Old Home Tour

I don’t get back to my hometown much anymore. Still have friends there but the 5 hour drive seems longer every time I make it. I was there this past weekend and killed a couple of hours looking at some of the houses where our family lived when I was growing up. My first thought on seeing these is, how can they still be standing?
holtstreet

No.1 is on Holt Street and is the house where — as I recall — we got our first television. Probably around 1951.

west9thstreet

No.2 is on West 9th and I’m guessing we lived there around 1952-53. I attended first grade just up the street a few blocks.

500walterstreet

No.3 is the first house our family owned. 1955? A nice little 2 BR home where my brother and I grew up. It has fallen on hard times in the years since I sold it following my father’s death.

Inus-perry-home

No.5 (on Lester St) was my grandmother’s home back in 1957. And it wasn’t a new home then. She lived with our family for several years after she sold the farm where my mother grew up. Bought this little house around 1957 and it was an older house then.

Seems strange to me these house are still standing 60 or 70 years later. And that people are still living in them.

Contact Sheet

The images below were scanned from an old (1973-74?) contact sheet. Pretty sure the photos were were taken by Larry Thomason at one of the frequent poker nights he held in a small house (think “man cave”) in his parent’s back yard. Larry printed a few shots from this particular night but most of these never made it off the contact sheet. I’ve left them in that format because 1) I like it and 2) it was Larry’s call as to what he wanted to print and he’s gone now and I can’t ask him.

Charlie’s Mix-Tape

charlie-mixtape
Want to take your music with you? Then you’re gonna have to work for it. This is Charlie making a mix-tape back in 1974. Amp on the left. Turntable in the middle. Two-deck cassette recorder on the right. When the cassette if full, there was a “high speed” dubbing mode so you could crank out extras for friends.