The Living Room

The downstairs of the house consisted of a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a large back porch. The living room seemed quite large to me. The majority of my preteen/teenage years the room held a couch, Mom's chair, Dad's rocker/recliner, the piano, and the television set. The floor was a dark brown tile that was made of a composite material. Mother would keep it dusted, and we knew someone special was about to arrive when it got a new layer of wax. The room faced South and you entered it from the front porch, the kitchen or the hall. This was the room that was most “lived in” and whenever we had guests, this was the room where we entertained. Most every night we watched television in the living room. This is also where we practiced the piano and sang along to old songs with mother. The living room didn’t always have this appearance. Before I was born and when I was very young a lot of one corner of the room was taken up with a large, dark behemoth of an oil heater. I hardly remember it, but the little I recall it was enormous and blazing hot. This was eventually replaced with baseboard electric heating which was a huge relief to everyone in the family since it gave us consistent warmth and less danger of getting burned.

Beverly & I in the living -room

Christmas 1958

Entering the House

Beverly & I 1955ish

The front door opened from the porch into the living room. It was the one door in the whole house that was built from some kind of solid, heavy wood. It was dark and had a large metal handle that was extremely difficult to open for the youngest one in the household (that would be me). When I finally grew old enough to have a key of my own I seldom, if ever, used the one to the front door; I much preferred going to the back door, even if the way was dark and scary. On dates, however, I could always have the young man leave me at the front door since Mom invariably left it unlocked. The ritual for returning home when I was out after hours as a teen was that I would enter the house (alone through the back door, on a date through the front door), turn off the light on the stove in the kitchen and head for bed. Usually I would stop in the folks bedroom for a brief play-by-play of the evening’s activities. Mother told me much later in life that Daddy thought this ritual was hysterical since there was never any question of what I’d been up to, I always spilled the beans, unlike any of the other kids in our family, my life was an open book. I was always more than willing to tell all…mostly because there wasn’t that much to tell. This ritual was not one that Mom and Dad had concocted, but one that I had devised. Why, because there wasn’t anything to hide…I was a pretty straight shooter, with little to keep secreted away from my parents (no wonder my sister and her friends thought I was a little goody two- shoes!)

Karry, Dad, Mother, Larry & Bev

in front of "the door" 1959