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...