Trail of Houses

A Trail of Houses

copyright 2020 Harris B. McKee

358(?) State Street, Marinette, WI Summer 1961

We lived in Marinette, Wisconsin from July 5, 1961 after our July 2^nd marriage in Indianola. We had planned an August wedding but the opportunity to play all summer on the shores of Green Bay in northern Wisconsin seemed too good to pass up so we advanced the wedding date. (We were sure that friends watched the calendar to see if the wedding change had been made for other reasons.) I had a job with Scott Paper at the Marinette plant, conveniently arranged because I was a recipient of a Scott Paper Fellowship for my graduate years at Thayer School. It really was a summer long honey moon. We swam in Green Bay and played tennis during the week and took trips on weekends to Door County, Mackinac Island, and Milwaukee where Margaret and Jim Hickman were spending the summer.

Our first household was a small second floor furnished apartment which was all we needed.

The Ledges, Norwich, VT Sep 1961-August 1963

Our second household was also a furnished apartment that rented as part of a motel during the summer and as a student apartment during the school year. It was composed of an efficiency kitchen, a bathroom and a fairly large room that was divided by a six-foot-tall bookcase into a bedroom and a living room. Our rent was $85 per month plus $5 a month for a heated garage. After a year in the “motel”, we accepted the responsibility for managing the facility and moved into a substantial apartment in the 100-year-old house that contained four year-round apartments in addition to the manager’s residence. (One of the myths about the house was that it had served as some kind of terminal for bootleggers during prohibition.) We operated the motel for the summers of 1962 and 1963. In addition to the four units used for student housing, there were four modern cabins that had plumbing, hot water, and electricity. I handled the trash and mowing the substantial acreage and Mary, with the help of one of her bright students, conducting all maid duty.

We had several events running the motel that we could not have anticipated. One couple who stayed in a cabin had some car trouble which the young man addressed while the young woman hung out with Mary. Turned out that they were not married and were traveling to see how they might get along for an extended time. The woman had been quite concerned that there would be enough privacy in the unit for them to undress and maintain isolation during their stay without compromising her integrity! The second major event was a fire in the boiler cabin caused by an overheated water heater. We were awakened by a passerby who shouted that we had a fire. I race up to the cabin, my bathrobe flapping with our fair-sized CO2 extinguisher. Just as I was beating the fire back, I ran out of CO2. One side effect was that the fire shorted out the electricity for the four cabins. We put up all the lodgers in personal beds in the big-house, gave them a refund, and fed them breakfast in the morning. One guest was a sister of movie actor James Whitmore so we even had a bit of sensationalism!

Stanford Village

419-6 Stanford Village, Stanford, CA Sep 1963-January 1965

421-8 Stanford Village, Stanford, CA January 1965-August 1965

311-1 Stanford Village, Stanford, CA August 1965-April 1967

I’ve grouped our three Stanford Village apartments together since I don’t have documentary photographs. You will have to visualize the construction that you would get by converting an extensive WWII Army Hospital into graduate student quarters.

The U.S. Army had constructed General Dibble Army Hospital in Menlo Park, California to house the casualties expected from the Pacific battles. Menlo Park's wartime population suddenly soared when the U.S. Army chose to build Dibble General Hospital on the site of the where the Stanford Research Institute and the Menlo Park Civic Center stand today. Between 1943 and 1946 Dibble specialized in plastic surgery, blind care, neuro-psychiatry and orthopedics and at its peak it had 2,400 beds, about two-thirds the population of the entire town. Dr. Bernard Silber was working at Letterman Hospital in San Francisco when he was transferred to the new Dibble hospital. But first, he had to ask four or five people where Menlo Park was. "It was a quiet, pleasant place," he recalled, noting that there weren't any stores yet on Santa Cruz Avenue except at the corner of El Camino Real. The government sold it to Stanford for $1 at the end of the war with a provision that, since the construction was considered temporary with a 20-year life, the facility would either be upgraded to permanent construction or torn down by the end of its scheduled life. We were living there as the 20-year clock wound down and were forced to move twice as units were torn down.

Interesting memories from Stanford Village included how little soundproofing there was. We discovered that the rattling through the bedroom wall was the toilet paper unrolling in the next apartment. On another occasion, what we thought was a couple fighting in the next apartment was our first earthquake. In our moves ahead of the bulldozer, we were able to trade up. Our second apartment had two bedrooms so Margaret could have her own room. It was in that room that we learned that the buzz from an electric alarm clock could be used to calm a colicky baby. The third apartment had its own distinctive being. It had been part of the psych ward which led to several design differences. All the windows were wire reinforced; we were in the end unit and the door had a steel plate covering the double door joint. Although all our previous units had floor mounted radiators, 311-8 had ceiling mounted forced air ducts located well above the reach of any patients. Finally, you could see the concrete foundations and cutoff steel posts which had supported the protective fencing that surrounded the ward. Mary didn’t think these features were particularly helpful in overcoming post-partum blues!

Fort Belvoir, VA May 1967-July 1967

I joined the Army Reserves at age 17 when I discovered that I would not have to go to meetings when I was taking ROTC which I expected to do and I would earn about $100 a month more when commissioned a second lieutenant. I didn’t realize that I would be straining the Army regulations to go to graduate school but I always expected to do my active duty time which began with an Engineer Officer Basic Course (EOBC) at Ft. Belvoir. I lived in a BOQ from the first week in May until the Middle of July while Mary and our daughters stayed with our parents in Iowa. Fort Belvoir was a beautiful post and I finished the class as the “Honor Graduate”. Mary joined me for graduation and we drove south on our way back to Iowa visiting both K.G., who was in the midst of OCS at Fort Gordon, GA and Alan and Marty at Fort Benning, GA where he was doing his post-Vietnam duty.

6945 Hillwood Circle, Dallas, TX Sep 1976-Dec 1986

This four-bedroom house was four years old when we purchased in 1976 for $85,000. At that time, the tree you see on the right was a small oak of about four inch caliper. To the left of the sidewalk there was a towering willow tree that barely survived our ten years in Dallas.

As shown below, a subsequent owner replaced the front doors. A still later owner created some upper rooms, presumably enhancing the attic storage space that we used over the garage.

When we arrived, the back yard consisted of pretty bare bermuda pasture which had been used by the neighborhood children and their horses. We took advantage of an offer at the Texas State Fair and engaged a irrigation contractor to install a sprinkler system for us for a total of $1200, which always seemed like a great bargain. A landscaper named Chris drew up a landscape plan which we followed to the letter, planting crepe myrtles in the alley as shown in the photo below and various schrubs and ground cover inside the fence.

We installed the pool with built in spa in 1980. Construction began on April 1^st and we first swam on May 1^st. (Our neighbors, the McCormicks began discussions with their pool builder at about the same time and began swimming in August after numerous design revisions.) The pool installation required an extensive sprinkler redesign and planting changes all of which I carried out. Adding the pool was like adding a room to the house. I swam every morning and the parties included dozens of people.

Our Joplin house was perhaps our most luxurious house. It had a full furnished walk-out lower level, formal dining room, large kitchen, and a three-car garage. The one-acre lot included more than 100 trees and did provide one challenge during the summer of 1995 when Mary held the fort in Waseca. I brought our walk-behind self-propelled 22-inch Toro lawn mower to Joplin while she kept the 42-inch ride-on in Waseca. Fortunately, a kind hearted neighbor across the street loaned me her ride-on. When we left Joplin for the smaller house in Bella Vista, Margaret and Laura took the piano that had been in our family since I began lessons 50 years earlier along with other furnishings in a trailer load north.

Nashville, TN May 1996-Sep 1996

Not much to report here. Sunbeam Outdoor Products agreed to move the HQ from Neosho, MO to Nashville as a compromise rather than moving to Chicago. We had found a lovely house and were ready to make an offer when Chainsaw Al Dunlap was hired as CEO and cancelled the move.

When we moved to Bella Vista on November 22, 1996, we found little in the way of landscaping. In fact, the previous owners had place landscape rock over the entire front landscape. Our first step was to remove the rock. They had constructed the lovely stone wall you see on the left below and a raised bed at the back of the yard which we used to good advantage. They also left excess stone behind which I used to bound the hostas. A drip irrigation system with battery controled timers in both the front and back yards, first suggested in my Benton County Master Gardener course, was a godsend for yard maintenance.

Autumn colors were unpredictable but could be glorious.

929 W. Foster Ave., Chicago, IL Feb 2017-…….

We had planned to move to a CCRC as we aged, having appreciated the gift given us by both of our mothers with Lois’ selection of Calvin Manor in Des Moines and Polly’s choice of The Village in Indianola. Our tentative selection had been one of a couple in Arkansas in an area we loved. In early 2016, Laura suggested that we should consider a CCRC in Chicago that had come to her attention and where Duane & Vera Dowell, UU friends since the 1980’s, were living. An initial look suggested that the costs were very high and besides, who would want to live in a high-rise building. Nevertheless, recognizing the desirability of being closer to our daughters, we agreed to visit the Admiral at the Lake when we came to Chicago to celebrate Laura’s 50^th birthday. We also scheduled visits on the same day to two other area CCRCs, both in Evanston. The following weekend, Margaret joined us in Arkansas and we toured our #1 Arkansas possibility. With the Admiral our clear choice we proceeded immediately to apply, succeeded and moved in of February 10, 2017.

One of our challenges was reducing our stuff from our 55-1/2 years together, 20 years in Arkansas, and accommodations that included 2600 sq. ft. of living space, a garage, an attic, under-deck storage and a stand-alone storage shed. Our new apartment was only 1050 sq. ft. and the storage unit was a four-foot cube. With the help of a soft-ware package, we did it.