MOVING

When I was almost 5 years old, my family moved to a house in University City. The housing shortage in the St. Louis area after World War II was easing. In addition, a regulation was changed so that school teachers in the city of St. Louis were no longer forced to live in the city. My father taught in St. Louis, so now he was able to buy a house in the suburbs.

Here is a picture of the University City city hall, courtesy of pr9000 on Flickr.




Our new house was a few blocks from the city hall. It had a lot of rooms. The front door led to the reception hall, which was just a room where you could take off your coat and say hello. There was a window seat in the reception hall. You could sit on it, or you could open up the bench and put things into it. Sometimes we kept our record player and a couple of chairs in the reception hall. There were a living room, that had a fireplace, a dining room, kitchen, and two sunrooms. One was very tiny and was my father's study. The other one was bigger, and was our playroom. The kitchen was big and had a pantry. The toilet was in a little room all by itself, and the sink was outside in a little hallway. All the rooms had hot-water (not steam) radiators with marble tops.
Upstairs there were three bedrooms that were pretty big, and one tiny one. When we first moved in, my parents had a boarder. That is, there was an extra person who lived with us. He got the big bedroom and paid rent to help my parents pay for the big house. Our boarder was a teacher friend of my father, who never had a house of his own. He always boarded with other people. So the first year, my sister, then 8 years old, and I shared the third biggest bedroom, and my brother, who was just a little baby, had the tiny bedroom. After one year, our boarder went to live somewhere else, so my parents got the biggest room, my sister and I the next biggest, and my brother the third biggest bedroom. The tiny one was now a spare room. We had a sewing machine in it, and a little extra bed. The bathroom upstairs also had the toilet in a separate tiny room by itself, with the sink and bathtub/shower in a bigger room.
There was also a basement. The most interesting thing about it was that there was a fireplace, but it wasn't a real one. It had green and orange light-bulbs in it instead of a place for a fire. Also, there were poles that held the basement ceiling up, and I like to hold on to them and spin around and around. Our washing machine was in the basement, but it did NOT have a wringer. It was a modern, 1950 model.



Our family in our new house, about 1951.