Tom's Diary

Goodbye Old Friend

Today’ we’re moving out of our family home of more than twenty-one years now.  I’ll certainly miss this place. 

Mixed Feelings over Leaving

Dad’s not crazy about leaving.  After all, he’s put a lot of the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears into fixing up this abode.  But Mom wants to go.  She’s tired of living so close to the north side school with all the traffic and noisy kids, and though no amount of noise ever bothered Dad, in the end he relented, and so, we’re moving into Gram and Pap Jewell’s old house down on the highway, about a mile from here.

My Talk with the House

This afternoon, I took a walk around here, and actually talked to the house.  I wished it well, sort of like you’d say to a deceased relative at his funeral.  Then,  I expressed hope that the new owners would take care of this place as well as Dad did.  No matter the problem, Dad could always fix it, and usually without help besides.  He was a one-man show, and the best home maintenance fellow I ever knew.  So I’m sure that our soon-to-be ex-home is a bit nervous over seeing us go, because it, just like me, realizes how uniquely skilled and caring Dad’s hands were, and that as a result, he’ll be a tough act to follow.  No one else could take care of a home like Dad, though many could, and in fact, would, do a far worse job.  I comforted the house however, and told it that things would be okay, even without Dad’s tender loving care, because I knew the new owners to be good people.  I went to school with the new lady of this house, and  suspect that she and her husband will take as much pride in maintaining this property as did Dad. 

The West Porch

As we talked, I walked, starting on the west porch.  I’d made numerous fast friends here through the years, and often we’d have slumber parties out here with our sleeping bags completely covering every square inch of the floor.  Dad had just replaced the floor and banisters, and the entire area smelled of fresh wood and paint.  I’d have classmates come by and we’d play my record collection for hours at a stretch right here, beside the front door.  

The North Porch

I then strolled around to the side porch, on the north side of the house, facing Antis street.  Here, a three-seat chain swing hung, and much of the music I know from the seventies, I learned right here, while swinging so high that I could kick the roof at the top of each cycle, as I held the radio or tape player in my lap.  Batteries cost a premium back then, and with my income so miniscule, I could not afford them.  Thus, I had to run a long extension cord either out the dining room door or through the living room window, to the swing.  It had to be flexible and long enough to allow me to swing hard, without interference, thought I don’t recall ever having problems with the cords.

We decorated these porches most every Chrstmas season that we lived here, either with multi-colored or all-white lights.  We ran them along the edge of the roof and may have placed them on the banisters once or twice as well.

The Gas Lamp

Just to the north of the front steps that faced third street, a black gas lamp stood.  It’s an electric light today but back in the 70s, it had the gas burners and mantals were so fragile.  At least twice that I can think of, I broke them either by hitting them with my bike or ball, or my friend Joey Moffa bumped into the pole while I chased him around in some game we’d been playing.  This light added more to the house’s already-vintage-looking character.

The Front (West) Door

Then, I entered the front door with its hand-cranked door bell that was perhaps the only item we’d not upgraded or removed since being there.  The ornate front door looked vintage, as though it came with the original house when first built.  I patted the door and tried ringing the bell just to hear it one last time.  But the handle would not turn, needing a fresh drink of oil for some years now.  I don’t recall when that bell last rang, although I do remember ringing it as a kid in the late 60s and early 70s.    Trick-or-treaters on Halloween would ring it as well although most who knew us well just knocked. 

The Living Room

My next stop: the living room, now empty and echoy, in the northwest corner of the home. 

Then, I headed for the dining room 

The Dining Room

Then, I passed through the dining room.

The Kitchen

Next, I hit the kitchen.

The Back (East) Porch

Then, there was the back porch.

The Back Yard

I strolled outside into the back yard with its clothes line posts.

The Garage

Then, there was the garage, that I never knew us to use to house cars.  Mom and Dad parked all their cars either out front on third street, on the north side of the house, on Antis street.

The Dog Pens

 

The Compost Pile

 

The First Floor Bathroom

We even had a full bathroom with Marlite paneling.  The sink, tub, and comode, all were green in color.  Once, I got a crystal radio for Christmas, and Dad strung the antenna for it out the window and on the clothes line posts. 

The Basement

The west wall of the kitchen had the door down to the cellar, where I’d watched Dad soldering copper pipe for plumbing upgrades (no PVC pipe in those days).  He’d also built me a platform (a big and low table) for a race track that Santa Claus brought me one year in the late sixties, painted gray to match both the basement floor and the track itself.

This house came equipped with two complete furnaces; the one gas, the other, wood and coal.  In fact, the place had a coal bin that you could enter on the west side of the basement.  We had some coal hauled in occasionally but I dont’ remember us using this bin very often.

On the south side, in the mid 70s, Dad made me a little work area just to the west of the steps that lead upstairs.  The gas meter hung on this wall.  For a brief time, I hooked up my CB radio down here and listened to our FM radio cable service provided by Warner cable company at the time.

Dad’s work area occupied the space, also on the south wall, but to the east of the steps.  Here, he kept much of his hunting gear and his tools and supplies for his home maintenance and carpentry hobbies which he enjoyed so much.

The Cellar Stairs

The stairs back up the first floor were organized into two little flights, with a landing in the middle.  A door leading outside characterized this landing and faced our neighbors’ house about eight feet away heading south.  A long row of coat hanger hooks ran along the wall in this area.

My walk through the areas described so far took roughly ten minutes, for I was taking my time to savor each sound and smell and vision one last time because though I knew the new owners somewhat, I didn’t think I’d ever get to come in here again and have everything be the same.  I knew they had plans to renovate. 

The Hard Wood Floors on the First Floor

But eventually, I emerged from the cellar, now back on the first floor, hard-wood floors that had been varnished to a bright orange and shiny sheen.  They creaked loudly when anyone walked on them, even as little kids, our foot falls made them squeak; hard to sneak down at Christmas time to see what Santa had brought.

The Reception Hall

The reception hall, to the left as you came out of the cellar, painted white, had a red Lazy-Boy recliner and a coffee table where my two stereps and at least two monophonic record players entertained me throughout the late 60s and all of the 70s. 

• 1968: In our first grade classroom, a 10-gallon aquarium fascinated all of but enthralled me in particular.  As soon as I saw this on, I immediately began a relentless campain to get my parents to buy me one.  Eventually, they did, and they put it on the north side of the coffee table against the west wall.  I wasn’t sure what interested me more; the fish, or the air pump that made those frothy bubbles around the filter cartridge.  But the, perhaps it was the cylindrical heater unit that protruded into the water from the rim of the tank.  When the heating coils were energized, a little orange neon lamp inside the tube announced this.  Finally, the lights with their murky, bluish tint really brought out the colors of the fish; especially the neon tetras.  I rocked a hundred miles in the chair, watching those little fish swimming around.  First, we had two gold fish, a cat fish, and three blue moons.  The blue moons soon died however.  But the gold fish and cat fish lasted for most if not the entire time I had the tank.  I remember feeding the fish and actually enjoying the smell of Tetra Min dry fish food. 
• 1970: I experienced one of my first serious bouts of separation anxiety in this room.  Me, a third grader, and this, the first year I attended WPSBC in Pittsburgh, PA.  The fact that I was so young to be leaving for an unknown place, so far away, frequently made me a rather sad little boy; at least on Sunday afternoons at around 1:10 PM, when it was time to leave for the bus that would transport me from central to western PA.   Usually, either Mom or Dad drove me each week, and they’d have to spend a few minutes comforting me here in the reception hall, before we headed for the car.  This may have indeed been a reception hall on Friday nights when I returned home.  Indeed, I have many fond memories of my sisters and friends greeting me here at roughly 6:00 PM.  But two days later, it changed into a room of doleful departure.  Bitter-sweet memories here to be sure.
• 1971: Mom got me a stereo record player that I listened to for a thousand hours in this room, as I looked out the west window at the asphalt-paved school yard across third street.  I lingered here a good while, remembering, and almost crying.
• 1977-1979: After working Christmas tree sales at WPSBC for the first time the previous holiday season in 1976, I bought a used Pioneer SX-1000 TW stereo receiver with the money I’d earned.  At first I could only listen to it with headphones, as I hadn’t the funds to purchase a decent set of speakers.  But Mom and Dad took pity on me, and bought me a set of two Research Audio units. 
• 1985: Sister Christine got married in June of last year, and all the family gathered in this hall before leaving for the church, to get pictures, congratulate the newlyweds-to-be.

 

The Stairs to the Second Floor

Next, I climbed the stairs from the first to the second floor.  Like the cellar steps below, these steps were built as two sections, with a landing in the middle.  You went up six steps from the first floor to this landing, and then another seven steps to the second floor proper.  Indeed all the stairs in this house from the cellar way ones, to these, to the ones leading to the attic, followed this two-flight-per-story pattern.

The Second Floor Hall

 

Mary Ann and Jojo’s Bedroom

 

Mom and Dad’s Bedroom

 

The Twins’ Bedroom

 

The Second Floor Bathroom

 

My Bedroom

My bedroom was the place I spent by far the most time, even if you don’t count the time I slept in it.  I felt the pulse of the house the strongest here and knew that this was the one spot I’d miss the most.  So many memories came to mind here:

• 1968: The time I took my second record player apart and had no idea of how to put it back together, and how Dad, when he learned that I’d done this, really blew his stack and grounde me for a couple days.
• 1969: My aunt gave me an old, tube-type radio, AM only, that I listened to a great deal that year.  The stations played that song   Classical Gas   quite a bit during the summer.
• 1970: STP stickers were all the rage that year and somehow, though I can’t remember just how right now, I managed to procure about twenty of them.  I then proceeded to affix them to the new panneling that Mom and Dad had installed for me a year or two earlier.  Strangely, Mom never got mad about them, though I think if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have been furious.
• 1973: Then there were all the hours spent fantasizing over [First Love], taping cassette letters to her, and hearing her play the flute in my mind, while reminiscing about   my first spring concert.
• 1973-1975: For Christmas, 1973, I received a General Electric portable radio that could also receive television audio for channels 2 through 13.  I listened to TV 10 in Altoona, especially the Match Game show, and I also struggled to pull in station WPEZ 94.5 FM in Pittsburgh.  Occasionally, it came in clearly when tropospheric ducting and other natural phenomena favored their radio waves reaching my antenna. 
• 1974-1976: My CB radio occupied much of my awake time in this room during these years.  Talking to people on holiday eves like Christmas, and New Years was so much fun.  This bedroom was always cold in the winter as it had no radiators, and always very hot in the summertime, as it had no air conditioning.  Actually we had air conditioning nowhere in the house until the early 80s, when we received two window units from my grandmother Jewell’s estate when she passed away.
• 1975: For Christmas that year, I received two clocks: The one was just a plain alarm clock that looked digital though it was actually electromechanical.  The other was a white, Panasonic clock radio, from Mom and Dad.  Needless to say, I told everyone on the CB about the gifts and made sure they knew that I was tickled pink to get them.
• 1978: On many days during the summer of that year, I came home from working on the Oswald farm, all sweaty, tan, and grubby.  Sister Jojo had loaned me her cassette recorder, which I used to record a tape or two of my favorite music, and I played that tape here almost every afternoon while the temperatures floated above 80 degrees that year. 
• 1978-1979: [Mentat] and I really got drunk and this was the first time I’d ever experienced the bed spins.  They felt like I was lying, spread-eagle on a huge roller, that was rolling me.  I couldn’t tell my ups from my downs then, but surprisingly, I suffered no hangoer the next morning.
• 1979: For Christmas in 1978, my parents bought me a Realistic portable radio that sounded amazingly big and high in fidelity in spite of how small it was.  For much of that year, I listened WVAM FM, Rock 100 before it burnt down in 1980 and then, never really recovered in my view.  I also studied electronics profusely in this room as I lie on my bed directly under the ceiling light.
• 1980-1982: I’ll never know just how many tears I cried here during this time over the foiled relationship with [First Love].  I don’t even think I’d know if we measured the tears in gallons.  I cried a lot then.
• 1983:  This year found me with a girl at the house for the first time in my life.  I liked having her there, though I was not so crazy about her herself, because at least now, I’d managed to join the ranks of the “big boys”.  Actually, she and I never slept together there because my bed was only a single one.  But I never revealed this small detail to the guys I hung with there back then.
• 1984: I read my first complete book for fun, as an adult.  That was Stephen King’s classic:  The Stand, recommended by [First Love].
• 1985-1986: I didn’t come home much during this time overall, as I was hard at work in college at the University of Pittsburgh.  But when I was home, I spent much time studying things like calculus, American history, and the Greek classics while sprawled out on my twin-sized bed.

 

I accomlished much of the introspection required to transition from a child into a young adult in this room. 

The Attic

For most of the twenty-one years we lived at North 3rd Street, the attic was off-limits to us kids.  It was not finished, and so quite cold in the winter time as it had neither heat nor insulation.  Also it became very hot in the summertime, as there was no attic fan.  Plus, there were lots of exposed nails, splintery boards, and live wires.  Indeed, the shelter-ability of this place is not much better than you’d get in a pavilion.  But once we all grew into adults, Mom and Dad relented and allowed us up here to hang out, and us siblings didn’t mind “braving the elements” so we could clam this extra, and very special space. That happened in 1982.

• 1982: Sister Mary Ann hosted a party for about ten of us in this attic.  She cleaned it all up and put lamps around up there, as there were no working, built-in lights.  I remember this get-together being particularly fun and how often we heard Olivia Newton-John’s hit  Heart Attack   on my Sharp boom box.
• 1983: Since I had been spending so much time in Pittsburgh during this time, sister Jojo made my bedroom on the second floor, hers.   So during the warm months during this year, I slept up here in the attic.  I don’t recall where the mattress came from that found its way up here.  But it was quite comfortable, and as long as you got up and left before around 11:00 AM, the temperature never got too high for comfort. 
• 1983: Also immediately upon my getting laid off from the University of Pittsburgh, I took to studying assembly language programming on the 6502 microprocessor, and read through two books on that subject in this attic. 

 

Tom Hesley