View of our house at 5433 Kirby Road (old numbering system), about 1950.
Living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, 2 bedrooms, no basement. And a
small utility room with a concrete tub where my mom did the laundry with
brown soap and a washboard. The house cost $7000 in 1947 when it was new.
I think this is one of the very few of the GI-Bill cubes left standing today
(according to Google street view). My Dad and I built the addition on the
back ourselves, with the help of a professional carpenter named Julian.
Forest in the background, brand-new 1950 Ford in the driveway (we didn't
have a car before that). There were no sewers then. There's a septic tank
under the front lawn; you could see where it was because the grass was
lusher. Wild onions grew with the grass, and my Mom had mint planted around
the perimeter of the house but I don't see it in this picture. Next door:
our neighbors the Casons, a retired couple whose phone we used until we got
our own. A lot of sharing in those early postwar years.... The first
family that got a TV set was suddenly very popular, everybody went to their
house to watch Martha Raye or Sid Caesar or a Washington Senators ball
game. Nobody had air conditioning though, so TV parties in the summer would
be cooled by oscillating electric fans with ice-cube trays in front. The
normal thing, however, was to stay home in the evenings and listen to radio
dramas: Lone Ranger, Dragnet, Gangbusters...
The original house was replaced in 2015 by a frame house at 1849 Kirby Road
(new numbering system), valued
in Zillow
at $1,812,900 as of late 2023.