This is me and my brother Mike on the front porch of 1867 Elyria Avenue; most of the pictures I have of it are of this porch, so I won't post any others here.
My mother (on the right, standing) and her siblings grew up in this house, and I lived there until I was nine. We rented it from a man named Ransom, and as I remember, the most we ever paid for rent of this two story, four bedroom house with full basement was $35.00 a month.
We three boys had a room we shared, upstairs, my mother's room was halfway down the hall, and there was another bedroom at the end of the hall, used as a guestroom. My grandfather slept in a room just off the living room.
In memory, everything in the house seems big...when I was little, the walk from the living room to the kitchen (i.e. the refrigerator) seemed to take forever, especially when I was trying to get a bowl of chocolate marshmallow ice ceram before the commercials ended and Ghoulardi came back on. The kitchen ran along the whole back of the house, with a screen door and the basement stairs at one end. The dining room was next, with the bathroom coming off of it, the staircase, then the living room.
We had no front yard, as our house sat behind another house. We did have a side yard, with an apple tree, a swingset, and my grandfather's garden, and a backyard, with an ash tree, and an old-fashioned, cottage style garage.
I loved that house, and could never imagine living anywhere else, so you could imagine my shock when I was told that we had to move...the house had been sold, and was going to be torn down. We moved into the house next door, and lived there for around a year, but eventually, every house on that block was demolished, to make room for a Giant Tiger Discount Store.
(NOTE: In 1974, a strong wind blew the roof off of the store, remamed Gaylord's; I felt, somewhere inside, a sense of justice.)
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