Chapter 1. Impressions

or the very young who live in the wintery parts of the universe there are but two seasons, the warm and the cold. We moved to our new house on Lake Street in the warm of the year 1942.

My new home was engulfed in a hubbub of activity -- movers padding in and out and my folks busily trying to make sense of the tumult. Sensing that I was in the way, I sat down on the curb outside and peered up into the great elm trees that lined both sides of my block. The trunks, like the orderly columns in an old temple, supported the massive boughs that branched and arched overhead eventually entwining into a tangled thicket of vegetation high above the middle of the street. Years later this intimate co-mingling of branch and limb would lead to their destruction. But in my immediate world I soon learned that the great mass of branches and leaves darkened and cooled everything below on hot summer days and provided a haven for hundreds of blackbirds later in the fall.

As the days turned to weeks, I became aware that a person walking from my new house to anywhere else walked uphill in every direction save one. And so it was that water, from rain, hose, or hydrant, moved down the slopes and found its way to a pair of small sewers in the middle of our block. One might ask why this small bit of ill-conceived engineering is worth mentioning? The answer is simple. In pre-television times, a child's play was guided by the surroundings outside. So, the location of the two storm sewers was important because water from any source up-slope would flow past my house. The street then was my Nile and from the very beginning the water coursing along the curb was an important part of my early universe. I don't know how many summer afternoons were spent building miniature dams of sticks and dirt or following makeshift boats to their doom in the sewers if the current was sufficient enough to carry them. This was "seats-of-the pants" engineering education at its best. I had no idea what a cofferdam or spillway was but I learned, in a primitive sense, what water does when confined, impeded, or diverted. Maybe this is how ancient peoples discovered the many clever ways to utilize their water resources -- simple make-believe play and observation as children applied to the real world as adults. I am convinced that I learned more by playing with the currents of water along my curb than I would ever have learned from watching television. I do not offer this statement as an indictment of that media but as anobservation that the old neighborhoods were brimming over with real adventures and learning experiences far beyond anything television or computers might offer. Were there dangers associated with these learning experiences? Most assuredly. But danger is nature's forge. It toughens our spirit and challenges the soul so that we might survive the future. I sometimes fear that our present penchant for shielding today's children from just about everything will only result in flaccid spirits and precariously diminished wits.

The Lake Street neighborhood was a wonderful mix of retired people, middle class professionals, and the well to do. The disparate assemblage was not the product of avant-garde social engineering. It was simply a hap-in-stance collection of homes that included everything from modest frame houses (many patterned after the rural farm homes of the time) and the stately mansions that had sprung up around the Country Club. Sprinkled between were a hodgepodge of middle class dwellings of every design and description. There was no particular theme. Frame, brick, stucco, big windows, little windows, Spanish, English, and French Provincial houses were all built at the whim of owner or builder and often reflected their individual personalities. Most were constructed before the advent of truly reliable heating systems and used fireplaces to warm sitting rooms during the long winters. Yards were decorated with gazebos, grottos, fish pools, and freestanding trellises -- even a greenhouse now and then.

Our house was one of the in between varieties and even though I extol the virtues of variety in the old neighborhoods, I have often wondered what a builder had in mind when some of the houses were conceived and built -- ours was no exception. One problem was immediately apparent as you entered the front door into our living room. There were two large double doorways in the living room that allowed access to the rest of the house. One, logically, opened into the dining room while the other, illogically, provided a direct entry into my grandparent's bedroom. Now there may have been a good reason for such a door at one time but the liabilities of the plan were apparent from the start and, not long after we moved in, the opening between the living room and bedroom was replaced by lath and plaster and forever closed.Another architectural puzzlement was my mother's bedroom at the opposite end of the central hall. Adjoining her room was a small sunroom that my brother and I shared. (Perhaps it had been a nursery at one time.) This was an exceptionally bad situation since it was impossible to enter or leave our room without first going through my mother's bedroom. However, unlike the offending doorway in the front parlor, there was no easy solution to this problem. So, we simply lived with the imperfection and the total lack of privacy until we moved many years later. Putting up with this blunder of design for more than a dozen years says much about my mother's patience and the enormous sacrifice she was willing to make on our behalf.

The rest of our house was fairly typical for the times. There was a formal dining room, breakfast nook, and kitchen in addition to the two bedrooms and sunroom. The basement was old, cavernous, and divided in two parts by a fiber board wall. An enormous hydra-like furnace sat squarely in the basement's center and dominated the downstairs. It acted like a giant black hole, sucking in and devouring any light that filtered in through the small basement windows. Eventually, when my uncle came to live with us he moved in to the basement and his presence there made a great difference. The downstairs was, at once, livable and my brother and I spent many hours there listening to his old radio and learning card games like casino and poker.

The old white lap-sided house on Lake Street was the stage and its residents its actors. I was the youngest. My family, a little unusual for those times, consisted of my grandfather, grandmother, mother, and brother. Later my uncle, a retired rancher, came from Wyoming to live with us. I was four years old and we were embroiled in a bitter world war that touched us all and held us hostage to an uncertain future. However, with a child's naiveté, the outcome of the war did not concern me. It was all very simple, we were a righteous nation and we would ultimately prevail in the end.