Your favorite childhood home

I lived in the Sunset View Trailer Park in Michigan when I was a little boy (back when I thought girls were icky and didn't know that one day when we all grew up that I would want to make sweet sweet love to them all night).

We had the cheapest trailer in the trailer park. My mom said it was because we were in the farthest corner and that our backyard was the town cemetery on one side and the state highway down a hill on the other. There wasn't even a fence, but there were some poles that looked like they used to hold up a fence.

My little brother and I had the back bedroom all to ourselves and we would build forts all the time but I would usually take over the fort and make him stand guard while I read books inside.

I always woke up before everyone else so I would stand on my bed and look out the window a lot. Sometimes I would look at the graveyard and sometimes I would look down the hill at the highway. Nothing much was happening in either place at that time in the morning, but I think I probably saw a few ghosts in the graveyard but they didn't scare me or anything.

We had a teeny black and white TV for a little while but I stopped watching it because I tried to watch a 3-D King Kong movie (I even had 3-D glasses because they were giving them away with Slurpees at the 7-11 down the street) but King Kong stayed real flat and black and white and didn't ever jump out of the TV at me.

My mom told me to take out the garbage so I told her that I would if she would let me run outside in shorts with no socks or shoes on, even during the winter. So, in the winter, I used to run out to the dumpster in the center of the trailer park in the morning wearing only shorts and I felt like a viking running through the snow that came up to my knees and I defeated the dumpster dragon by throwing explosive garbage into its mouth before it could eat me.

Jason Tunney lived next door to me and one day I told him about Satan. I was reading a comic book and Satan could appear anywhere he wanted and he could read minds and you never knew if he was coming to get you. Jason Tunney got real scared and ran inside and later that day his mom told my mom that she didn't want me to talk to Jason Tunney anymore.

My other neighbor was named Chandra and her family had cable and I saw The Sword and the Sorceror on their TV and it was pretty awesome. I also saw Chandra's older sister Amy naked once when she was changing clothes in the bathroom and that was even more awesome. I used to switch the heads on Chandra's Barbie dolls so Ken would have boobs and she didn't like that very much.

I had an orange kitty, Boo Boo, who used to bring birds to the door in the morning when I would let her in. She almost always had a bird, and she probably thought I was trading her food for her bird but my mom would always go and bury them in the flower bed later on. One time Boo Boo didn't show up in the morning for awhile and when I was looking out the bedroom window and the sun was coming up I saw her laying down on the side of the highway. But that's because she was dead. She probably chased a bird into the road.

One time I was sitting in the driveway and thinking about what my teacher told me that everytime you learn something new you get another wrinkle in your brain. I was worried that if I learned too much that my brain would get so wrinkled that there wouldn't be room for any more wrinkles. So, I decided I wouldn't learn math and I wouldn't learn to tie my shoes so I'd have room to learn about animals like the platypus and so I'd learn how to build spaceships.

One time Stanley Ireland spit in my ear and I stuck my finger in there to wipe it out and I could smell his spit on my finger and it smelled horrible and I got so mad that I punched him a lot and he cried.

I got a Huffy bike sent to me by my Dad that was sparkly blue with orange pads and grips on it but I couldn't really figure out how to stop so I would just run into things. My little brother had a black and yellow Huffy and we both thought it looked like a bumblebee. Someone stole my bike and I never found out who it was. I think it was Stanley Ireland.

My aunt won an Orange Crush contest and she got an Orange Crush Jeep that was orange and said Orange Crush all over it.

The End.

 

the thadeus wins. Stanley Ireland is a real a-hole.

 

Kenny?

 

The Salvation Army downtown has always been good to me and the family.

 

Lived off Reveille, between Gulfgate and Park Place Blvd., on the only street that still had ditches. The farmhouse the folks lived in that used to own a chunk of the neighborhood was behind our house. The chicken coop lay just inside our back fence and my Dad used it as a laboratory after fixing it up. Eventually, he did his tinkering at the University, so I took it over and it made an awesome club house. Saw my first UFO as a kid in that backyard. Seriously. Two of my friends were there and they still remember it. Used to gather all the Christmas trees put out on the street after Christmas (that we could get our hands on) to my yard to make a big fort. Drove my parents crazy! Almost all the families were headed by vets that used the GI Bill to buy those small homes, btw.

Good times.

 

I grew up on Jaquet street in Bellaire. You know that little park on the West Loop between Fornace and Bissonett? Near the Chase building? We OWNED that park. That was our turf.

We used to ride our bikes in the parking garage for that Chase building. You could really pick up speed on those down ramps. Don's Record Shop was right down the street. That's where we'd get our KISS albums.

 

Are you talking about that huge driving range that was there before Incredible Universe/HCC? And are you talking about the parking garages on First Street? Those were my stomping grounds.

 

No, the little park right on Jaquet street. Jaquet and Elm, to be exact.

And yes, the garages on First Street and Elm. They were great fun on the weekends when they were totally empty. Bellaire was a great place to be a kid in the 70's. Did you grow up there?

 

Kinda sorta. I didn't live in Bellaire as a child, but my grandmother did, so I was around there a little bit. But my family moved there in 87 when I was in high school, so I did high school there. I still remember Weingartens and Food Giant being the two main grocers in the 70's. And we had some fun in those garages. One of my friends lived in a house across the street from one of those garages. He and I were the only two in our group that the police knew on a first name basis. I still remember this one time where we put black cat wicks into cigarettes sporadically in the parking garage by his house and lit, so they would ignite after a few minutes. Then we went into his house and called the police and said it sounded like there was gunfire in the garage. Then we sat in his room and laughed our asses off watching the police screech around in circles trying to find the "shooter" in the parking garage.

We also accidentally got a police car caught in one of our "car traps" which was where we would place fishing wire and duct tape on Bellaire Blvd. with soda cans attached to the ends so it would get stuck in the car's axle and have the soda cans bash up and down the cars' sides. He wasn't very happy.

 

I grew up in a little town called Thompson Falls, Montana: Population 1200.

We lived 6 miles outside of the town, in the country on a 40 acre patch of land. There were trees to climb everywhere, a forest to my left and a dirt road that led up a big hill.

The best view was the backyard though.

The backyard was about 50 yards long and 20 yards across. 20 yards of forest had been cleared out to make it. There was a cliff overlooking the river... You could see the river coming around a bend and snaking its way through the mountains below. I lived here until I turned 7 years old. I never appreciated that scenery the way my mother did.

Then Mom remarried and we moved to California and lived in a house behind another house in the middle of the city. Some Mexican kids always tried to steal our apricots. I grew up thinking you couldn't grow apricot trees without Mexican kids trying to steal them.

****ing California.

 

I also grew up in Bellaire in the 70's and 80's from 3rd grade through graduation from high school. We lived on Spruce Street right off of the loop. Bellaire really was a great place to grow up back then. Our neighborhood was working/middle class with pretty good mix of whites and latinos. We went to Gordon Elementary which IIRC was the smallest school in HISD, just one classroom per grade. We played pick up and league football and baseball at Field Park next to the school and when I got older the parking lot for the park was a great place to park with girls.

We rode our motocross bikes everywhere, like little hellions and rode our skateboards down the ramps of the office buildings parking garage on Locust St. We walked to the community pool on the other side of Bellaire Blvd during the summer. It really was an incredible place to grow up. I understand that now our old house and most like it in Bellaire have been demolished and replaced by McMansions. What a waste.

Edit- Damn. I just looked at Spruce with Google Street View and I don't think there's a single original home left there. It broke my heart.

 

LOL, the things we did as kids. Makes you wonder how we made it this far without getting killed.

gifford, we alternated between 2 pools - Evergreen pool and the one by city hall. I always preferred Evergreen.

The little house I grew up in is still there, but the rest of the houses on my street have been torn down and replaced by these David Weekly looking homes. They make our old house look like a garage.

 

Weird, I have heard a first hand story just like this. Did you happen to know a guy named David - who owned a baseball card shop?

 

Yep, Evergreen was the pool.

 

our neighborhood was boxed by Kirkwood, Wilcrest, Beechnut, and Bissonet

 

I just looked it up via google maps street view. It's still there and surprisingly it hasn't changed much at all. The actual pool looks exactly the same.

 

alief

 

I'm sure I did in some way. The things we did during high school became things of legend. Another one was where my friend (same guy from above) was riding home on the school bus and he had one of those "Drumstick" ice cream cones. He saw someone driving next to the bus with their sunroof open and decided it would be funny to toss the ice cream cone through the sunroof. Well the car pulled the bus over to tell the driver what happened, and we had to ride with the windows on the bus closed the rest of the school year.

 

I grew up in a state park in Iowa. There was a village of about 100 people. The only thing the village had was a small post office everything else was 15 miles away. I could take a paddle boat across the lake to go swimming in the summer. The few of us kids that lived there, ruled the place - good fun.