View of our house, 5433 Kirby Road
(don't use that address to find it
today; Kirby Road house numbering has changed since then). 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, 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
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The same house in 2011 - Google Street View
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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 Uncle
Milty 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...
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