A house is not a home, but it’ll do in a pinch.
September 7, 2007 (Friday) – I’ve told you about all my secular jobs and all the churches I’ve joined. Today I’ll tell you about the houses I lived in, as I grew up in Houston.
(Some of these pictures were made in 2005; others at the time described in the blog).
I was born September 24, 1931, at 2705 Davis Street in a garage apartment. My father posed with me for a picture. The building has been demolished.
I lived with my grandparents on Virginia Street (now Ranch Street) off and on as a pre-schooler. This house was heated with a pot-belly wood stove, and my grandmother cooked on a kerosene cookstove.
We lived next on Noble Street, at the corner of Davis. I celebrated a birthday while there. My twin sisters, Elva and Melva, were born there June 19, 1934.
Our next house was on Jarrell Street, and it was a duplex. Jarrell Street was later swallowed up by Eastex Freeway.
We lived next on Caplin Street (500 block). Today the street is two blocks north of the North Loop 610. There was no Loop 610 back then. The house is now gone.
From there it was back to Virginia Street, with our grandparents. Then back to Caplin Street. Then back to Virginia Street.
Next stop: Robertson Street, just two doors down from our school.View image
When our parents divorced for good, the year was 1941, and we moved to Elysian Street with our grandparents. We had a hurricane that September, and water leaked everywhere in that old house, which was old then and still standing today.View image
We moved down the street to a new house View image, where I remember seeing my grandmother by the radio on December 7, listening to news of Pearl Harbor. “It is war,” she told me.
We soon moved a few blocks to an apartment houseView image on Noble and Simms. Our mother took us in for the summer and we lived in an apartment at Lorraine and Maury for a month, then we lived in a one room apartment on Shearn, a block or so from the cafe where she worked.
When school started in 1942, we moved back with our grandparents to 1915 Maury Street View image for one more year. In those days, there was an open porch where the picture shows a door, window and a/c in 2005. My grandfather and I used to sit there at dawn and drink our “morning soon” (he had a nickname for everything), meaning coffee.
All the houses so far had been rentals, but in 1944 we moved into a house my father and his new wife, Dorothy Hill, bought at 6908 Brownwood Street. Daddy and Dorothy lived in this house until 1979, when a fire in the den took his life.
For a few months in the fall of 1945, I lived with my grandmother (my father’s mother) on Shearn Street on the west side of downtown, near Houston Avenue. Then I began living with my mother and her new husband, Joe Heim, at the house they were buying at 2219 Ruth Street (Charles and grandfather standing in front of the house).
For the next four years, we kids moved back and forth between the two parents. We were becoming the “older kids,” as children were being born into the new families.
Finally, it was time for me to leave town and go to college. I (or we) lived in nine more places while going to school. One of those places was the second floor apartment in Cleburne where Wanda and I lived as newly-weds. And six more houses after that, including, in Rockport, the parsonage near the old church buildings downtown. If I counted right, it adds up to 33 in all.
Hey, I settled down. I’ve lived in this house in Oak Terrace for 37 years (1975 Photo). Another picture of the same house was made in 1970, right after we moved in. We were planning “open house” August 9 and, sure enough, it was very open, thanks to Hurricane Celia Aug 3, 1970. Wanda made this house beautiful. Again I quote Dorothy (or was it Judy — you know: Liza’s mom?), “There’s no place like home.”