house to another with the mothers trading off kid-herding duty. During the day we made daisy chains long enough to stretch from sidewalk to sidewalk and screamed when a car drove through and broke them. At night we caught lightning bugs in glass jars. (Now I wish we hadn’t.)

My parents learned early on that they could leave me by myself with a minimum of toys and any patch of dirt and I could amuse myself indefinitely. I would build houses or towns or just roads.  An observer would have predicted a future in construction -- probably operating heavy equipment.

My best friend, Barbara, lived several doors down the block. (My best friends have almost always been female.) As we got older we kids roamed first to the ends of the block and then beyond. A block further away, on the other side of a row of houses, were cultivated fields that provided ammunition for epic dirt clod fights. One Derby Day (the Kentucky Derby was the biggest yearly celebration in Louisville) I got hit by a rock right at the top of my skull (while bending over to pick up more clods) -- I still have the scar.

This field was bordered by trees and bushes that formed a sheltered and private little world for small kids. Some of these bushes, once you worked your way in, formed little, dappled rooms which were great places to hide out.

At the top of our street were two gas stations and a dry cleaners. I would come home with bags of treasure, like old spark plugs, and we would play in the mist of dry cleaning fluid and the lint that blew out the back of the cleaners into a sort of creek/dump. At that time Coke machines, like the ones at our gas stations, were built like caskets.

(In most cases, these images will be the most appropriate I could find online.)

You lifted the top, put in your money, and then dragged the bottle you wanted along rails...

...until it came to the opening where you could lift it up out of the pool of cold air.

When I think of those times I think of steaming hot summer days, the smell of rain evaporating off hot asphalt, and cold bottles of Orange Crush.

Near the other end of the block another friend of mine lived in a huge rambling house. He was a little strange but his father had hung a military hammock in their backyard which I thought was the coolest thing ever. You could lie in it even in the rain with mosquito netting letting in any breeze while keeping out the bugs. He also had a slightly younger sister who jumped me on their plushly carpeted stairs and demonstrated this kissing thing she had learned god knows where.

Their father was the first “hi fi” enthusiast I knew of. He had a complicated collection of tube based equipment and also speakers that were cut into the walls -- but never properly finished so the place looked like a construction site.

We only had radios and a cabinet style turntable for 78s and possibly LPs. I actually don’t know if we had anything but 78s at that time. I would listen to my mother’s Glenn Miller records but you had to flip them over or change records every few minutes and the sound was poor.

Decor

Because my dad sold paint, we were always experimenting with the latest thing in coatings and resins. (In Boulder our chain link fence had wood posts coated with the latest in protective varnishes -- it looked like shit and peeled off after a summer or two.) The latest thing in, let’s say 1958, was antiquing of indoor furniture. You would paint the thing a beige color then slap on some dark brown and work it with special tools to create a sort of pattern. It was strange. But what it was good for was making a variety of cast off pieces look like they sort of belonged together. So that’s what we did to my bedroom. We even antiqued my radio -- it was a big, tube model with old style knobs, something like this...

...but now it looked like it belonged with everything else. I would sit at my newly painted desk and tune my newly painted radio to the station that played the most Nat King Cole.

Into the Woods

1959 was the last birthday I spent in Louisville. I was seven and what I wanted to do was go day camping with my dad in one of Louisville’s wonderful parks (these parks, Cherokee and Seneca, had been designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and are still amazing places). I think my dad had told me about his adventures in this park when he was younger and I wanted to see it with him. We basically had a picnic with a bit of hiking and canteens and maybe a campfire. In the summer the eastern woods tend to be overgrown and lush but in late winter and early spring they are barren and grey and open and quite inviting, really. It was great to spend most of a day out in this wonderful, near wilderness in the city. In retrospect I can see that I also wanted this because I really didn’t see all that much of my dad since he was always traveling.

Flying

As my father was deciding to move west with his company, he started flying more on business. We happened to be at Standiford Field when the first jet, a 707, arrived in Louisville. A couple years later I flew for the first time, in a turbo-prop from Standiford to Chicago Midway, and then, in a Continental 707, from Chicago to Denver Stapleton. In that first jet flight we had three regular coach tickets but they put us in two sets of seats facing each other with a table in between so we could play cards and checkers (I had a magnetic checker set, possibly new for the trip). Note that we had four seats and a table for a party of three. It was really a different time.

After Christmas 1959 the movers came and wrapped everything we owned in paper, packed it into boxes, and loaded it all into a big Mayflower truck (or possibly Red Ball Express truck, we moved several times and I get them mixed up). We then packed up the red Impala (see The Cars of My Life), and crossed the Mississippi and then the Great Plains for the first time. We arrived in Denver on New Year’s Eve. Approaching Denver, especially in winter, you get a stunning view of the snow capped front range of the Rockies looming up behind the skyline of the city. It’s particularly dramatic after days of seeing nothing but the flat plains. We woke up the next morning, the first day of the ‘60s, to find the motel parking lot and all the cars buried under several feet of fresh, powder snow. I was delighted. (See also: Family, Golf & Country Clubs. Next: 2 - Houses - Colorado. 

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