Parallel Lives

The blog and booklet, The Linas in Troy Missouri, chronicles the life and times of my grandfather and how he got to where he was in 1952, the year he died.

Upon reflection, there are a lot of parallels between his life and mine.

My grandmother was short in stature, loving, caring, and independent;  and belonged to a womens' group. My wife is likewise and likewise belongs to a womens' group.

He and my grandmother had their three children within four years of marriage, so did we.

He left his pregnant wife with friends and family as a young man and set out to make his fortune in a new part of the world.  I left my pregnant wife with friends and family as a young man to make my fortune in a new part of the country.  We both were reunited with our families a short time after relocating.

Much later in life, when each of us was in our early fifties, we came to a point of transition; he was out of work and so was I.

To make the best of the situation each of us took a flyer on a business idea that was not our own, he the chicken and egg business and me the computer training business.  He didn't make it rich in his business and neither did I; we may both have bought into impossible business models.

He moved to a place strange to to him, Troy Missouri, and I moved similarly to Louisville Kentucky.

He settled into a house two miles off the main road out of town, down a winding road, across a railroad track, and around a bend in the road.  I did the same, two miles down a winding road, across a railroad track, and around a bend in the road.

At his railroad crossing there was a depot, at my railroad crossing there is a church; both of these are structures for arrivals and departures; one from Troy, the other from this world.

His three kids and their families visited him regularly and so do mine, every Christmas and we go there during the year.

So it goes.

An Acre

There is a lot of speculation in the literature about just what was an acre.  It was alternately a measure of area, length, or taxation units, and varied in size from one to another.  

I came up through the ranks of Civil Engineers and earned my way through college as a surveyor, both for construction activities and for establishing boundaries.  It was always to work for a licensed surveyor of one kind or another, never having been myself licensed; yet it was I who did the work and the units and legal descriptions interested me.

Common sense became the rule for the definition of the huge area of land that comprises the United States.  After the original colonial boundaries had already been established using metes and bounds, the Township/Range method of describing land was put in place for the remainder.  

The basic unit of that system is the “Section”, a square one mile on a side; then the Township/ Range, comprised of thirty-six sections.  There are various anomalies  to be considered, not the least of which is spherical excess experienced on long lines due to the fact that the Earth is a sphere but that is one detail that we aren't considering here.

The Section, being a square mile, is by definition 640 acres.  Then the whole thing breaks down very simply into “Quarter Sections” being 160 acres, “Quarter-quarter Sections” being 40 acres, and when these are quartered again there is the 10 acre parcel which very conveniently is one-eighth a mile, or 660 feet, on a side.

This from Wikipedia: “Distances were always measured in chains and links, based on Edmund Gunter’s 66 foot measuring chain.  The chain—an actual metal chain—was made up of 100 links, each being 7.92 inches (201 mm) long.  Eighty Chains constitute one U.S. Survey Mile.” 

It is interesting to note that a convenient ten of these 66 foot chains produces a line one-eighth of a mile long or one side of a 10 acre parcel.  It is my belief that the 100 links were standardized but not intended to be used as a subdivision of the chain as would inches be of feet.

Coming at it a different way, a mile is 1600 meters and also 1760 yards, which just happens to divide into 110 yards (1/16^th of a mile) equaling 100 meters; keeping this in mind it is easy to translate distances.  When one examines the 660 feet, one can see that it is 220 yards or 200 meters because 110 yards is 100 meters (more or less.)  So, 200 meters is very close to 1/8th of a mile, the side of a 10 acre square.  The scientific number is 109.361 yards equals 100 meters.  

It can be seen that in the world of land area measurement for subdivision, the 10 acre lot is the basic unit of land and the acre a way of getting a more precise measurement where the boundaries may not be regular.

Family

Family through Time

Two people

Form a common bond

Then there are more

Uniquely bound

Ups

Downs

Ins

Outs

Bugging

Hugging

Formative years

Spent figuring it out

Then spewed into the world

To make a way

Each finding another

To whom to bond

Then there are more uniquely bound

Carrying the torch

Illuminating the way

Married Life

One

To t'other

For better or worse

In sickness and in health

Individually
Living and growing

Each moving forward

Yet merged into a life together

A stumble

A fall

Asked

Forgiven

Life goes on

Failings forgotten

Going for the finish

Troubles in stride

Awaken to see

Each t'other

Love conquers all

 

Oriole Avenue, 8572

In Saint Louis Missouri, there is a street named Oriole Avenue.  If one were to look at a map, one would see that Oriole Avenue is in two sections, one is south of Calvary Cemetery and the other is north.  This is the street with which we are concerned, the north section and it runs from the Cemetery to Veronica Avenue.  The less important, to us, section of the street from Switzer Avenue to Veronica was constructed in the late 1930’s.

The 8500 block of Oriole Avenue starts the north section, from  the Cemetery to Switzer Avenue, and dates from around 1900.  It was owned by a man named English, who lived elsewhere; he subdivided the property and registered the plat as English Grove.  There were building lots along Partridge, Oriole, Gilmore, and Robin avenues to the railroad tracks.  The remainder of the land around English Grove was farms and generally of an elevation that increased to the north and west.  The drainage of the area was toward the south and east to a creek that ran along the base of the railroad property and eventually drained into the Mississippi River.

At 8572 Oriole Avenue is the house, built in 1905, where my parents lived from May of 1940 until October of 1993; my sister and I spent our formative years in that house and it is the subject of this little memoir.  One reason they bought it is that my mother’s family lived at 8569 Oriole, across the street; her mother’s sisters lived at 8565 and 8561 and they all built their houses from about 1900 to 1909.

The property is actually three building lots, each 30 feet wide and 125 feet deep, the northernmost running along Switzer Avenue.  The house is located on the center lot of the three and situated all the way back at the alley line.  This arrangement gave the maximum area in front of the house to Oriole Avenue and put them on the alley that would allow them access through the alley to the street at the closest point to Holy Cross church and Baden, the church and nearest shopping area.

The original architecture was simple.  The lot was thirty feet wide and so was the house; it consisted of two rooms, each fifteen feet square with a ceiling height of nine feet and each had a door to the outside with transom above; each also had three large windows  to allow any breeze that may be stirring to waft through the rooms.  All the windows had louvered wooden shutters that swung aside and could be closed for security.

The rooms were faced with a porch that ran the full width of the house and was six feet wide with its own roof, turned wooden railings, and stairs aligned with the door on the right. The roof was flat and sloped slightly to the rear with some ornamental dental woodwork at the front edge to give it character. The construction was frame with clapboard siding painted white; the porch rails, shutters, and trim were a dark green.

The floor was about four feet over ground level; for good reason.  The aforementioned drainage pattern resulted in a water run that passed through the lot about half-way back from the street; they didn't want a basement  to get water.

The area under the rooms was excavated by hand to contain a kitchen and a root cellar enclosed with concrete walls and four windows for ventilation.  Easy access to the outside from this kitchen consisted of six steps open to the sky but they could be covered by closing two sloping doors.  The kitchen had a wooden floor about four inches above the clay dirt.  The root cellar had a clay dirt floor, cool enough to store potatoes, carrots, and other root vegetables.  It was also used to store wine barrels that were filled annually.

On the lot to the left, as one looked out toward Oriole Avenue, were outbuildings of unpainted yellow poplar consisting of a coal and wood shed on the alley, a privy directly across from the basement steps, then a space, then the smoke-house over a fire pit, then a utility shed for tools and laundry.  All of these were contained on that one lot and grouped to the back of it for convenience and to maximize the yard area.

Centered on the stairs leading to the bedrooms was a walk to Oriole Avenue that bridged the run.  On the street side of the run was a grape arbor that went on out to the property line.  On the left lot, there were fruit trees consisting of two cherry trees, an apricot tree, and a plum tree.  The area to the right of the walk was for a vegetable garden and lawn. The area between the outbuildings and the house was paved with concrete to allow all-weather access to the outbuildings.

Summers in Saint Louis are hot and humid.  The open plan of the house allowed the occupants to take advantage of any breeze that stirred but from late afternoon until they went to bed it was difficult to stay comfortable.  A maple tree was strategically planted to shade the house from the summer sun.  It lived there until 1990, about eighty-five years, when my parents had it removed because it was becoming a safety hazard.

A major creature comfort was a large swing that hung from a sturdy frame made of 6x6's, facing Oriole Avenue, and located between the house and the tree. The couple could sit there in the shade on a hot summer afternoon and make their own breeze.  This was also used to hoist pig carcasses at slaughtering time; butchering hogs was a cooperative neighborhood event in the fall and the smoke-house was used to preserve the meat.

For two people the arrangement was more than adequate.  It allowed for work to be carried out in the kitchen, food stored in the cellar, personal needs met by the out buildings, and water from a deep well.  Much of the food consumed was raised in gardens or harvested from the trees and shared among neighbors to allow for a good variety.
 

The family that built the house eventually outgrew it.  To accommodate the larger number of people a front room was added, likewise fifteen by fifteen feet with a nine foot ceiling; the basement was likewise expanded under it.  A peaked roof with dormer windows was also added that completely changed the appearance of the house.

The room had two large windows facing Oriole Avenue and the porch was altered to wrap around the side of the new room; access to the room was through a door close to where the room intersected the original house.  The remaining original doorway to the house became the main access door to what became the kitchen.

A bathroom was added on the front of the house taking part of the now enclosed porch, allowing them to abandon the privy.  The pit was filled in but the concrete sides around it remained and may still be there..

A comic aside concerns the original chimney in the house.  My dad was doing some work on the house in the 1970’s to seal this chimney.  Poking around in it he found a brick and said something to his friend and neighbor who was a bricklayer and lived on Robin Avenue.  His friend laughed when he was told about the brick because he remembered dropping it and it fell into the chimney while they were adding to it some 50 years or so before.

This is what the house was like when my parents bought it in 1940.  It underwent major remodeling during the 53 years they lived there to finish bedrooms in the attic space and re-model the kitchen; the wooden exterior was covered by shingles, twice and my dad did most of the work himself.

My sister moved on and so did I and eventually the house required more maintenance than my parents could do.  They sold it in 1993 and moved to an apartment, then to assisted living where my dad died at the age of 90 years and 6 months.  Mom then came to live with us and died at the age of 100 years and 8 months.

The house is still there and is inhabited, at least as far as I can tell and there have been changes made.  The major apparent changes are a large gazebo in the front yard and a driveway from Oriole Avenue all the way to the alley along the south property line.

A Halloween Story

Caulfield’s was crowded on this the Saturday before Halloween. People were almost shoulder-to-shoulder in the three big rooms of the store, looking for that one item that will set them apart. Caulfield’s will be legendary in the future when it’s gone but it isn't much to write about now, an old place jammed with novelty items, now mostly for Halloween.

In a far corner of the store, I saw a little girl of about four almost lost in the crowd as she stood in front of a display.  It was a set of bars made to resemble a jail cell.  In it, behind the bars, was a bunch of ghoulishness; trap doors in the floor from under which hands appeared as if trying to get out; a door in the back that opened revealing a dreadful mummified apparition, and in the center was a full-sized casket, which was the focus of the display.  It was seemingly inert. 

All of the other stuff activated several times before the lid on the casket slowly and quietly opened; the little girl was rapt.  Then, suddenly, a floppy corpse catapulted towards her with a loud shriek, arms and legs flailing!  She became unglued, screamed, cried, and covered her face with her hands.  Her mother comforted her and she quickly regained her composure when she saw what it really was. 

 People all around her quietly laughed in amusement, especially after they saw that she had calmed down.  The floppy corpse retracted, the casket lid closed, ready to startle the next unsuspecting victim; and the crowd dissipated back into their shopping. 

A short while later, as I stood in line forever to check out, I saw the little girl again.  She seemed fine and not at all affected by her encounter with the casket.

La Devise

Le passe', c' etait
Le futur, ce sera
Le present, c'est maintenant, c'est ici, c'est tout