Hendricks Avenue
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The house on Hendricks was built by my mother and father -- concrete slab foundation, concrete block walls, and a flat roof -- on a fairly large lot. We lived in the house until about '58 -- the subsequent owners converted it into a business. The only pictures I have from that house are of me in the yard (sitting on my wagon, near the clothes line, in about 1952).
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The grammar school where all of my brothers and
I went was immediately across the street -- it still looks just as it did
when I was a child.
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| Much of my free time as a child was spent bike riding with either my brothers (I'm the youngest of 4) or friends. At 9 or 10 years old, we would ride fairly long distances (2 to 5 miles away from the house) -- something kids don't seem to do as much these days. One of our favorite places to ride was the duck pond on San Jose Ave. The pond really hasn't changed much since I was a child -- people still feed the ducks, and still walk around the pond on the concrete bulkheads that keep it from being a marsh. |  |
My memories of first learning about deviance are tied back to this pond as well. For some reason, there was the childhood myth that your dungarees (blue jeans -- we called them dungarees in those days) would fit better if you went swimming in them, and that this particular pond was the ideal place to do that (I think my older brothers created the 'this pond' part of the myth). So, every time we got a new pair of dungarees, we'd bike over to the pond and wade around in the pond until they were soaked -- and then go bike riding until they dried. I knew that this was very much against mother's wishes, but pressure from my brothers (i.e., peer pressure) meant we had to do it. And, of course, we believed that the dungarees then somehow fit better. Looking back on that, the amazing thing is that we didn't get sick or injured -- the pond is only about 3 feet at its deepest; the water is fairly stagnant; the bottom is slimy muck, yard debris, broken bottles, and other junk; and of course, there's all the duck droppings.