Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
This is a post where you can come to share what’s on your mind and stay for the expansion. The diarist is on California time and gets to take a nap when he needs to, or may just wander off and show up again later. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Grab your supportive indulgence(s) of choice and join us, please. And if you’re brand new to Morning Open Thread, then Hail and Well Met, new Friend.
I was born in Pomona, CA. Although I do have memories from there, my fuller childhood memories began when Dad moved the family up here to Quincy, CA, and a whole new kind of lifestyle and environment. Pomona’s just a big city; you don’t need any photos to envision that. But Quincy is a small mountain town in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains. A nice photo of the town from a hill above it is restful to the eyes.
Dad was California Highway Patrol and had requested and received transfer to Quincy. He had to take the job and live up here for a few months before he was able to find a house for us so we could join him. What a house he found.
This is one of the more historic homes in Quincy. In fact, only one of its kind I’m pretty sure. Eight bedrooms. Two downstairs, six up. It was a birthing home, owned by a woman named Verbena “Beanie” Mosley, who had passed away well into her eighties just a couple of years prior to our moving to Quincy. The house had been put on the market at her passing but because of its size (and relative price) hadn’t moved so it was available to rent. Dad needed a four-bedroom minimum, because there were four of us kids, my three sisters and me. Oldest sis Carolyn got her own room, my two other sisters (Pattie older, Louise just younger than me) shared, then one for me and one for the folks. Louise wasn’t even yet in kindergarten so I guess that’s why she didn’t get her own room. Poor Louise. She’s the sister I remain the closest to and in fact lives just a few blocks away from me. Anyway, “poor” because she didn’t get her own bedroom until Carolyn graduated high school and went off to college in 1968.
So, in addition to the houses themselves, at each one I tried to get a photo of my bedroom window. In the above photo, my bedroom was just to the left of the big gable on the left.
Ah, the stories that house could tell about us when we lived there. Three feet of snow in the backyard the first winter, our first family dog and cat, making cardboard forts out of big appliance shipping boxes from the furniture store nearly next door, and setting up a slip ‘n slide (from the next door neighbor kids) in our backyard the first summer, 1961. Then the house sold and we had to move. In kind of a hurry, as I recall. The only place Dad could find wasn’t even in Quincy. Seven miles out of town, down the Feather River Canyon, a resort town (and California Zephyr depot) at Keddie.
We didn’t even get a “house” proper down there. We got two, as it were, but it was two units in a two-bedroom fourplex (meaning each building held four two-bedroom units) that had been combined to make a single four bedroom unit. That building doesn’t even exist anymore. The best I can do is this Google Earth image from 2005. By 2010 all these buildings were gone.
Yeah, sure got some stories from my time there. Here’s my favorite. It was the middle of winter and one school day morning it was snowing to beat all get out. All us Keddie kids waited together for the school bus at the gas station on the highway. One of the older kids came up with a sinister and delicious plan. We’d all ditch school and have us a “snow day”, but it had to be a deep secret, our parents could never be told the truth. There must have been about eight, maybe even a dozen of us kids, junior high age down to first grade. We huddled, listened to the plan, and cemented the conspiracy tight. We’d hide behind the gas station, wait for the bus to come and leave, and then wait, hidden, about twenty minutes more. Then we’d all go back home and claim the exact same story. “We waited and waited, and the bus never came.” Simple, and imminently plausible, given the heavy snow coming down and packing the highway. Who’s going to doubt our story if no one cops to the truth? And that was the deal: we all had to be in on it and stick to it, or it would never work. Like a devious and single-minded criminal cabal, we pulled it off. About two hours later (after contritely making sure any unfinished homework or dutiful chores got done) we all got together on the sledding hill and had a blast! We never gave up the secret. In fact, my mother was shocked, SHOCKED! when I told her the true story of that day, decades later. But she sure got one heck of a laugh out of it.
It was always in Dad’s plan for his family to have a place that we could truly call our own, and so Dad got busy on buying a lot and having a house built to his specifications in a new subdivision just on the west side of Quincy. In the meantime living in Keddie was very inconvenient, so as the new house was being built we moved back into Quincy, renting a nice place, but way too small really, smack downtown on Main Street. Here’s two views, and each show my “bedroom” window.
I put “bedroom” in quotes because I didn’t actually have one in this house. In the above photo the second floor windows are those of a sun porch off the master bedroom. That’s where my bed and dresser was for the the summer. When winter came my bed got moved onto the stair landing outside the bathroom. I couldn’t stay in the porch because there was no heat.
This was a two-bedroom house. Even Carolyn got short shrift; she had to stay in a tiny room downstairs that we called the “sewing room”. Pattie and Louise got the other upstairs bedroom; it had a large walk-in closet, and that’s where I kept all my clothes that wouldn’t fit in my dresser, like my winter jackets and boots and shirts. We stayed here just over a year (so a partial summer, a full winter, another summer and into the beginning of another winter). By December of 1964 our custom-built house in Bellamy Tract was sufficiently completed so we could move into it. That’s a day I recall well because it was Christmas Day. Most everything we had was either already in the new house or packed up and ready to haul. We opened our presents that morning around the tree, had breakfast, then put as much as we could of our personal items into the station wagon and the pickup, and we were outta there! And our Christmas tree, too. Ornaments off, but lights still in place. Carefully transported upright in the pickup to the new place. So we got to decorate our Christmas tree twice that year.
Oh, the new house was a joy, even though there was still painting to be done and a lot of other trim work. We kids even got to choose our own bedroom carpet color. Except, I was a boy, right, and I knew what I wanted on my floor. Linoleum, Dad, thanks. He was kinda puzzled until I said, hey, toy cars and trucks don’t roll on carpet, do they Dad? And what about spills, and stuff that might end up under the bed? Way easier with linoleum, Dad. He agreed to the sense in that and I got a floor surface I could let my imagination roam on.
This was the last house I’d live in in Quincy, growing up here. 1750 square feet (not counting the big two-car garage), four bedroom, 1-¾ bath, open plan kitchen/dining area/main living room, second living room that we used mainly for big family gatherings or as an indoor winter time play area. That’s where I’d set up my little electric train set too. Didn’t have enough room in my bedroom for that, but I couldn’t leave it set up in the living room either.
So that’s where I lived from December 1964 until I graduated high school in 1972 and flew the coop. Oh, I came back and lodged temporarily on occasion, but when I joined the Navy in 1979 I never “lived” in that house again. However, besides my bedroom window being right where I left it, out front of that house the two Silver Maples that Dad last planted in that yard, sometime around 1968 or so, I think, remain there to this day.
One more home in Quincy, though, that will be my last. I’ll not be living in it. But I’m cool with that.
Care to share any memories of your childhood homes? Either way, see you in the comments.