The Street Where I Lived

When I was one year old, my parents moved to 24 Lamoille Street in Essex Junction, Vermont. My dad, who had just hired on with the State of Vermont as a Forensic Chemist (it sounds far more interesting that it was), was now earning a whopping $3600 a year. He figured he could finally buy his dream house, a small two-bedroom, one-bath cape on a tiny lot, only slightly larger than the house which sat on it. The house, the model home of the subdivision (actually just 16 houses at the end of a dead end street) cost $6500 and required a down payment of just 5% (that’s $325, in case you didn’t have your calculator handy). Being the model home meant that the pipes in the basement were buried under the concrete rather than just sitting on, and the windows had real shutters. They didn’t really shut but it didn’t matter because the home also featured state-of-the-art “triple track storm windows.”

Twenty-eight kids lived on our end of Lamoille Street: impressive when you factor in that eight of the 16 homes had no kids at all and six more had just 10. The five Farnham kids and13 (yes,13) Ketchum kids made up the remainder. I remember occasionally complaining about sharing one bathroom with two parents and four brothers and sisters. I remember my parents occasionally responding by pointing to the Ketchum house across the street. Remarkably, the Ketchum house was always immaculate, inside and out. I’m not sure, but I believe Mrs. Ketchum, who died early, may have been nominated for sainthood by the local Catholic Church. If she wasn’t she should have been.

It turned out that a dead end street made for a great neighborhood, especially for us kids. The only cars that ever drove up our street (our playground) belonged to the people who lived there. They knew to watch out for us and knew that games of stick ball, or dodge ball, or hide-and-seek, or tag, or bike racing always had the right-of-way. In a neighborhood that boasted only one television (everybody gathered at the Robbins twins’ house on Sunday night to watch The Ed Sullivan Show, but that’s another story), there was still always a game on, but a real game being played by real kids. It was a mixed blessing when several years after our subdivision was complete, the city decided to pave Lamoille Street, at the time the only unpaved street in town. Games became less dirty (the mud kind, not the playing house with the Robbins twins kind) but more injury-prone. Bike races were better; sliding into home base, not so much.

Not too long after the street was paved I got my first “two-wheeler.” I learned to ride it by pedaling through all the back yards on our side of the street. Fences were unheard in our neighborhood, landscaping was scarce, and the grass was far softer than the pavement. After just a few days of “sod busting,” I graduated to the street, where I was allowed to ride all the way to the corner store, which was called appropriately enough, The Corner Store. A plethora of tasty treats at two (not one, but two) for a penny filled the candy cabinet. Riding to the corner store is where the trouble began. Not accustomed to cars and drivers that weren’t always looking out for kids, I was “bumped into” several times on my journeys. I was never seriously hurt, and always driven home by the seriously freaked out “bumpers.” Fortunately, or maybe not, I was a handy little guy and always managed to get my bike back into usable, if not usual, condition. My parents may have wondered why my bicycle always looked so beat up, but they didn’t have a clue as to how many times I’d been run over.

12/27/10