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The tale of the house on Olney Drive

Created on: 01/20/15 07:39 AM Views: 2311 Replies: 1
The tale of the house on Olney Drive
Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2015 07:39 AM

I form extreme attachments to homes.  It’s probably because I lived in only one home for 23 years, from birth until moving full-time to Austin in 1976.  We bought our present home in Houston  in 1986 and we’re still in it almost 30 years later.  I put down long roots in the only two homes where I have lived.  I never really totally disconnected from the home on Olney Drive where I grew up. 

In 1950, the Sumner Development Corporation built a little pie shaped neighborhood of houses bordered by the Austin Highway, Harry Wurzbach and Rittiman Road known as Wilshire Terrace.   The main streets were Olney Drive, Sumner Drive, Karen Lane, Byrnes and Blakeley.   This was a very modest neighborhood and my parents’ humble little place cost them $8300.  They had indigestion as to how they would possibly cover those payments:  $72 a month.  Real estate taxes and insurance were so low they were hardly noticed.  These were quick build tract homes, thrown together for the influx of families who were involved with Fort Sam Houston and also wanting to move into the excellent North East Independent School District.  It was the school district that lured my parents up that way.  Their ticket into the house on Olney Drive was the GI bill which financed with no down payment.  They had managed to save $800 to buy  furniture.

Those houses were basic.  About every 5th or 6th house was the exact same floor plan, with perhaps a different porch design and maybe some variation in siding.  That siding, by the way, was asbestos, which is a huge no no today.  It was cheap and durable.  Windows were steel casement style, cranking out to catch the summer breezes.  One nice feature inside were solid oak hardwood floors.  But no one liked them and usually covered them up with carpeting.  We always kept our wood floors and they really took a beating.   Most houses had two bedrooms and one bathroom.  There was no air conditioning or central heating.  Gas jets stuck out of the baseboards in every room, so you could purchase gas heaters and use that.  On really cold mornings, we turned on the kitchen gas range for a little while.   For cooling, there was an attic fan in the hallway, which did a fairly credible job of cooling the place down, especially at night.  My parents also invested in an evaporative cooler, or swamp cooler as described by Steve Clark.  It was absolutely great because the air that blew in was water cooled.

In the back beyond the chain link fence was a cool grass-lined alleyway, great for exploring.  Every house had a water meter and it was usually inhabited by something slimy, which we would catch, pass around, and then release. 

Right outside the kitchen was a carport, which was actually fairly handy.  It had a huge storeroom in the back that held the constantly expanding  family junk collection.

My poor mother made do with about eight square feet of counter space in one of the smallest kitchens imaginable.   The kitchen sink was big enough to bathe a kid in and occupied about a third of the counter space.   There was no dishwasher.  Eventually she did manage to find a portable dishwasher that rolled around on wheels.  We would roll it out of the corner, fill it up, attach it to the sink faucet and run it daily.   There was no laundry room and a washing machine sat right in the corner of the kitchen.  We hung our laundry on a clothes line, in full view of the neighbors through the chain link fences.  It was so embarrassing to be hanging my father’s tighty whiteys out to dry.  When it rained, we waited until it stopped to do our laundry.  It we made a mistake and it rained after we had hung everything out on the clothes line, we just let it dry out again for an extra day:  two rinsings instead of one. 

With only one bathroom, you learned to plan your strategy well and get to the door ahead of your siblings.  Baths and showers were only taken at night since there was no way all of us could run through one bathroom on a school or work morning.  I learned to beat Wes to the bathroom door pretty early so I could have the required time to fix myself up before school.  If he got there first, it was hopeless.  He would hog it until about five minutes before the bus arrived.   Howling and pounding on the door was useless.  The bathroom sink had exposed plumbing on the bottom and a small but efficient gas wall heater.  The only tile was on the floor.  The bathtub was surrounded by stick on plastic  tiles.    That gas heater was extremely dangerous.  It would have been easy to be asphyxiated and it was down on floor level with open flames.  It could easily have ignited clothing if you got too close. 

Our homes were pretty humble, but we all had pride in ownership.  Everyone kept up their houses and yards.  Watering was cheap, so our lawns got all the water needed and grew lush and thick.  Lawns were kept mowed and edged, and houses were painted and fixed as needed.  Everyone planted trees and shrubs.  We had juniper, boxwood and ligustrums which grew into huge trees where we played Tarzan.  We also had mesquite trees which the builder had left.  The thorns crippled us regularly.   In the backyard was a chinaberry tree which bloomed each spring with the most fragrant and lovely  tiny lavender blooms.  Unfortunately, this was followed in the fall by a crop of nasty marble-sized  yellow berries which dropped everywhere and decomposed.  But the blossoms were worth putting up with the stinking berries.  You rarely see chinaberry trees anymore.  Years later in Austin, we found a blooming  one on South Congress in a restaurant parking lot.  I smelled it before I even saw it.   I stood under it and oohed and aahed  for about five minutes while my daughter stood by questioning my sanity.  I was just so happy to see one again.

By 1960 we started outgrowing the place but could not afford a step up to Northwood or Terrell Hills.  So we added on another 200 square feet room  in the back with knotted pine paneling, an acoustic tile ceiling,  red linoleum floors and wall to wall aluminum windows which gave us much pride.  The addition served as my parents’ bedroom so Wes and I could occupy the original two bedrooms.  Because of the configuration,  my parents’ door opened directly into the kitchen.  It was pretty bizarre, but we got used to it.  We could now boast that we had three bedrooms, but still only one bathroom.  We also closed in the carport and made a garage.  At least now when it rained, we could string our laundry up on a line inside the garage.

My parents kept the house until 1976, when it was sold.  Sadly, it went into foreclosure within a couple of years and became a HUD home.  Soon it became one of a collection of about 30-40 rent homes owned by a woman who was a real slumlord.   Every time I returned to San Antonio we would drive by and it was sadder and sadder looking.  My father’s beautiful lawn had turned to dirt and weeds and even the weeds were usually dead.  Our thick boxwood hedge in the front disappeared along with the ligustrums and the chinaberry.  The asbestos siding became worn and chipped.  The owner  barely maintained the place, renting it out cheap to tenants who took dismal care of it.  It almost reached the point where I dreaded driving by it and seeing how much worse it could get.

In April 2014, I was nosing around in Realtor.com and found my old home was for sale!  It was in such bad condition that there were no interior pictures posted.  The price was rock bottom, half of its market worth.  It was in that bad of shape.  By the time I got a request in to see it, there were so many offers that the seller was accepting no more and showings had stopped. 

In August  we drove by it again, curious as to what might have happened.  I was absolutely thrilled to see a pile of construction debris out front!  Someone was remodeling and it was major.  It was on a Saturday, and there was no crew in sight so we stopped and walked all around the exterior.  The siding had been replaced in some places and repaired and painted a cheerful blue.  All of the windows and the roof had been replaced.  We peeked in the front window and saw granite countertops!  My little house was getting granite countertops!  When it finally went back onto the rental market in September, we made an appointment to see it.   It was a surreal experience to walk back into it after almost 40 years.  It was a different house.   I longed to see anything that was leftover from when I lived there, but those details were few and far between.   The kitchen was expanded and beautiful.  The garage had been closed in to make an extra bedroom.  The storeroom had become a laundry room.  The new owner slash landlord went on and on about how a washing machine had sat in the kitchen!!  I kept very quiet.  The original wood floors had been lost because the foundation had cracked down the middle and a giant hole had to be cut in the middle of the house to pour a pier.  But they had replaced it with some nice laminate.  The bathroom was beautiful.  I looked in all the nooks and crannies and found a few places where it was original, such as inside the closet of my old bedroom, and the huge floor to ceiling cabinet in the old bathroom.  The door moldings were still there, though well painted.   The foundation of the back add-on bedroom had separated six inches from the main foundation.  How had the tenants lived there?  The new owner had it jack hammered out and  replaced  with a nice deck and ceiling fans.

This little house has started its second life and should be good family home for another 40-50 years.  I am happy for it and wish it the best.  It’s the nicest little place on the block and the rent is expensive, so it should be well taken care of.  I am no longer sad.

 
RE: The tale of the house on Olney Drive
Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2015 01:14 PM

As we discussed before, our childhood home had a lot of similarities.  I had forgotten about our one bathroom that had an open gas heater as well.  It may have been dangerous, but it was certainly a welcome feature on cold winter mornings. I couldn't wait for Dad to light the fire.  Also amazing to remember that water was free and everyone had beautiful thick lawns and gardens.  We always had tomatoes or some kind of vegetable growing in our backyard garden along with peach, plum and pecan trees.  I'm surprised that I did not have warts all over with as many toads as we caught during the summer in the alley water meters.

I have driven past that old house many times in my adulthood and it seems so small now.  The whole neighborhood that loomed so large and full of places to explore from a child's perspective is seemingly so diminished in size and the houses so small as an adult.  I guess the old bromide is true that one can never go back home, literally and figuratively in this case.  With all your stories of bygone places and memory evoking events, maybe we ought to name this "The Memory Exchange" instead of User Forum!