My father was a junior high school history, civics, and English teacher with a Masters Degree teaching in the Farmington, Connecticut public school system. Until they built the new junior high school building at the other end of the town, the junior high school was in the same building as the high school. So where does this have to do with changing living standards? Here are some examples.
Teacher housing was provided as part of the the teacher compensation package (hint hint for later). I can still remember living in the teacher housing. The units had been World War II Navy officer housing from somewhere in Rhode Island, that had been moved to the grounds of Farmington High School, and Farmington Junior High School, sometime in the early 1950s. We lived there when I was born in December, 1954, and we were still living there in April, 1959, when my sister was born.
It made it real convenient for my dad to get to work. All he had to do was walk about 500 feet from his front door in the "barracks," as the people that lived their called them to the school. If he had to be at school at 7:30 AM, he could walk out the door at 7:25 AM, and have time for a cup of coffee while he was getting things set in his home room. Not a bad commute. He could even come home for lunch, which he did. My mother was a stay at home mom at the time. She did not work outside of the household until my sister entered Kindergarten. Our family always had lunch together, seven days a week.
The teacher housing was where the tennis courts are now located. They were torn down a long time ago. Even though we had moved out of there in late 1959-early 1960, there were still many teacher families living there until the units were finally demolished. As far as living standards this middle class housing was much more primitive than the housing projects built for welfare recipients today. They were made of wood, and were quite Spartan compared to what is considered to be normal living conditions in this day and age. They weren't an Abe Lincoln log cabin, but they didn't have even what are considered to be basic amenities by today's standards.
There were two clusters of buildings that were designed in an "L" shape. They were long row houses that were one story each, front and back of each long building. At the end of one of them was a one story bungalow (that might have been the Commanding Officer's house when the units were military housing), where the girls' gym teacher lived with some other lady.
Our residence was an end unit. I can still remember the layout. You walked in the front door, and you were in the living room. To the right was a bed room. This was my room until my sister was born, and then we shared that room until my parents had their home built in 1959-1960. When you walked through the living room and made a left, you were in an alcove that was the dining room. The room directly to the left of that was the kitchen. I remember there were cupboards, a sink, a floor drain that was used as the drain for the washing machine. Washing clothes will be covered in another post. There was a range with an oven and four burners, three of which worked. There was a refrigerator that had to be defrosted once a week. There was a hot water heater. Last but not least, was the unit's central heating system. It was a kerosene heater that heated the entire unit. The only way you could get heat into the other rooms in the winter was to keep the doors to the rooms open and run fans. Even so, in the winter, the bed rooms might get up to 65 degrees while the kitchen, where the heater was, would stay a nice cozy 90 plus.
Next to the kitchen was the bathroom with a pull chain commode (does anyone remember them)? there was a sink, and metal shower stall. There were no bath tubs in any of the units. At the end of the building was the second bedroom, which was my parents' room. Somehow we managed to survive the heat of the summer, and the cold of the winter without air conditioning or central heat. It's interesting how provided housing for middle class people who worked for a living, was worse than the Section 8 housing that is provided to people on welfare today who don't work, with many of them refusing to work. I'm sorry, but something is wrong with this picture.
Sometime around 1959, my parents decided to have a house built in a new development called the Highlands. Several of the teachers had already moved their. Mr. Menzel, the builder, offered three styles of homes on half acre lots. You could get a a ranch (rambler), split level, or Cape Cod. My dad went with the Cape Cod. They moved into that house in 1959, the same year that the new junior high school was built at the other end of town. Now my dad had to drive to work every day. No more coming home for lunch.
That home remained the only home my parents owned until my dad passed away and my mom moved into an assisted living facility for patients with Alzheimer's.That was their home. They never tried to flip properties in order to get rich.Except for the addition of a family room and a two car garage, the house remained basically unchanged from the time we moved in, until my mom moved out.
I used to have some pictures of the home inside and out on a memory stick, but it can't be found. The house was renovated by a builder, and those pictures were on the Zimbio web site. I never would have recognized the place. It was wonderful, but it was now completely modern compared to the the 1950s/ early 1960s design inside and out of the home that my parents had saved, and saved, and sacrificed and saved for years in order to have a 20% down payment when they purchased their first and only home for the outrageous sum of money of $12,000 back in 1959.
Yes, the new home had a bath tub rather than just a shower stall, and it had central radiator heat that was hot water heated by an oil fired furnace in the basement, and then pumped through pipes to the radiators in the different rooms. You didn't have to rely on a kerosene heater in the kitchen to heat the entire house like you did in the "barracks." At first, the upstairs was basically unfinished except for my sister's room, where we both slept until I was about 8 years old.
When I was about 8 years old, my parents had the rest of the upstairs finished. We did 90% of it ourselves, with a little help from Mr. Hedling, a builder/carpenter, who would get my dad started and then we would finish it ourselves as a family project.
That meant a second bedroom, and one more closet in the hallway next to the bathroom. The new bedroom, which became my room, had its own closet, and a crawl space behind the built-in dresser and shelves, that had a plywood floor, so that you wouldn't have to worry about putting your foot through the drywall ceiling over the kitchen. That crawl area became a storage area, and also became my personal "fort." I had all the storage items stacked up in a certain way, so that I could be in my fort and guard the world against all enemies, no matter who or where they were. Ah, the imagination of a pre-teen young boy.
That home, finished downstairs, upstairs, and with an addition,of a family room and a two car garage, became their home until my dad passed away at the age of 92. I still miss that house. The last time I slept there was when I traveled up there for my dad's funeral. I slept in the bedroom that had been my room from the time I was 8 years old. I had slept in that room all the way through high school, and it had been my room when I returned from both college and during leave periods in the U.S. Air Force. I woke the morning after the funeral, and had a hunch that that was the last time that I would ever sleep in that room. I was right. Three months after the funeral, my mother sold the house and moved into a senior citizen center. I occasionally look at pictures of that house from the outside with fond memories. That was a journey going from provided housing, to the ownership of a nice middle class single family home for my parents. My own journey took a slightly different path.
During my first two years of college, I lived in the dorms at Bowling Green State University, and came home during breaks. During my third year of college at Western Connecticut State University, I lived in a group house near the campus, and came home on weekends to do laundry and such. Starting during the summer following my year at WESCONN, I continued to live at home, and studied drums with a teacher in New York City. My life was about to change from what I had planned, and in retrospect, it has turned out to be well worth it.
Upon the advice of my teacher, I sought employment with one of the military bands. I was accepted into the 590th Air Force Band in New Jersey, and following Basic Training, it was back to the barracks. Two years later, I won an audition to the premier band, the United States Air Force Band in Washington, DC, and after three months in the barracks, ended up moving into my first and only apartment in an "emerging" area of Washington, DC. Shortly after that, I met my future wife. She was living with her daughter in an apartment in Silver Spring, MD, about two miles from my place. We started dating seriously. She moved out to Virginia so that she could buy something, and after a short time, the two hour each way commute was killing her. We married and decided to buy a house, but we were looking in Maryland, not Virginia. We settled on a four bedroom, two and a half bath house in College Park. It was convenient for both of us to go to work. It was a stretch for many years. We were house poor, but somehow we made it. We are empty nesters, the house was re-financed just before my retirement, and we are now talking about sometime in the future, selling and moving to something that is all on one level.
I would like to move to Montgomery County, but I don't know if I can afford a place in either Rockville or Silver Spring. We may be stuck here in Prince George's County, because it is affordable for now. At least it is familiar. How does my single family home compare to my parents'? It's smaller, and there is no two car garage. However, it has central air conditioning, which my parents' house didn't have. My yard is also a little smaller, but that is fine, since I hate doing yard work anyway. I have access to a fair amount of public transportation. It could be better, but where my parents lived, there was virtually none. It was a mile walk to the main road, and no bus service after about 6 PM, and none on weekends. You had to have a car. I am a little over a mile from the Metro, and there are bus stops close by, bringing me to the Metro. On weekends, I can drive a little over two miles, and park for free in the Metro parking garage.
Ideally? I would love to live in a two or three bedroom, two bath apartment/condo in either downtown Rockville, or Silver Spring, MD, with no yard to deal with, and plenty of public transportation until late at night, within walking distance. I would consider parts of Washington, DC too, but I have a feeling that all three places are out of my reach financially. There is going to come a time when I am going to be not interested in owning a car too. With the various car share services like Enterprise and Zip Car, and ride share services like Uber, I will have ways of getting to gigs when it is impossible to use public transportation. Then again, I just might cut back on my gigs entirely at that time, and just concentrate on teaching. Also, there will come a time when I am going to completely retire, and just do what I wanted to do when I retired the first time from the Air Force, and still haven't realized my dream: I would love to spend at least two months out of the year travelling on Space-A military hops, going wherever, with Australia and New Zealand being on the bucket list. Of course, there is also the possibility of retirement to Mexico or Ecuador. It's affordable, and I like the idea of the challenge of becoming fluent in Spanish. I've heard wonderful things about Cuenca, Ecuador. Maybe I'll head there next summer. More to follow...
