1. Home-buying

New York (Long Island) (Long Island)

The Kanes in Levittown:

On the move to Forest Hills three years before Levittown:

Julien Kane “when we moved in it was the only building within one or two square miles around,..and there were rabbits in the fields,...Before we signed it we said, we like the great outdoors and this in wonderful we=re the only... is it going to remain this way, he said yeh as far as I know, and we moved in, and a couple of days later the excavation started (laugh)”

On Levittown:

Julien Kane “Levittown was the place to go, because they were very easy to pick up and so we bought a house for $9000 or something like that, and so we had our countryfied area, our real suburb.  Of course at that time there were still farms outside of Levittown…”

Muriel Kane: we “did not look elsewhere,  My father was horrified, he thought that Levittown was the other end of the world, that far out on the island, he couldn=t believe we would do a thing like that but we did…” That “first Levitt house was paradise, it had two bedrooms had a small yard and a nice yard.  We didn=t have to buy appliances, it came with a washing machine and refrigerator and a stove.  It was fine, it was fine.  It was affordable.  We would have bought it if we hadn=t liked the people around, but we did, they were all people like us…”

The Burnetts in North Amityville

Eugene Burnett: I started looking....I'm going to get married; I'm going to have a family; the normal aspirations.  I came back as a serious young man thinking about family and life and all those sort of things and I didn't want to do that in Harlem because at the time because heroin had madeYya know, had posed its ugly head and ahYumYI saw a lot of my childhood friends getting caught up in that and ahYat that time I umYdecided that ahYya know, we said we wanted to take our children, we want to raise our children somewhere else other than in Harlem.  So I started looking. One day I'm looking in the Daily Mirror and I see this advertisement for Levittown and so I looked up one of my army buddies.  He know Long Island because he lived in Corona…

So, I called up my buddy, and he had been overseas with me. We came back together. I didn't know him beforehand and he came and and he drove me out to Levittown. He said he knew Long Island.  He didn't know nothing. It took us all day long to find Levittown. And ahYwe got there and we ah saw the model house. We walked in. We looked around. I noticed that everyone was staring at us but ah that's part of being black in America. You're always under scrutiny.

There wasn't another black in sight. Yes. AhYsomebody knew something more than I did.  Most people did. At any rateYahYso I walked up to the salesman and I said, Nice home and I'm interested in purchasing one and would you lay out what the procedure is. And he listened and [said] It's not me but the owners, the builders of this development have not as yet decided to sell this to blacks, to Negroes. And ah well, I was shocked. And as I have said over and over, the ride back to Harlem--I'll never forget that, I was a very angry person. That I didn't start World War III then is beyond me. Very angry…

I was a ghetto boy who always lived in apartments and to see a plot of land and the outside of a house and this is mine and I can buy this--that's what I mean by beautiful.  That's a whole new experience.  I knew no one that owned their own home and so forth.  That was a big step in the life of a young black man.

Oh, let me tell you, that after Levittown turned me down, I saw this ad in the Daily Mirror about Roneck Park and I came out there and I was accepted, so we then…. We lived in the flattops which was the first section.

Bernice Burnett: was "impressed...can you imagine...the whole idea of something being your own...needless to say, the modern devices and airiness of the place, as opposed to a little apartment...[it was] overwhelming."

"...a washing machine!  We were telling you, we were washing your clothes by hand, and now you got a washing machine!"

The Murphy's in Old Field

From the book:

The Crystal Brook residence, on the north shore harbor of Mount Sinai, had been their vacation house for many decades, until Robert Murphy’s impending retirement led them to give up a house in Bronxville. The Crystal Brook house, “set in trees upon a bluff above salt water,” lay several miles to the east of Old Field, in a twenty-house subdivision of one-or-two acre lots. By the early 1950's, Grace Murphy still considered “our view” of the harbor to be “as fresh and beautiful...as it was when we first saw it”;  “a simple view, yet so are the lines that came from Leonardo’s pen.”  The journal that professional naturalist Robert Murphy had started to keep offered a different, less “untouched” or sanguine picture.   Murphy worried especially about private dredging operations allowed by Port Jefferson village, which produced sand and gravel for Long Island’s rapidly expanding roads, highways and subdivisions.  He had long joined in anti-dredging campaigns, yet Murphy and his allies faced a further challenge in 1950, when a new company proposed to dig out nearly a quarter of the eastward end of the Mount Sinai harbor, across from Crystal Brook.  This “very territory...has the greatest and most lasting residential and recreational value,” blessed as it was with “the beauty and cleanness of the countryside.” “What do you want then–a black hole, or a place where there is still room for souls to expand?” Murphy also fretted about Crystal Brook itself, which had been invaded by a highway, new homes and residents, industrial activity, and vandalism, all of which the governing authorities had failed to stop.  These pressures were bound to intensify “as the population increases.”  And at Crystal Brook, field mice and squirrels nested in inconvenient places in the house, and the soil was excessively coarse and sandy.

            So in January of 1952, with the ornithologist’s retirement turning full-time, the Murphy’s went looking for a new place.  Aided by a local realtor, they began scouting out the incorporated village of Old Field, with its two-acre zoning and other land-use strict rules.   Two months after they had started looking, their friend Ward Melville offered the property next door to his own in Old Field, at what Murphy called “a great deal.”  Murphy commented little in his journal about the house, other than that it was “substantial and attractive.”   He went on, instead, about the property, six acres rather then their one and a half at Crystal Brook, with “good trees” and a “spring pond,” “a good place to feed and tame waterfowl.”   Moreover, house was located along a dead end road, “completely hidden from the highway,” with the “only man-made structures visible [the] backs of [the] Melville stables.”    Its siting–he did not mention Old Field zoning and land use laws—meant that the place was “likely to keep for many years to come the spacious residential seclusion it now enjoys.” And “maybe the soil will be better and the mice fewer.” All told, the property seemed “a proper abode for a lady and gentleman and might be the practical solution of our problem between ages of 65 and 100.” 

Los Angeles

The Rynersons in Lakewood:

Janet Rynerson:  They were building in this whole area around here.  There were several developers.  Some of them were in Long Beach.  And we'd looked at houses, but by this time, you know, we had two-and-three-quarter children, and we knew we needed closet space, or we wanted a double garage.  The ones they were building at that time either didn't have the closet space, or they only had one narrow garage, and we wanted more than that.  And then these houses came on.  They had some earlier versions of this tract, of Lakewood housing, that we didn't like as well.  But then when these ones they called the Mutuals, when these came on, they suited us, and the price suited us.

...what we did like is that they seemed to be very well built, and for the time they had lots of closet space.  They had a garbage disposal, which was something new at that time.  They had those stainless steel sinks.  They were in a good school district.  That was another big must for us.  There was ample yard space.  So we thought, you know, what more could we ask?

 Bud Rynerson:  ...we looked at all the models that Lakewood Park offered at that point before we bought the house.  Then, of course, you could pick your house and decide where in the complex you wanted to have the house, because they were located in different areas.  After we did that and saw where this one was located and how close it was to schools, we decided this is a good spot.

The Alvas in San Gabriel:

Bea Alva: Well, my mother-in-law--my in-laws lived across the street and this place was owned by the Spoolers [phonetic], the Spooler family, and we were living in L.A. We went to live in Schlossen [phonetic] Western, by the lumberyard so that my dad wouldn't have to travel, my husband wouldn't have to travel so far. We only stayed there six months, because my mother-in-law--every time it rained, we'd come home, because they wouldn't work. They didn't have any lumber. So then we'd stay either with my mother-in-law or my mother.

I thought that was kind of foolish to go right back on Sunday and if it rained, then we'd be back, because we wouldn't stay over there. We'd come right back here to stay overnight if it was raining. So we decided we'd stay, and then he'd go in with my brothers to work, and then I'd go in, in the afternoon, home. So if it rained the next day, we'd come back the next day. We were never over there, you know.

So then my mother-in-law told us that this place was for sale, so we came down to look at it. We didn't have any money, really. I think we had saved up $250, and we had a little car. We had bought a little car. No children yet. Oh, yes, we did. Yes, she was born in '38. So I did have a very heavy piano, the one my dad had bought for me, I kept it. Well, that thing went all over with us and it was awful to move, because it was a real heavy thing. But we took it to Los Angeles, we brought it back to San Gabriel again.

Finally, when we moved here, when they told us about this house, we came back and we stayed with my mother-in-law, because these people weren't ready. See, the lady that lived here was the daughter of the owner of the land. She didn't want to sell. She wanted more money, but the man had set a price, her father had set a price, because she owned the house and he owned the land, so there was nothing she could really do about it. So we went through the real estate...

The Lillards in Beverley Glen

Sellers: do you remember your first impressions of the Quito Lane house.

Louise Lillard: Yes I do. It was built in the 1920’s…late twenties in a style that was prevalent in California at the time…called vaguely Spanish….Spanish style…red tile roof and stucco and the use of interior tiles and beamed ceiling. There’s a lot of charm of the period, but it was very run down at the time that I moved in. He didn’t have much money. He was paying alimony to his wife; he was supporting his daughter by his first marriage…

Sellers: How old was she at the time?

Louise Lillard:

Eleven when I married her father, but she was not living with us; she was living with her mother. She would come to spend summers with us. And so he was very hard up for money at the time. Fortunately I was working at the time, teaching at Beverly Hills High School, so that helped. So we re-did the house; had it painted; had the roof repaired; added another room. Eight years later we had a child and then we put on another bedroom at that time and sort of family room and kept making little changes in the nineteen years the I lived there - improving it; modernizing the kitchen and that kind of thing. When we first moved there Beverly Glen was quite rural; it was always Beverly Glen Boulevard which is very heavily traveled because it was a through street from the west side to the valley, but despite that it had a very rural atmosphere to it and of course that has gradually changed over the years.