My attempt to share stories for each letter of the alphabet featuring our life in Austin B.C. (Before Children) 1975-1985. The 70s were a long time ago. 26 stories might be a stretch for my brain. I am behind, but intend to make it to Z! Today I have made it to W.

After we had both completed grad school and were gainfully employed, we started itching to own a home. On weekends we would drive around neighborhoods under construction, go to open houses, and peek in windows. We looked at a lot of houses that were beyond our means, but they were fun to dream about and gather ideas.

At one open house, we approached a builder whose houses we liked in a neighborhood we liked, but they were all way too big for us. We told him we were thinking of something more along the size of the houses another builder was constructing in that neighborhood. He told us that if we liked the other guy’s houses we should get him to build one for us. No! We like your houses! Just smaller. Please?

He told us to find a plan with a square foundation and no hallways and he would see. It would need to be a plan that he could use more than once. We found a plan in a magazine that was the right size that we thought would work. He made a few changes and we agreed. We still have a sketch of how the house sat on the lot. The foundation is pretty square. And there were no hallways.

I’m not going to use the builder’s name because he is still building locally. Let’s call him Big House. The name of his company was Big House & Son. Son was about two years old at the time and the youngest of five. Yup. Four daughters, then Son. Now that “& Son” was on the company logo, they could stop having kids, we assumed. “& Son” is no longer part of the company name and it looks like one of the daughters is listed in some management role. While Big House was building a house for us, he was also building a new house for himself. He laughed and told us that our house would fit in his attic. He was a piece of work.

Although we liked his construction and many of the touches in his homes, we were not fans of the decorative selections in his spec houses. His wife was the decorator, so we made sure not to insult her and were thankful we could choose the wallpaper and flooring ourselves. I grew to understand why people say building a house can strain a marriage. Fortunately, the process took a toll on my sleep rather than our marriage as I looked through wallpaper book after wallpaper book after wallpaper book both while awake and in my dreams. We ended up with these selections. Not too tacky for the 80s, right?

We handed over a down payment in October of 1981. I don’t remember if anything happened before the end of the year, but we moved in during the spring, maybe by the end of March. Neither of us had ever watched a house go up before. I checked the progress nearly every day. It seemed like it took forever, especially toward the end.

This photo was obviously taken a few years later. Mini van in the garage. Stroller in the driveway. We still aren’t great landscapers.

Our house seemed so big when we moved in with our apartment furniture that didn’t fill the space. The older photos show some of that apartment furniture. And the first curtains I made.

Some photos are lopsided and barefoot and pregnant.

A random photo shows a kitchen much smaller than we are used to now – just the right size for a young Cinderella in furry teddy bear slippers to clean between nebulizer treatments for asthma. The little details in a picture like this … the lunchboxes stacked on the fridge, the tiny television that kept me company while cooking, the chair from the kid’s table and chairs inherited from my husband’s family, the dining room through the doorway that was never used as a dining room…

Some photos show sweet love and random shoes.

We eventually added a big room in the back as a playroom/sewing room as well as a nice deck to accommodate our family of five plus dog.

In 1996 we built another house in the same neighborhood. Not having a hallway or a bedroom for each kid started getting a little cramped. Now we don’t need this bigger house. Sometimes I think about moving back into our first home if it ever goes on the market again. I haven’t convinced my husband that it would be a good idea – the bathrooms are small, the kitchen is small, and so on. We don’t know what updates and changes the subsequent owners have made. Maybe they made improvements we would like. Or maybe not.

Big House used this plan two more times in our neighborhood with different roof lines. I don’t know if he built it any where else. That little three bedroom, two bath house with no hallways we paid $88,000 for would likely sell for a number in the upper six figures today.

I will end with another memory from this house. I didn’t think I would be able to match the prompt photo, but I did!

Gallop on over to visit other bloggers at Sepia Saturday. You won’t regret it!

My attempt to share stories for each letter of the alphabet featuring our life in Austin B.C. (Before Children) 1975-1985. The 70s were a long time ago. 26 stories might be a stretch for my brain. I am behind, but intend to make it to Z! Today I have made it to V.

By the time I thought of a way to incorporate the letter V into a post last weekend, it was too late to get it done. I had finally landed on the word “voices” – a pretty general idea for including some random memories as my alphabet challenge nears a conclusion.

My husband and I heard the voice of Ray Benson and the other members of Asleep at the Wheel on January 20, 1979 at the Austin Opera House, or Austin Opry House, as it was also known. They were recording the album Served Live.

What a cheap date night! $5.00! My husband took a few photos with that TLR camera I mentioned in my previous post. Some turned out better than others.

This shot of Ray Benson isn’t that great.

But he got a pretty good one of Johnny Gimble. (below the video) You can clearly hear Johnny Gimble on fiddle in the song Miles and Miles of Texas. Surely you can hear our voices too!

 

Some voices are expressed and heard through books. Graduate school kept me busy reading textbooks in the field of Social Work. I wrote a research paper evaluating a bunch of the parenting books that seemed to proliferate during the 70s – a variety of voices that confuse parents, I thought.

College and graduate school basically ruined me for reading fiction. After graduate school, it took some time to accept that I didn’t have to “learn” from every book and I really could read simply for pleasure. But … what to read? I had lost touch. I tiptoed back into fiction, depending on a recommendation of a friend for starters. Since I can be a bit of a hoarder, I was surprised that I didn’t find many books from that time still on our shelves. Maybe I was better at borrowing back then instead of the constant buying I seem to do today.

Of course, The Road Less Traveled was not fiction. I enjoyed it and bought M. Scott Peck’s next book, People of the Lie, when it came out in paperback. I was pregnant with my first child at the time. After reading about his experiences with exorcisms, I had a terrible nightmare that the baby I was carrying was possessed by the devil. My dream was so real and upsetting that I stopped reading the book and removed it from the house.

I sometimes wrote down a few quotes.

I read quite a few books by Kurt Vonnegut and saved a quote from Slapstick that resonated with me.

A couple of quotes I wrote down are rather long. A quote from The World According to Garp by John Irving about the Under Toad, for example. The undertow/Under Toad made a lasting impression on me – an image I’ve never forgotten. The same goes for quotes from The Color Purple and the image of the purple field that God doesn’t want us to ignore. I also read books by E. L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anne Tyler. I’m sure there were others.

Then babies happened, and I dropped reading for leisure again and took up books about and for children.

My husband heard the voice of John B. Anderson, an Independent candidate for president in 1980, at a rally in Austin in June of that year. A Republican from Illinois, Congressman Anderson lost some early primary elections and chose to remain in the race as an Independent, running against Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter.

I did not attend the rally with my husband, so I don’t know exactly what he heard that day. Perhaps he heard Congressman Anderson speak to women’s issues as recorded in a Nova Law Review paper entitled John B. Anderson: The Exemplary Dark Horse.

“His remarks before another crowd of women were also remarkably outsider-sensitive. He said he was proud of the fact that twenty-one of his state coordinators were women. He said he supported the women’s movement during the 1970s because it was “a vital force in our society” despite the great opposition. He told the crowd about all the particular laws that treat women in a disparaging manner. For instance, Anderson said that it was a national disgrace that approximately 3.5 million women were beaten by their husbands each year, and further, that women were only receiving fifty-nine percent of what men earned.

What would Anderson have done differently for women if he had become President? He listed ratification of the ERA as a top priority, followed by freedom of choice and making sure that poor women are able to get funding for abortions, among other things. Anderson wanted to have women treated as equals. While he opposed the draft, he thought that if men were going to be drafted, women should also be subject to the draft.”

A voice that I heard almost weekly was that of our senior pastor, Rev. Jack Heacock. He used his voice in both the pulpit and in numerous letters to public officials and letters to the editor of the newspaper.

I liked having a pastor who made me think, question, and get a little uncomfortable if the shoe fit. Not everyone felt that way. There were times when church members thought he had taken a step too far and they moved their membership elsewhere.

I got the idea for using “Voices” as the central idea of this post after returning home from the Women’s Rally at the Texas Capitol last Saturday. I gathered with thousands of other women, men, and children, to be a visible voice through numbers and to listen to the voices of those who spoke at the rally. The women I stood with in these photos are women from our church, one a pastor.
      

The rally came at the end of a week when my first ever letter to the editor was published in the newspaper. Sometimes, you feel like you need to use your voice.

I’ve been thinking about the circumstances of Gov. Abbott’s life and how he is uniquely situated to do so much good. He has the power of his position, of course, but there is more. Physical injuries as a healthy young man left him unable to walk and, I would assume, with other health issues. His wife is the granddaughter of immigrants from Mexico. His daughter, adopted. 

These circumstances might render him a man of compassion and an advocate for women, immigrants, people with disabilities, children in foster care, and more. Instead, he makes life more difficult at best and life-threatening at worst for those whose lives echo his personal circumstance. 

He exudes “righteous anger” as he distracts attention from his own failings, makes spurious correlations, instills fear, and utters illogical nonsense to defend his positions.

I sense a hole in his heart the size of a ballot box.

And then, this happened:

If you read the article above about our former pastor, you saw Congressman Doggett’s name mentioned from back when he was a state senator and we attended the same church. I didn’t know him, but knew where he sat. What a surprise to receive such a personal letter from him last week!

I don’t know what happens. I start writing a post about the past, meander around, end up in a place I didn’t expect – like the present, and then things circle back around again.

The woman in the prompt photo looks as though she will walk right up to you and say what is on her mind. And maybe hand you a bouquet of flowers as encouragement.

There are many ways to use your voice – in song, photography, letters, books, art, and spoken word. Please visit other bloggers who have used their voices to respond to the prompt photo. Find them here: Sepia Saturday

My attempt to share stories for each letter of the alphabet featuring our life in Austin B.C. (Before Children) 1975-1985. The 70s were a long time ago. 26 stories might be a stretch for my brain. I am behind, but intend to make it to Z! Today I have made it to U.

The prompt photo this week includes a woman with her camera.

As undergraduate students at Baylor, we were required to take three two-hour electives. My husband took a photography class that he really enjoyed and he encouraged me to take it the following semester, with the promise that he would help me. I enjoyed it too, but not enough to become proficient at determining the best shutter speed and light meter settings. I did enjoy the developing and printing process, though.

The university cleaned out some old model cameras and my husband bought this Kodak Duaflex II twin lens reflex camera. It was fun to use and he tells me that, although he had another camera, all of the photos he printed himself were taken with this one.

While we were still Baylor students we had access to the photography lab and my husband continued to take and print photographs. One of the things that was fun to do with this camera was to intentionally take double exposures. He enjoyed experimenting with different techniques and has always had an interest in architecture, so he often took photos of architectural details.

Once we moved to Austin, he found The Darkroom, located in a nondescript one-story building adjacent to the original Hyde Park Bar and Grill on Duval. The Darkroom would develop and print photos for you, or you could pay to use the darkroom equipment and do it yourself. That is what we did. After a while, we started developing film at home in the the windowless bathroom in our apartment and only did the enlarging and printing at The Darkroom. It saved a little money and was easy to do. I remember clipping developed film to hangers, then leaving them on the shower curtain rod to dry.

I really enjoyed the times we spent at The Darkroom together creating black and white photographs. Sadly, The Darkroom closed sometime in the early 80s, I guess, and that was the end of that.

I have shared quite a few of my husband’s black and white photos in this Austin Stories series. As I was looking through his photos again, I found one featuring the letter U, bringing me closer to completing my alphabet challenge.

This photo is one of a series of photographs taken in May of 1977, when my husband experienced Iowa for the first time. We went to the Amana Colonies with my Grandmother Abbie (my father’s mother). The photo above taken at the Middle Amana Cemetery. The photo below somewhere in the villages.

The Amana Colonies is a National Historic Landmark and a fun place to visit. I’d like to go back one of these days. A few years later, my husband bought me an Amana rocking chair, a favorite of mine that I have written about previously.

Another photo of the two of us at the end of the day. Or maybe at the beginning of the day?

My husband and I also spent a day in Pella, Iowa during the Tulip Festival.

My favorite photo from the day.

And because it was a tulip festival, I must show a few photos in color.

Street sweepers.

My husband’s impression of Iowa was that there was a lot of corn. I’m not finding any photos of corn, but he did get one of a farm near Hedrick, where my dad (Jerry) lived with his wife, Josephina, and their daughter, my younger sister.

The old train depot in Hedrick. I think someone converted it to a restaurant for a short time.

And a couple of family photos. My younger sister at the playground in Hedrick.

Me with my mother’s parents, Eveline and Tom Hoskins, in Ottumwa, IA. I had lots family in Iowa!

It is too bad that there isn’t a Darkroom today. I think it is a hobby my husband would enjoy again and I wouldn’t mind being his assistant.

**** I finished and posted this and was putting away a few things when I found a foldout postcard set from the Amana Colonies that my husband sent to his parents. Ha!

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday this week. Please visit other bloggers at Sepia Saturday, where I always find something to delight.