Heath Street Stories: A Look Back at 1950'S Innocence in Suburban America

By Gehla S. Knight

1950, and the cookie-cutter houses in the slipstream of a paper mill promise new beginnings for the families moving to Heath Street. From the tragicomedy of Atom Bomb drills to the wonder of glitzy gadgetry, Dyanflow transmissions and automatic canasta shuffling machines,everything that makes Made in America the password to the future is reflected in the neighbors' prodigious faith in progress.

On Heath Street the seeds are sown for a generation caught between vanity and self-esteem, humility and confidence, duty and liberation. How far we've come -- or have we only just begun the journey?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 7, 2005
• ISBN: 9781467073851

Gehla S. Knight

  Gehla Knight’s work has been published by ACE Books and appeared nationally in Phoenix Magazine and Redbook.  She has also served as technical and script consultant for Fox-Regency Film Productions.  A fifth-generation Oregonian, she is active in community theater and preservation of pioneer history.  Knight is a graduate of Baylor University in Waco, Texas where as a premed student, she acted in many regional theatrical productions and improv theater, working under the tutelage of Charles Laughton.   Knight lives in Portland, Oregon, where she manages a Trial Consulting practice and continues to write mysteries and quirky takes on the Northwest retro scene.    

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PLUG IT IN, PLUG IT IN

We came to Heath Street in April of 1950 shortly after the birth of my baby brother Gussie. This was only one of more than fourteen moves throughout Oregon I made with my Gypsy-souled parents during my childhood. Their vagabond lifestyle taught me that all security is temporary, all refuge fragile, that if you do not claim a place to which you belong, you belong instead to yourself. Free to wander year after year while people attempt to frame your world with permanency, you become imbued with a fierce independence, realizing with surprising insight even for a child that the things of true value move with you: character, memories and family.

Heath Street was a high watermark in our travels. It was the start of something bright and wonderful that sizzled like a pat of oleo on the stove and then melted away with barely a trace to remind us of what we once had. Heath Street wasn’t merely another address in a string we memorized yearly, it was a whole new attitude of top dogs, fat cats, and was special not just for the novelty of the house, but the innocence and exuberance of the decade that began at the same time. Our moving truck had barely backed onto the weedy crop of wilted grass and nettles in the front yard before the air we breathed was charged with optimism.

All the families who found themselves sharing a street that spring were busy rebuilding lives postponed by war, separation and sacrifice. World War II had affirmed American superiority, and we felt justifiably proud of ourselves, our clever gadgets and awesome wartime production which had produced a mind-boggling surfeit of military hardware to blitz the bad guys. The Can Do generation had triumphed over the Depression’s humiliating privation, global conflagration, the rebuilding of Europe and, as my father never failed to remind my mother, twelve years of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The future seemed full of exciting possibilities. We had just whipped the Nazis, humbled the Japanese Empire and stunned the world with the power of Yankee ingenuity. There were no more impediments to stem the tide of our destiny. We were bound for peacetime material glory with automatic dishwashers, Dynaflow transmissions, safety razors, hi-fis that changed records all by themselves and electric frying pans. This was Uncle Sam’s headiest coming-out party since his nouveau riche relatives invaded the Continent’s aristocratic bastions after the Civil War. In 1950 we were scrambling aboard an industrial roller coaster for an unrestrained, unabashed ride to the top of the track, to a time when the fruits of our labors were ripe and ready for plucking; our military might was invincible, and the American dreamscape was rich with opportunity.

Just before hostilities broke out in Korea, my father received a promotion at Associated Oil to district manager of Flying A gas stations. His US Navy tour had ended in 1940 after seeing mostly unheralded action in China, witnessing the Rape of Nanking and a multitude of atrocities at the hands of the invading Japanese forces. Dad re-upped in the Merchant Marine after Pearl Harbor and survived three Liberty ship sinkings and the rigors of the North Atlantic supply run to Murmansk. By 1950, he was eager to paint himself back into the family portrait. It wasn’t easy, and he never fully escaped the dark shadows terror and violence had cast on his psyche, but he tried. His most earnest effort was the year and a half he spent on Heath Street trying to pick up the pieces he’d left behind.

Leaving our log cabin in Leaburg for the move to Heath Street signaled a step up to middleclass living. My parents had rented a house in a new suburban development in Springfield and were excited by the prospect of a fresh start, but my brother David and I didn’t want to go. We sulked and sniffled all the way down the twisting highway to the Willamette Valley, our noses poking into the slipstream, savoring the pungent odor of ferns, cedar and wood smoke. Leaburg was an idyllic playground for two small children who could already appreciate the beauty of the McKenzie River country. Our cabin nestled among Douglas fir trees as tall as skyscrapers and meadows rich with wild asparagus, rhubarb and roses scrambling over every fence and stump. At night, we were serenaded by the wind singing in the fir boughs, the rushing river, hooting owls and bullfrogs the size of toy poodles burping and belching in the backwood ponds.

My brother and I slept in bunk beds on an enclosed porch. A later addition provided privacy for my parents’ bedroom. There was a cavernous stone fireplace for heating and cooking in the cabin’s main room which served as parlour and dining room. A toilet and sink were added off the back stoop, but hot-tubbing in front of the fire was still a weekly routine. The cedar shakes on the roof were as thick as Porterhouse steaks, and when snow drifts piled up to the window sills, the log walls kept out the chill.

When we were thirsty, we dunked our chins in the frigid McKenzie a few steps from our back door and drank until the icy water took our breath away. On warm summer days, we lolled beneath the forest canopy and dipped our toes in the ripples until our legs were colder than popsicles.

Cooking was my mother’s greatest accomplishment at the Leaburg cabin. With the doors open to catch the breeze, the smell of Mama’s cinnamon rolls would tempt even ground squirrels to beg at the back porch. She turned out rhubarb pie, gooseberry jam, venison roast, Boston baked beans and angel food cake that melted in our mouths. Figuring how she did it was a little like solving the Rubik cube: there was only one electrical outlet in the kitchen, a former lean-to woodshed which had been turned into a passable pantry. My mother had to plug all her appliances into that one receptacle. She was busier than when she had sat on a high stool in front of the Pacific Bell Telephone switchboard as a long distance operator in the 1930’s throwing interstate connections like Olympic javelins across the lighted board.

Mama cooked on a two-burner hotplate which took up one slot. She jockeyed other plugs in and out of the remaining outlet as she bustled back and forth in the primitive kitchen where she assembled her electrical hardware: the Hamilton Beach mixer to mash the potatoes and whip the cream; the GE percolator to brew the Hills Brothers coffee with a conga rhythm on the wooden drain board; the Westinghouse Dutch oven to roast the turkey; the Sunbeam steam iron to press the tablecloth. My paternal grandmother who refused to give up her old triple-oven woodstove, built as big and sturdy as a battleship, would have been baffled by Mama’s kitchen arsenal.

For our last Thanksgiving in the cabin my mother put on a show that could best be described as an imitation of the carnival performer who balanced a dozen spinning plates on poles while the drums rolled. She juggled, stacked and shifted pots, pans, plates, roasters, casseroles and skillets like a trouper – all with sixteen hungry people milling about her cramped kitchen no larger than a good-sized coat closet.

Invading our tiny cabin that Thanksgiving were aunts and uncles in the throes of domestic misfortune who faced slim pickings at home. Uncle Waldo, whom we saw only on such occasions as provided food and spirits as well as a forum for his tales of Masonic ascendancy, showed up with his fiancée, never-to-be-wife Frances. Uncle Donald, the eldest in my father’s clan and still a bachelor at forty, brought along only one small valise containing two pairs of argyle socks, spare boxer shorts with stripes as wide as bacon rashers and four bottles of Jim Beam bourbon – all the necessities of life, he confided with a knowing wink.

Eileen and Bob came, too. They were friends of my parents. Bob was actually my father’s boss at one time, but with Dad’s recent promotion, they now faced one another across the holiday table as peers. Eileen fastidiously avoided our cocker spaniel as she compulsively plucked hairs from her skirt and cashmere sweater. Ugh! I think dogs are disgusting, but at least they’re easier to clean up after than children, she said with a shudder. That’s why we’ve decided never to have any of our own.

Dogs? my mother asked.

Children. Because of the mess and awful smells they make. I don’t know how you bear it, Jane.

My brother and I avoided her like nettles.

My favorite relatives, Mama’s parents, came up to the mountains from Salem. Then there were our three cousins, adolescent sons of my father’s sister. These big-footed fellows were more than a little scary. They talked about slingshots, spitballs, big tits, rumbles and something called hot rods that reminded me of branding irons. The gathering was completed with the arrival of my paternal grandparents – one nearly deaf and the other terminally surly.

Sixteen of us were crowded around Mama’s new Duncan Phyfe dining room table with all three leaves in place. This mahogany prize was so special to her. It nearly filled the cabin’s entire living space from the front doorstep to Mama’s hotplate in the kitchen. Once we were all seated, every door and window was blocked, including the passageway to the lavatory. It was necessary to interrupt the proceedings, stand up, scoot back the chairs and pull out the table when anyone had to make a personal call of nature. It wasn’t as if one could demur gracefully about bowel functions and slip off quietly – not when a toilet trip required a boarding pass punched with more holes than a Long Island Railroad transfer.

That dining room set was the most elegant, beautiful thing my mother ever owned. It was a surprise present from my father – just because he saw her wistful gaze as her nose pressed aganst the furniture store window and on an insane impulse went back and signed a long-term contract to bring it home. It was a ludicrous luxury, of course, and I think that’s one reason my mother treasured it so. The delivery truck drove all the way up the mountain from Eugene, bumped down a barely passable lane through blackberry brambles and Oregon grape and unloaded this mahogany masterpiece with its elegant side chairs upholstered in crimson and gold sateen. They had to take the front door off its hinges and remove the table legs to get it inside. When they set it down with its club feet positioned at all four corners of the cabin, it looked like they’d parked an aircraft carrier in a one-car garage.

Most of the chairs were hung on the wall when not in use. But that table gleamed like a thoroughbred with its carved legs and uppercrust panache, and my mother refused to send it back for a smaller version. Set for a holiday dinner with candles, lace tablecloth and the heirloom silver, it was fit for a regal banquet. Mama admired her treasure as if it were an ephemeral, tropical flower blooming in the desert which in a way it was.

Having that Duncan Phyfe masterpiece was probably the main reason we hosted that memorable Thanksgiving dinner in 1949 now that I think on it. It’s a good thing she got to put that table and chairs to proper use because it was our last family gathering at the McKenzie cabin, and when we moved into Springfield and the little house on Heath Street, the table went back to the furniture store, and Mama mourned it for some time.

That Thanksgiving, ensconced elbow to elbow on the sateen chairs, eyes on the featherless prize enthroned upon the Staffordshire platter in the center of Mama’s magnificent table, nobody could keep still. Not from excitement but from the need to keep passing the side dishes because there was no free table space. Every square inch, as broad and endless as a Kansas wheatfield, was covered with steaming porcelain bowls, vegetable dishes, platters and gravy boats.

There was a dish of pearl onions baked in a creamy sauce and dripping with melted cheese which always left the table in the same pristine condition in which it arrived. It took twenty-four years before my parents discovered no one liked creamed onions except for eccentric Uncle Cecil, a reclusive relative acquired through a great aunt’s second marriage on my mother’s side of the family who had passed on shortly after World War I. Unfortunately, his only legacy was the damnable creamed onion conglomeration which sat neglected on a silver trivet waiting for someone to discover that my mother’s grated peanuts and nutmeg seasoning actually made for a very tasty dish.

Everybody ate with their head bowed over their plate, their dominant hands shoveling in mashed potatoes and dressing in graceful, and not so graceful, strokes while their other hand was aloft passing one dish after another – first to the right, then reverse order to the left.

Here. Hold the spuds.

Take the green beans – they’re hot.

OUCH!

Watch out for the gravy boat – it’s full.

OOPS!

Pass the Waldorf salad, please. It’s got grapes, and I love grapes.

Are these nuts in here?

What’s Waldorf salad without nuts?

What kinda nuts?

Waldorf nuts, I guess.

No – walnuts.

What?

The Waldorf – those are walnuts.

Walnuts in the gravy?

No – grapes, I think somebody said.

Who wants to trade me for these creamed onions?

Sorry. No room.

Plate’s full, sorry.

Maybe later, Jane.

Much later.

Shhhhh.

An air traffic controller would have felt right at home at our Thanksgiving feast.

The main celebrity at Thanksgiving is the bird – the native American turkey sacrificed in ritualistic blessing of our fortunate bounty. The turkey may see it as just another example of human domination and massacre of a lesser species, but that’s not quite what the Pilgrims had in mind when they started it all.

My father had decided to pick out the turkey long before Thanksgiving, fatten the fellow up around the cabin and then bring him properly demised to the holiday table. We were enthusiastic. How exciting to go along with Dad to the turkey farm, see the birds running in flocks from one fence rail to the other like blind fingerlings swarming in the hatchery pond. We picked the one odd fellow with neither the inclination nor the brains to be afraid of us – he strutted over to the gate, stretched his scaly red neck and gobbled at us. That did it. This was definitely our bird.

Back at the cabin, Dad untied the gobbler’s legs and set him down on the ground. With an indignant flap of his wings and a final screech of outrage, he walked off and began to look for creepy crawlies. In no time at all, my brother and I found this funny fellow to be a regular sport at playing chase games, finding stink bugs, frightening stray cats and harassing Mama when she walked up the lane to the mailbox.

The bird assumed the size and proportions of an ostrich from my limited point of view – a point precariously close to the ground as I looked up at his orange beak poised to poke at my eye and his tail feathers fanned out like a peacock’s plume. It never registered in our young minds that this comic actor with his red, rubbery headdress and flat feet was destined to end up as the source of our favorite treat: tasty drumsticks braised to a golden brown. We believed drumsticks must be plucked from meaty stalks at the grocer’s and packaged like hotdogs. There was absolutely nothing about Archibald, the pet turkey pacing circles in our yard, which even remotely resembled a crusty drumstick.

So of course it came as quite a shock when my father appeared on the front step a couple days before Thanksgiving with his log-splitting ax in hand, his eyes scanning the woodsy perimeter while he clucked a comely Archibald … here, turkey. Here, Boy.

There was a sinister air to his voice and a look of malevolent anticipation in his eyes which alerted my brother and me to imminent evil. Archibald astutely determined my father’s intentions for himself and broke into a panic marathon sending both him and my father in a roundabout race like the tiger chasing Sambo.

My brother and I began to wail and sob. In the confusion, Dad put down the ax, and David and I rushed to pick it up. Dragging it as far from Archibald as we could, we begged and pleaded for our father to spare him. It was a pitiful scene: children bleating and keening like lambs at the slaughter, hanging on Dad’s pant legs, hiding the ax in the woodpile while Archibald flapped his wings and ran his assassin ragged through the fir trees, around the woodshed and down to the river. Whenever my father got a grip on the bird, we’d manage to scurry off with the ax. By the time he recovered the ax, the bird was headed for the highway, no doubt to hitch a ride back to the turkey farm which had been notably more accommodating to plucky foragers such as himself.

Archibald finally succumbed to the inevitable fate of his ilk and ended up in Mama’s kitchen where his feathers floated down in a growing pile as my brother and I stood sniffling by the back door. Archibald was some pounds lighter after his amazing run. My father’s weight loss was never exactly determined, but in any case, he made it all up at the dinner table the following Thursday.

Thanksgiving day, while Archibald’s roasted remains passed before us on his china bier, David and I sat with hot tears burning our cheeks as Dad carved a giant drumstick off the corpse for each of us. A doleful pout accompanied a wave of nausea fluttering through my bowels. I heard a sigh and caught David’s teary glance.

"Poor Archibald." I sent my condolences across the table in telepathic code I was certain my brother could decipher. He never had a chance.

We did the best we could, Sis, I heard his own transmission float back.

Yes, I hiccupped, swallowing a little sob. But I will never eat another drumstick for the rest of my life.

Me neither.

Archibald’s untimely murder weighed heavily on our souls until the candles were lit, the fruit salad and cranberry sherbet were passed, and we tasted the first delicious bite. I hope Archibald understands from his bug-stocked heavenly perch that we mean no disrespect to his memory when we oooh and ahhh at the annual celebration of the slaughter of his descendants. But I still won’t eat drumsticks, and on those infrequent years when my brother and I share a Thanksgiving table, we exchange knowing looks and pass the turkey legs on to our innocent children.

The turkey’s passing was forgotten by the following spring when we left the cabin and our simple way of life. There were so many wonderful things to see on Heath Street that we might as well have landed on the moon. The new house had enough wall sockets for an astonishing array of gizmos proclaiming our arrival in Postwar Suburbia. No more hotplate checkers for Mama. We could now turn everything on at once – electric frying pans, percolators, hi-fi’s, toasters, ovens, radios, shavers. It was wonderful. Mama’s new kitchen seemed equipped with the electrical capacity of a hydroelectric power plant.

Our biggest dilemma in the Heath Street house was how to avoid doing anything necessary to modern living without the aid of an electrical appliance specifically designed for the task at hand. The architects’ generosity with outlets was responsible for converting our new household into a maze of extension cords snaked like adders across the floors, sucking life into a powered gadget which promised freedom from drudgery.

One giant leap into this technological diorama was the installation of an electric phonograph player into the wind-up Victrola cabinet and the retirement of the old cast iron pots my mother used in the cabin’s fireplace. We now had instant hot water and a gleaming, stainless steel sink; electric coils glowing cherry red on the Hotpoint range and a firm belief that food not cooked in an electrically controlled contraption with steam gauges and settings for fricasseeing and char-broiling was simply unfit to eat.

Once we had emptied the moving boxes of our best booty in Springfield, untangled the cords and plugged them all in, we marveled at these power connections strung throughout the house as if they were lines of lineage leading straight to the thrones of Europe. With the satisfying, soul-warming buzz that greeted our thrust of the twin prongs into the wall receptacle, our lives entered a glorious new dimension.

Heath Street was barely finished when we arrived. It was still unpaved. The developers razed a plot of ground bounded by dead end and no dumping, in sight of unimproved and laid sewer and water mains, strung up utility poles and poured concrete slab foundations for blocks of identical bungalows. No sidewalks, no curbs, certainly no landscaping. It would have been unthinkable for the builders of these cookie-cutter tracts to provide the dwellers with finished dreams of affluence. In 1950, the buyers expected to complete their own versions of utopia – the picket fence, if you wanted one, the green lawn and peony bush were the extras which signified your faith in the future.

Each of the eight crackerboxes built on Heath Street had exactly the same floor plan. Only the pastel colors on the cedar-sided shingles were different. The little houses rose like wildflowers from meadows of thistle, poppies, daisies and Queen Anne’s lace where grasshoppers jumped like popping corn when the sun warmed their hind legs to dancing fettle. The tract was located decently upwind of Weyerhauser’s pulp mill belching enough dirty-sock fumes to spoil the illusion of suburban bliss.

The houses were three bedroom, one bath – nine-hundred square feet in all. They were so modern that a little unorthodox inconvenience was to be expected: when we sat on the toilet, our knees scraped the bathroom wall, and my parents had to stand with one foot in the bathtub to open and close the door. There were no more Saturday night scrubs with my brother and me trotting out bare-bottomed to soak in the washtub set in front of the cabin hearth. Up-to-date living required ordinary embarrassment when flashing our behinds as we scampered down the hall.

Nudity had never been an object of much discussion at the cabin. We took the natural human state more or less for granted and rated it about as titillating as unbuttered bread. But suddenly there was a bathroom door with a shiny lock which spelled privacy, and we discovered an ill-fitting modesty surrounding our hygienic habits. Where once we had scampered about freely with our fannies no offense to anyone, now Mama was careful to remind us to lock ourselves in whenever we used the new defalcatorium designed to quash just such innocent naiveté as young children acquire quite nicely on their own.

The kitchen, an alcove just off the front entrance, was covered in old-blood maroon tile that my father said was exactly the color of raw liver. We had never seen such outrageous décor. The sink gleamed like a piece of gunnery hardware with its chrome faucet and high-tech, clear plastic handles – clearly ornaments from the future. Even the water flowing from the faucet’s swan-like neck sounded new and modern. It made a soft swoooosh when we turned it on. No dribbles and splats here. Wasn’t progress marvelous?

We had a brand new Kelvinator refrigerator with a silver crescent on the door which cleverly disguised the handle. There was a comforting, crunching sound as the door smooched its cushiony seal, and just thinking of an excuse to open it and watch the blue plastic interior light up was a thrill at first. How had they thought of such a wonderful invention? Only in the good old US of A! There was even a see-through, dimpled compartment with an indentation for butter and pull-out glass-topped bins for the vegetables and meat. Twelve little hollows for eggs were molded in the door. Amazing! Where had people ever kept eggs before this marvel arrived in their kitchens? How primitive the old icebox seemed.

Up at the cabin, every week the delivery man came in a rattle-trap Dodge truck, schlepped a block of ice up the back steps and wrestled it into the icebox on the back porch. Nothing ever got cold in the icebox. In winter we kept homemade ice cream and meat frozen by storing it in a used coffee can and burying it in a snow bank. In summer, we took our lemonade down to the river and partially submerged it in an icy pool along with the butter, cream and anything else needing to be chilled. As a matter of fact, I think the icebox was most useful as safe storage for Mama’s bread money which she kept in an old Calumet can on the top shelf.

On Heath Street, windows in every room let in floods of light. There was so much sun streaming in from the fields of the Willamette Valley that, at first, my brother and I cowered like cave shrimp caught in a flashlight beam. Sunlight filled the house, radiated off the kitchen tiles, the shiny linoleum floors and the plastered walls in sherbet shades of white, green and pink. It all seemed neon-bright compared to our forested Leaburg lair.

We settled in our little gray house with our dog-eared packing boxes and the dish barrels that moved with us from one location to another over the years without ever having their lids cracked open. After rolling those heavy barrels like rum casks on a clipper ship, up and down steps and basement stairs, the stories would grow about the rare and precious heirlooms inside.

My mother was adamant that her great grandmother’s wedding china brought out to Oregon overland on the great westward trek of 1846 filled one of the three barrels. My father recalled that a great aunt’s sterling lemonade server hidden from Yankee raiders invading her Virginia tobacco plantation was packed in one barrel. Even my trusted grandparents swore that they could remember packing the crystal brought over on a sailing ship from Surrey, England to the Colonies in the seventeenth century. I couldn’t wait to see it all for myself although it never occurred to me that with the hyperbole on both sides of the family mounting, the barrels would have to be the size of the Lincoln Tunnel to hold all the treasure claimed.

So it was no longer a surprise when I opened the musty barrels after my father’s death and discovered newspaper clippings, broken crockery of dubious distinction and silver baby spoons. My mother hadn’t a clue as to what had become of all the priceless pieces she was positive she had packed and repacked in those barrels many times during her forty-six year marriage. It turned out that great grandmother’s wagon train Minton was found in four old book boxes stored in countless garages and outdoor sheds over the years. Probably was the safest place for it as the barrels got some rough handling during the moves – one rolled off a pickup tailgate and traveled halfway down Highway 99 before a trucker’s bumper punted it into the ditch.

But those old barrels served an important purpose. Every time they were rolled to a new storage site, wedged in beside the rusty lawnmower and Mama’s magazines, their arrival would initiate the saga of the Great Plains Crossing when our forebears left Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1846 and came West, losing two children on the way, suffering great hardship and sacrificing almost everything they had brought with them – except the china great grandmother refused to leave behind at Heartbreak Bend. The dishes had been her grandmother’s and were a bit of her English inheritance she refused to give up. At her wit’s end, nearly beaten by the endless dust, disease and hardship of the trail, Great grandmother had stood her ground, raised up to her full height of four feet, ten inches and stared down her husband, leader of the wagon train and no great sympathizer with feminine frailities. I’ll go this far and no farther without my dish barrels, she had sworn with a fist in the air. God and this forsaken wilderness have taken my children, my health and my reason, and I swear they will not take another thing of mine so long as I can fight to preserve it.

My great, great grandfather knew when he was bested, wisely reloaded her heirlooms into the wagon, and they went on unscathed to Oregon City. Each piece of porcelain had a story behind it to be told, and whether or not the crusty old barrels were the respository of these sainted souvenirs, they were like family tombstones to remind us of where we had come from and how much these shreds of the life left behind had meant to these pioneers. It was always a sobering thought when I imagined that frail woman defying God and her husband to save a barrel of dishes.

Sometimes the human spirit is sparked to greatness by lesser things than patriotism and oratory. Something more than platters and plates was salvaged on the salt plains that day, and I liked to think that it was not about crockery but about dignity and respect for feminine sacrifice that so many men in history seemed determined to ignore.

Settled in to Heath Street at last, we placed the old Cordovan-stained Victrola near the front door so the change Mama kept on the turntable would be handy for the good humor man, the bread truck and the paper boy. Our three-cushioned davenport sat in the middle of the living room across from what served as a picture window – the only picture being the neighbor’s side yard and the Scottie dogs penned up between the houses.

The prize furnishing was the chrome-trimmed, pink dinette table with four plastic upholstered chairs, their legs splayed like a cello player. My father made a deal at the furniture warehouse when the table toppled off the loading dock and snapped a metal leg which Dad fixed with a piece of pipe and electricians’s tape. It didn’t matter that the kitchen was so small we had to swivel our hips, lock our knees and assume the position of a bobsledder to allow traffic to pass when we were all seated for supper. The dinette set harmonized with the bleeding-heart tile and the watermelon shade on the living room walls, Mama reminded us. And it was the latest thing – much more practical than mahogany, she sighed remembering her Duncan Phyfe jewel collecting dust at the furniture store. She had swapped a Rudolf Valentino for a Mickey Rooney.

Dad splurged with the purchase of a Zenith console radio, too. We huddled around it each evening and tuned in far away places like Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Paris. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t understand the strange voices speaking to us from around the globe – it was enough to feel connected, to eavesdrop on what we were certain was something wonderful. We also learned that some people in distant places seemed to be inherently bad, like Communists. Never sure just what diabolical characteristic distinguished this malevolent group from the rest of us, we were told that they were the bogeymen who wanted to blow up our houses and shoot down our airplanes, and we never knew why. But no one was asking such questions in 1950, and being so successful and having so much, it was natural to believe everyone else was conspiring to take it all away from us. In the atomic age, jealousy could be a dangerous thing.

All those Heath Street melodies still linger, playing inside my head as I recall the sounds of a summer day: spirited gossip on the front steps, dishware clattering in the sink, jacks and rubber balls bouncing on the sidewalk, screen doors slapping shut, newspapers unfurling, dogs barking, softballs kissing well-worn mitts as twilight threatened to strand another runner on third while radio static crackled like starched crinoline calling listeners to another episode of The Shadow.

We stood atop a lofty peak in 1950, at the summit of America’s success. Our inventions were the most efficient, dazzling and innovative the world had ever seen. Our laundry detergents, automobiles, electric ranges and earth moving equipment were the best ever made. We were first in world steel production, wheat harvests, paved highways, telephones and painless dentistry. There didn’t seem to be anything we couldn’t do, couldn’t accomplish better and faster than anybody else. Luxury, the cachet of the privileged few, became a middleclass password across the country.

Of course, realities of life began to seep into our lives and color the houses on Heath Street in a more somber hue as another war far less definitive than World War II cast a pall over the domestic landscape. And there was the faint stirring of a breeze, caught in my sails even then, of a wobble in our whirling orbit of progress – a jolt that was tilting our globe out of synchronization with the universal achievements we worshipped. Racial injustice and feminine inequality were only part of what was wrong with America.

But to a six-year-old constancy was defined in months not decades. Some truths were self-evident: the Yankees always won the World Series no matter how hard my brother and I rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers; anything any good was made in America; limitless power fueled the mightiest industrial giant the world had ever seen. The good life was centered around cheap, plentiful electricity that ran all our machines, sparked our technology, lit our houses, perked the coffee bubbling in the liver-red kitchens and warmed the radios that buzzed with Arthur Godfrey every morning. It seemed endless – the power and richness of America.

On Heath Street, I was awakening to a dream where all the houses had new paint; the cars were streamlined machines with more chrome than the Chrysler building; the women were permed, aproned and content as they sat at the kitchen table, bouncing a baby on their lap while the percolator brewed another cup of perfect coffee.

JIMMY LOVES ETHEL MAE

The Marcianos lived right across the street from us and were relishing the culmination of their earthly dream: their own little green mansion bordered by freshly planted yellow roses and sweetpea vines, a front walk decorated with red chalk lines for hopscotch and twin maple saplings staked in front.

Ethel Mae had been a war widow. Her first husband, an ill-fated recruit who fell off a troop transport and broke his neck the first week of training, never made much of an impact on his bride fresh from a small, midwestern farm.

When Bobbie was killed, Ethel Mae hadn’t yet summoned the courage to slip into bed at night without her nightgown buttoned to the very top. Unfortunately, her poor groom was gone before he got past the third button and never did see his bride naked.

They knew each other only five weeks before the civil wedding that disappointed Ethel Mae’s parents who had hoped to land their only daughter a better catch. But as far as Ethel Mae was concerned, it wasn’t just about romance – it was a chance to exchange her vistas of cornfields for scenic toll roads and cities whose tallest structures weren’t filled with sorghum.

Bobbie had brought his bride to Oregon and Camp Adair in the Willamette Valley where he settled her in a drafty government shanty amid blackberry brambles, Scotch broom and poison oak. She’d barely finished cleaning the mildew from the Fridgidaire and mopping the mud oozing under the back door when they gave her a star to paste on the window and thirty days’ notice to vacate her quarters.

Ethel Mae was adrift after Bobbie died. Like so many war widows, she had lost more than a husband – her future had been stolen. She didn’t have the heart to go home to Iowa and move back in with her parents. The thought of moping around the farm, trying to put a brave face on what had plainly turned out to be a mistake, was unthinkable. So she stayed in Oregon, got a job at the Eugene five and dime, and one day smiled back at the muscular, tanned master sergeant who offered to give her a lift at the bus stop.

After seven whirlwind weeks, Jimmy had stolen her heart. He was thankful to find the object of his affections in a sweet, hardly-used young girl whose eyes brimmed with admiration for the handsome Marine. Caesar Jesus Marciano, known as Jimmy, was her salvation. They were married two days before Jimmy shipped out to sea bound for Guadalcanal and a hell he couldn’t begin to imagine from his peaceful Willamette Valley bivouac. But at least, he consoled himself as he waved good-bye from the troop train, he had Ethel Mae to wait for him. He had someone to come home to.

Jimmy’s mother promised to look after his new bride while he was away. Mama Marciano was outspoken in her disapproval and dislike of those who failed to show favoritism to her brood of Italian hell raisers. Although she threatened to scratch the eyes out of even her hellions’ mildest critic, she often knocked heads around the house keeping her boys in line. The one exception was her youngest son. He was puny, prone to colic as a baby, stuttered and hid behind his mother’s skirts when his older brothers teased him. He had been born premature, a wrinkled, red little runt she feared would never survive the night. She wrapped him up, nestled him against her generous bosom and promised the Virgin Mother that if her baby boy lived, she would name him after the Savior himself.

So Jimmy was christened with the names of her most outstanding