Houses and Homes--part 1

As we all know, a house is not always a home. It may be our domicile but for a residence to be "home" it has to satisfy certain criteria. Some do and some do not. Over the course of my life I have lived in quite a number of different places--sometimes just "camping" with some sort of a roof over my head and other times feeling I had a real home, at least for a time.

1535 75th Street

The first house I came to within a day or two of my birth in Kansas City, MO on the afternoon of April 27, 1943 was the home where my father had lived with his parents and siblings for several years, though not his first home. In my memories, which cannot be anything but the most vague since I never saw it after I was about thirty months old, I see Tara from Gone With the Wind--a great white edifice closer to a mansion than a regular house. That is not quite accurate but it was a large and very nice home located at 1535 West 75th Street in Kansas City. I suppose to some it was home but I don't have that sort of attachment to it.

My parents soon relocated for a short time to small cottage in the general neighborhood and then moved to Cambridge, MA while dad was employed by Raytheon  after a training accident ended his very brief military career.  There we lived in another two story house though smaller than the Kansas City one. This one was located on Edgewater Drive in a Boston suburb and was painted a dark red with white trim. it had what is called a mansard roof and a sun porch--definitely not a Massachusetts Room LOL but nice on sunny days during the chilly winter. From there we went back to Kansas City for a few months in the last part of 1945.

KC cottage

121 Edgewater Drive, Waltham, MA

Early in 1946, mom and dad loaded up in their 1939 black Ford coupe and started off for the long trek to Arizona which was to be their main home for the rest of their lives. By that deed, I came to consider myself an Arizona native since I cannot really remember living anywhere else. My memory starts in a little stucco "company house" on a hill in Jerome, Arizona. Jerome was a Phelps Dodge mining town and many of the residences were owned by the firm and used to house their employees. As Word War II ended, mining started to wind down somewhat and there were vacancies. My parents rented one fora very economical fee. That house was my first real home. For the most part I was secure and happy there, an only child for most of the time and still a bit of a pet or toy to my parents as their first born. We stayed there from about April 1946 until November 1953. So house #164 Sunshine Hill saw me from a toddler of three until I was past ten.

164 Sunshine Hill

From there we moved down into the Verde Valley and took up residence in other company houses, now owned by Haliburton who had taken over the former Phelps Dodge smelter and other facilities in Clarkdale and later built the cement plant which is now owned and run by the Yavapai tribe, sometimes incorrectly called the Yavapai Apache. We leased 409 and 413 Lower Main, one that we lived in and the other kind of office/shop/storage space. I was to call that place home from November 1953 until I went off to Flagstaff to start college in September 1966, or actually part time until the summer of 1967 when a number of issues finally came to a head and the family was evicted. That is a totally distinct tale and much too long and complex to share here. For a number of years that was the longest I had resided in one place.

409 Lower Main, Clarkdale

The photo of the Clarkdale house is from 1989. The trees were not there back in the late 1950s nor was the front porch. The two little houses were pretty ugly and bare while we lived there. I may find a photo or two later but hold little fondness for the place now and call myself gladly gone. It was perhaps a home part of the time; at others just where I lived. The houses there are now privately owned and mostly have been fixed up and remodeled nicely.