What a great thread!! It makes me feel a little sad reading everyone's posts and looking at the photos. Also I have tapes (I pulled out a bunch of cassette tapes with 50s and 60s music on them.) I'm listening to as I read this so I'm feeling quite nostalgic. I have only been back to a few of the places I've lived and I'm always surprised at how much smaller they are than I remembered. I read a book by Goldie Hawn a few years ago and she said she and a friend or two of hers were in the city where she had grown up. She knocked on the door of the house she lived in as a teen and asked if she could look through it. The people let her come in and look around. I was thinking how surprised a person would be if a celebrity knocked at their door and ask if they could come in and look around. Wow, I'd sure hope that was a day I'd made the bed!
We moved houses every few years when I was a kid, but apart from the first one which was in a different city ..the rest were all within a mile or 2 of each other.. first and second ones from the 50's, and early 60's were torn down and made way for whole new housing estates. I have visited the last 2 several times since I left at 18...they both look almost identical to when I lived there..minor changes here or there ..but still the same.. I can look at them both on google street view now, and see them. My mother died in the last house!!
My sister and I returned to Lake Villa a few years back to go to an annual carnival that has been held there since we were young and before. We decided to go visit the house my grandfather had built and we had lived in when we were younger. As it turns out the people that bought it from my parents still lived there. They were happy to let us tour it and like one of the other posters, I was struck by how small it was. The memories that flooded back gave a kind of sweet peace and a rightness with the world.
I keep touch with my hometown, Waterville, Ohio, and go through the homes and land that are up for sale. One was the home I grew up in. The Realtor had a video showing each room, and lawn. I seen my bedroom. Folks bedroom and nursery next to it. Grandma and PaPa's guest bedroom. Remembering cooking breakfast and looking at the river, through that picture window that overlooked the Maumee River. It was exciting to sit at my computer and see these pictures and reminisce.
@Marilyn Pahl "Maumee River" The name reminded me that the Maumee is one of three rivers converging in Fort Wayne, Indiana. My wife was born and grew up 15 miles north of there. Just wondering if Watervillle is near Fort Wayne? Those rivers have been known to cause some real flooding in Fort Wayne. I owned a house there myself while employed by Dana Corporation in Churubusco, 10 miles north.
Well my parents still live in the house that I lived in since the age of 9 in a suburb of Erie, PA so I am up there once or twice a year. I also sometimes drive by a couple of areas I lived in before we moved there. One of the houses is still there, the other one I am not sure, because it is down a private road, and I haven't driven down the road..maybe next time I go up there I will check it out. When I was pretty young about ages 3-7 we lived in a place we called the cellar..It was basically a basement that no one ever built a house on top of. It was kind of a cozy little place actually. It had a blacktop roof, that sometimes leaked alittle bit. I remember being on the top of it with a broom sweeping off the water...lol.
I was born and raised in a city apartment and the owner sort of became a family friend. I moved out when I was 24 or so and after several years, the remaining members of my family also moved to another house. After sometime, I asked my husband to pass by our place just to take a look at our old apartment. What do you know, the apartment was gone and in place was a small building that looks like a condominium. Talk of progress, huh. My husband's ancestral home was sold in 2010. Immediately, it was demolished and a 3-story building now stands on the lot. If we had the money, we would have bought their ancestral home to preserve it somehow. But it was situated in the metro where land is very expensive. We just couldn't afford it.
Oh my were not far away in Ohio....We would watch the weather closely during the January Thaw, and the ice flow going through. Always had the radio on none stop, Coffee Shop busy, and talking with anybody that came through from Ft. Wayne.The three rivers that started in Ft. Wayne. Maumee, Auglaze , and the St. Joseph. The two rivers Auglaze and St. Joseph were tributaries that flowed into the Maumee the biggest of them and went through Neapolitan, Defiance, Liberty Center, Waterville, Maumee, and Toledo, Ohio into Maumee Bay that emptied in Lake Erie. The Greyhound bus starts in Toledo, Ohio still stops in Waterville, Ohio and into Ft. Wayne Ind.
Many years ago, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, I was hitchhiking through Ohio, south of Michigan, headed east. It was very early in the morning, probably two or three o'clock, and there was no traffic, so I was walking rather than waiting for a car to come along. I was hungry, and could see the lights of a town to my right (south). I left the highway, walking down an embankment because there wasn't an on-ramp there, and walked toward the lights, hoping to find a 24-hour gas station or convenience store. An actual restaurant would have been better yet, but I was willing to settle. I walked a long ways, through a residential area, and didn't come across anything that looked like a business at all. Whatever the town was, the lights looked a lot brighter from the highway. Being stubborn, I decided to keep walking rather than turning back. Eventually, I came to the Maumee River. I don't know what town I was in, possibly Maumee itself, as I think it was in that general area. There was a bridge across the river, but things didn't look any brighter on the other side. I stood there by the river for a while and, although there were buildings all around, nothing was moving. I was thinking of sleeping along the river until daylight. Everything was quiet and lonely. Then I heard what sounded like some kind of chanting going on somewhere along the river. I couldn't understand any of it, but the sound carried on the water, and it was spooky. I decided to give it up, and I walked back to the highway. That's the extent of my experiences with the Maumee River. I hated it. It's spooky, and people chant weird stuff late at night.
I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. If you crossed that bridge from Maumee you would be a mile outside Perrysburg Ohio. Waterville was 7 miles south from Maumee. Weird Stuff.... My folks had just moved in the house, this woman was jilted by her lover she tried to drowned herself in 7 inches of Maumee River water.
Waterville Elementary School. They took down the ivy and a small crab tree one of the older classes had planted. Next year the school will be demolished.
This is 3rd. Street our Main Street in so many small towns across the USA. The two story red brink building down the street use to be a hardware store. We bought our hunting and fishing licenses. Around 1953 the building caught on fire. Everybody had to evacuate the whole street because there was live amo and paint cans in the store.
I worked here as a teenager. It was a restaurant, and was supposed to be haunted....It was long ago a restaurant, hotel with a ballroom and the smallest part of the building was a jail.
Summertime on the banks of the Maumee River in Waterville, Ohio. The bridge is, The Ohio Electric Interurban Railroad Bridge.