I was raised in a house at 616 W 2nd St. in Weston, West Virginia. I lived there most of my first twenty-seven years, except for four years away at college and four in the Navy. I have for the last thirty years lived at 16111 Pointer Ridge Drive. For people who are into numerology, the 616 and 16111 might suggest something. It has often occurred to me that it should have some significance, but not being inclined to truck with superstition and too cheap to gamble, I have let sleeping dogs lie. Personally, I have mildly envied by next door neighbor's address at 16113 because for several years and for various reasons, I have considered the number 13 to be my lucky number. Part of the reason for this is my inclination to regularly take the opposite view from other people and to discount superstitions. I find the number 666 appealing for the same reason, conventional religion being one target of my contentious attitude. However, the number 13 did seem to push itself upon me in my earlier experiences, most particularly as it was my flight crew number in the Navy for most of two years. I had many adventures and experiences during that time, generally related to that crew, including a near-death experience in 1958. Also, there came a point when my office room number was A13, and I was a GS-13, so I concluded that thirteen should be my number regardless of my inconsistent resistance to superstitions.

I cannot think of any reason to record the few specifics I remember about the house I grew up in, except that I am anal and consider such minor things significant. I am sure there are things I could and perhaps should write, assuming I can remember them, which would perhaps interest my sons someday, but this is probably not one of them.

I spent my early years in a simple two-story frame house which was built in the '20's by or at least for my maternal grandparents. One of the little specifics I remember about it was the cold air coming up through the open cracks as I sat on the floor in front of the fire, eating a snack and reading comic books as was my wont in the winter. In fact, although I started the habit in cold weather, I remember that it occurred to me one warm spring or summer day that here I was on the floor, eating and reading in front of the fireplace when I had no requirement for heat.

The house was located on a two-lane road about a mile from the center of town. The road at this point was both US Route 33 and US Route 219 and ran east to west out from the center of the town of about 8000 people. My house was about one mile from the center of town. The fact that it sat directly across from Polk Creek Elementary School was a more significant particular regarding it s location, at least from my point of view, both literally and figuratively. This house was on the desirable side of the road, as Polk Creek, which flowed about sixty yards behind the schoolhouse, flooded many of the houses on the lower side of the road periodically. My house not only was on the desirable side, but it sat up on a little bank about three feet above the road. Two small brick twin houses were next to my house on the west side, and on the other side stood a larger and nicer frame house just across from a gravel alley which ran up to another unpaved alley which ran parallel to the road behind our property.

At the back corner of our property adjacent to the two alleys stood a large divided building. The portion at the corner was a plain bare wood frame garage where my mother kept her car. From the time I can barely remember her bringing it home until 1952, it was a black '38 Ford Coupe with mechanical brakes. The other larger part of the building was just a big storage building, and the only thing I remember in it was the coal we stored there. It was probably at least 25 X 35 feet. One of my few duties was to take a coal bucket up to the building and bring coal, stored in one corner of the building, to the house for our one operating fireplace. There was also a smaller wooden building we called the smokehouse, although it was never used as such in my time, and abutting this was a brick cellar lined with foods my mother had canned. These two buildings were only a few feet behind the house.

I remember we used to burn a kerosene lamp in the closed cellar when the weather was cold to heat it enough to avoid freezing the food. I do not remember anything ever freezing there. In the winter of 1958-59, I visited my home a few days. I remember getting up one morning of that visit and going out to start my '57 Ford, parked on the street in the open. The car started, and as well as I can remember, with no significant trouble, even though the thermometer on our front porch read '26 degrees that morning. That may have been the coldest it got around there in those days, but I do remember it was generally a lot colder than it is now. My town is generally due west of Washington D.C. and not at a high elevation in the hills either, but I think the temperatures here are moderated a little because we are closer to the bay.

The property may have been 100 X 250 feet, but with my limited ability to judge distance, even disregarding the fact that my initial impression was formed when I was young, I could be off by over 50%. What I remember which makes the property seem so large was a very big vegetable garden which we had in the back. It was actually like two gardens, with a grape arbor dividing the two lengthwise in a line perpendicular to the house. I believe the arbor had Concord grapes with big seeds, and these are not my favorite kind of grapes for sure. We had all kinds of vegetables in this garden. The ones I remember were Irish potatoes, corn, including a few years small popcorn, tomatoes, onions, beets, red and icicle radishes, gourds, peas, green beans, turnips, leaf lettuce (Black-Seeded Simpson was my mother's favorite), cucumbers, green peppers, carrots, and no doubt I am forgetting a few. One year the garden was my project in the 4-H Club, the closest I came to the FFA or Future Farmers of America. There was also a patch of rhubarb which grew beside the cellar for as long as I can remember.

The house had one chimney which serviced three fireplaces, one in both of two rooms downstairs of the common wall. Only one fireplace was used, and I remember sleeping in the room with that fireplace burning at night. I remember the crackling, hissing and popping sounds, and the smell of the coal burning also. This is a pleasant memory of those days, but my favorite would have to be hearing the rain on the metal, or so-called "tin roof." I even have stored in my unusually small cache of memories the sound of rain on the roof of our little '38 Ford couple. There was also a fireplace leading to that chimney in the room above the front room and another fireplace in what we called at certain periods "the front room" or "parlor," on the other side of the house, and, I believe, in the room upstairs. This was the room where my grandmother was laid out when she died, instead of at the funeral home, as became the custom later.

As I will very likely never finish this writing, I will throw my "batty" experience in here now, since that was a subject that came up in our Writer's Group. In any case, one of the disadvantage of the chimney was the provision of an egress for bats into the house. Generally, we found them upstairs, and as I got older, I assumed (with some trepidation) my mother's role as bat swatter. At the time I remember doing this, the upstairs room were large and relatively empty. They designated swatter would go into the room with the bat, close the door, and, as the bat flew in circles around the room, would, in a rather tensed-up state, try to swat it down with a broom. When the bat was knocked down, we would flush it down the commode, a form of disposal of which the local plumber would disapprove. I don't remember how we picked them up, since I found the bat to be one of the more distasteful creatures I encountered in my moderately broad contact with nature. I particularly recalled finding a snake in the lawn just off our front porch, swallowing a bat. This was another picture that I never forgot.