2064 E 17th South

This picture was taken in the basement appartment that my parents lived in just before they moved to the house they still live in today. I was born while they lived here but I don't remember anything about it since I was about one year old when they moved to their first house. However, there are things that I do remember about the move and the "new" house but I will save those for another blog.

Dad worked for a trade magazine. I think it was called something like "The Chinchilla Breeders Association". I believe he was also working on his Master's degree and working for the Deseret News at the same time. In this picture, I imagine Dad sitting in the kitchen and writing a story about Chinchillas!

I remember that old typewriter and the metal stand that it stood on. I had that metal stand in my bedroom as a piece of furniture on many occassions. It had panels on each side that would fold up and down. I would lay under the table and play with the panels, folding them up and down, up and down. I was intrigued by the mechanism that locked the panels in place and the magic that would release the panels by slightly lifting and dropping them.

I liked to sit at Dad's typewriter and make pictures by typing letters in various combinations. The typewriter was an ultimate mystery for me and I couldn't wait to learn to type as fast as Dad. I sometimes think that my early fascination for the typewriter had something to do with my love of computers (and computer graphics - remember the typewriter pictures?)

One time, I wanted to write down the words to a song. I couldn't possibly write them as fast as they played on the record player. But, I just knew that Dad could type fast enough to keep up. So I set Dad's typewriter up on the metal stand in the middle of the living room. I got the paper ready in the typewriter. I had the record ready in the record player. I invited Dad to sit at the typewriter. When he sat down, I started the record and said, "OK, start typing!"

Grandpa's Patio

This picture was taken long before I was born but there are items in the picture that stuck around long enough to become a big part of my favorite memories.

However, first things first; who are the people in the picture? That is my aunt Lu (Luana) on the back row wearing the gold necklace. Next to her are her children, Christie and Terry. That is my Mom on the far right. Grandma and Grandpa West are across the table. Dad probably took the picture.

Grandpa built this patio on the west side of his back yard. It was built right on the property line so it wasn't constructed to code. Grandpa said that the code inspector would come by from time to time and tell him that he had to take the patio down. Grandpa said that he would but never did. Finally, the code inspector gave up.

It was a good thing that Grandpa did not take down the patio. It was an important part of our family get togethers. Looking at this picture, I can feel the table cloth; it had kind of a waxy or oily feel. I can taste the shiny metal cups that we drank from. I can hear the clinking if the ice in the green glass pitcher of red kool-aid. Its a little hot under the patio, especially in the summertime. But Grandpa has a secret little door above the sink that he can open to let in a breeze.

Yes, that is a sink with running water on the patio. Just to the right and out of view is an old fashioned gas stove. Grandma would warm up the hot dogs in an old pot on the blue flame. Grandpa said he put the stove on the patio so that Grandma could do her canning outside and not heat up the house. But the only thing I ever saw her cook on it were the hot dogs.

Oh yes, that light above the sink was yellow. Being yellow, it wasn't supposed to attract the bugs as much. That was a sturdy picnic table. The benches were HEAVY! The floor of the patio was made of red and white lanscaping squares. Grandpa had them in a checkerboard pattern. The posts supporting the roof had little shelves built into them for Grandma to display her potted flowers.

I would like to have that old fashioned gas stove. I don't know what I would do with it though...

Who Are These People?

I think I recognize some of these faces. Starting on the front row, it looks like my Uncle Jack kneeling. Next to him is my father Keith with the bib overalls (see Dad's comments about bib overalls in a previous post.) That is definitely my aunt Luana standing a head taller than Keith. It looks like it might be my Grandpa West on the back row peeking over the head of a tall lady in front of him. But who are the rest of the people and where are they? It looks like they are in a red rock canyon in southern Utah.

My guess is that the rest of the people are relatives from California. I remember Grandpa talking about how when the family from California would come to visit, they always liked to go to the mountains on a picnic. On one such occassion, Grandma was helping pack the picnic lunch. Being the organizer that she was, she stuffed a back of peanuts into an empty container that was already packed for the picnic. What she didn't realize was that the container was a coffee grinder. The mistake wasn't noticed until Uncle Roy (I think that was his name) said to his wife Margaret (Grandpa's sister), "Maggy, that is the damnedest coffee I have ever tasted!"

The White Picket Fence

There was a white picket fence that connected the back of Grandma Thalmann's house with the garage. My mother told the story of when she was a girl, she was climbing on a white picket fence and fell and got a terrible cut. I always pictured this fence as the one she was climbing on. Mom, was this the fence? There were a lot of white picket fences in the neighborhood so it could have been any one of them.

Grandma would pay me two dollars to cut her lawn. I probably would have done it for free because it was so much fun. But the money was an extra bonus. The picket fence had a swing gate next to the house. I remember trying to manipulate the lawn mower through the gate while trying to hold it open at the same time. One day, I made an amazing discovery. The white picket fence was ingeniously designed so that one section of the fence could be removed by lifting it up at one end. While I could still probably manage the lawn mower through the swinging gate, it was much cooler to remove the panel of the fence and take the lawn mower through the wide gap. I always imagined that Grandpa had built that fence and designed and built the hidden doorway. Did Grandpa build that white picket fence?

Besides the picket fence, there were a couple of other things that made Grandma's lawn fun to mow. Grandma grew mint on the west side of her house. I loved to mow on that side of the house because it smelled so good. There were lots of mosquitoes living in the mint but I didn't care because I would grab a mouth full and chew it while I mowed. The other cool thing about mowing Grandma's lawn was the driveway. Yes, you had to mow the driveway! Or at least the strip of grass that grew down its center. Actually, the driveway consisted of two strips of concrete, one for the left wheels and one for the right wheels.

One beautiful summer day, I had just finished cutting the lawn and had put the panel back on the fence. Grandma came out of the house and stood near the gate. She stood on one side of the fence and I stood on the other. We started talking. I don't remember all that we talked about but I remember thinking that I wanted to remember this moment forever. It was so good to be with my Grandmother and she was taking such an interest in me. I knew I wouldn't have her forever but I felt if I could remember that moment, it would be like I did. And guess what? I still remember that moment at the white picket fence and it is like I still have her forever.

Grandma's House

This is a picture from about 1980 of Grandma Thalmann's living room. In the center of the picture, you can see the bookcase/radio/television combo that I talked about in a previous post. The combo TV has been replaced with a "modern" color TV set--the first one that I ever saw! It seems like you had to continually adjust the color because people's skin color would go from purple to green and back again.

Looking at this picture brings back more memories about the neat architectural features of the house. I had forgotten about the filleted corners between the wall and the ceiling. Normally, a wall meets the ceiling at a right angle. But in this room, there was a smooth curve going from the vertical wall to the horizontal ceiling. I don't believe I have ever seen that before or since.

Now, the one thing that I would like to draw your attention to is just through the doorway on the left. There is a hall that goes to the kitchen. There are two nearly identical doors on the left side of the hallway. One door opens to a built in ironing board. The other door opens to a pantry closet that was the only source of children friendly food in the house: cold cereal. If we got hungry while at Grandma's house, we would plead, "Can we p-l-e-a-s-e have some corn corns?" (our word for cold cereal.) The next challenge would be to open the correct door. I could never remember which was the ironing board and which was the cereal pantry. Opening the wrong door could prove problematic!

Grandma had two kinds of cold cereal in the pantry. The first was Kellogg's Corn Flakes, the non-sugar coated kind. That was too boring. The second kind was more exotic and was always the one that we picked; Kellogg's Bran Buds. Kellogg's Bran Buds looked like the fish food that we would buy at Lagoon to feed to the fish. But it was cool to eat, especially if we were hungry. Plus, Grandma's house was the only place we could find this neat cereal. I can imagine that we were all pretty "regular" after a visit to Grandma's...