Memory Lane

While we were in Tennessee recently I wanted to go to a photo store. Durys in Nashville is a professional level store and I wanted to check it out.  To get to it, I had to get off the Interstate at Wedgewood Avenue, which is the street that goes to the street where I was born and lived until I was eight years old.

So, I decided to take a side trip to see our old house on Stewart Place.  There are a lot of memories still there.  At the intersection of Wedgewood and Stewart is a tree I crashed into with my bike.  I passed the house where an older friend, Carl, lived.  Carl died from cancer.  Stewart Place is a long, straight street with a slight incline, but when I was a kid it was a death defying slope to ride your sled down when it snowed.

When my sister and I lived there Halloween was a great time.  It was also a simpler, safer time.  One house would have popcorn balls, another candied apples, etc.  A whole lot more fun then.

Here’s the house where I lived from 1945 to 1953:

There were a couple of Maple trees in the front yard when we lived there.  They probably were only 15 or so feet tall, but to a little kid they were huge.  The porch above is where I was carrying a bottle of milk to our neighbors to the left.  I dropped the milk bottle right at the edge of the porch you see, it broke, and a shard of glass cut my leg.  I still have the scar, but due to the many years that have passed it’s hard to find.  Those neighbors owned a furniture store in Nashville.  They were into TV advertising fairly early for those days (early 1950’s) and asked Gabby Hayes, a cowboy sidekick to many screen cowboys, especially my hero Roy Rogers, to do an advertising spot for them.  I got to go to the TV studio to meet Mr. Hayes – a big moment in a little kid’s life.

This is the other side.  The satellite dish wasn’t there when I was a kid.  We got our first little black and white TV in the early 1950’s and most likely had a simple antenna.  The steps on the side of the house were there when I was a kid.  The door goes into a small kitchen – our current bedroom closet is bigger than that kitchen.  You could also get to the cellar from the kitchen and, long before air conditioning, the cellar was the coolest place in the house in the summer.  The back porch is still there.  My folks had a console Zenith radio and I remember listening to many of the old radio serials on that porch.  The garage looks ‘new’ compared to what I remember.

That house is probably close to 70 years old now and, besides our family, I’m sure it has a lot of memories stored up from a lot of families over the years.