The Neighborhood

66°f/19°C this morning, another warm day with highs in the upper 70s . Hazy, light clouds, soft breeze. Cooler than yesterday's high of 84f.

/29C.

I enjoyed reading all your comments on yesterday's post about childhood games. Several of you remarked on how lucky we were to have so many playmates, and that is true. But when we moved to Manassas we didn't have many children to play with. The neighborhood on Quarry Road was mostly people in their 50s and 60s whose children were grown, or close to it. (The street was East Quarry Street when I lived there, and before that was known as Railroad Row, because all the men worked for the railroad that ran just a block behind our house). 

Our old house as it looks today. Gussied up! Mom and Dad paid $12,000 for it in 1956, and were the third owners.   Built in 1914, now it is valued at around $675,000.  Image is from zillow.com

You can see our neighborhood as it looks today in this Google maps image. Click the arrows to move left or right. To see the other side of the street, click here.

On one side of us, for example, was Mrs. Renaldu, her brother we called Uncle Riley, and her daughter Miss Mary. Miss Mary was in her 40s, never married but had a boyfriend named Francis who was waiting for his mother to die before he got married. On the other side were the Blakemores; they had 2 daughters. One daughter was at college when we moved there, I think, and later became the first female head coach at WVU. The other was in high school but graduated within a couple years of us moving in. Across the street were the Compton in a two story brick house. They had two sons, maybe a daughter, all in their late teens in 1956. 

The Lonases were directly across from us and I think had only one son who was an artist in Germany. Next to them were the Earhardts,  who had 2 sons, one close to our age but he never played with us, possibly because we were that rare thing in Manassas in those days: Catholic.

Next door to the Blakemores was "Grandma" Compton, mother of Judge Compton in the brick house. She was probably in her 60s then but seem very, very old to me. 

That was our street, the only place we were allowed to be, and as you can see, there was a dearth of young children. There were 2 girls who lived across what we called the back street, more an alley I guess, but they were not allowed to play with us either and we rarely saw them outside. Two houses up from them, though, was a large Catholic family of 7 children. We played with them often for a while, and were allowed to walk to their house, but the parents had some issues and soon our parents decided it was better that we not go there (especially after one incident when the mother ran through the house with a knife, chasing the children. Poor lady had a nervous breakdown, and thankfully got care and didn't hurt anyone).

Our street was a great place to grow up, even without a gang of other kids around us. All the neighbors had gardens and fruit trees, and some had chickens. Mr. Lonas made grape wine and always brought my parents a bottle, and Grandma Compton had an orchard and often gave us apples. Oscar behind us had a tractor and owned a large field across the back street from us and raised a truck garden every year. He was a guard at the maximum security London prison, and sold his produce there as well as at a small stand in front of his house. Across the street was an empty lot that belonged to Mr. Lonas. He put up hay by hand there, and allowed my brothers and their friends to play football there in the fall.

We had a sidewalk in front of our house, just on our side of the street, that ran to the corner and along a busier street. We were allowed to ride our bikes and roller skate on this walk, but no further. The church was only three blocks away, and a small market was just past the church. When I was 7 I was allowed to walk to the market to pick up things for Mom, and this market also delivered in a 1957 Chevy panel wagon. For a brief time the library was just a block away, but it soon moved about a half mile or so away. When I was 10 I was allowed to walk all the way across town to the library and I went every week in the summer, checking out as many books as I could carry.

As we got older we were allowed to walk uptown too, to Rohr's five-and-dime, or to Cocke's drugstore for ice cream. We spent hours with our wagon, trundling around the town picking up pop bottles so we could cash them in for money for that ice cream (2 cents a bottle, and a cone was only a nickel) oorvfor penny candy at Rohr's.

Life wasn't always easy, of course. Daddy was a lineman and got burned badly when he was up a pole,  missing 6 months of work at a time when there was no disability or workers compensation.  Talk about broke! His family helped out and kept us from losing our himone, and the church helped too. Mom was often sick and/or pregnant, so we had a lot of household duties from a very early age. Money was always scarce, of course. 

I didn't have the typical teenage years either. I wasn't allowed to drive, date, or have a job. Dad was very strict on the girls, not so much with the boys who could do all those things.  I missed a lot of school, especially when Mom went away for depression for 6 weeks. My sister Judy and I took turns missing school, cooking and cleaning and keeping the home running. I babysat many many evenings when my parents got into square dancing and were gone several evening a week and sometimes on weekends too. So when former high school classmates post on Facebook about parties, swimming, dances, etc,  well, I have nothing in common there. 

Still, I have no resentment about those teen years, or being on the edge of poor all through my childhood.  I had parents that I knew loved me dearly, all my siblings, a good if untidy and ramshackle home, good neighbors. I know I was lucky, and thenolder I get the more I realize the value and the impact of that upbringing.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.