Our Lafountain Street Home in the 1940's, Part 1

There are some numbers that will stick with me all my life. One of those is 4859. That was our telephone number. In those days all phone numbers had four digits. The more familiar seven digit number didn’t appear until the fifties, and the Area Code expanded it to ten digits some years later. There was no direct dialing for long distance calls. A caller reached an operator by dialing zero. The person would then tell the operator, “I would like to make a ‘person-to-person’ or ‘station-to-station’ call to…” and then give the city, state and phone number. The “person-to-person” calls were to a specific person, and were thus more expensive. Long distance was relatively expensive, so it was only used for important calls - no idle chit-chat. Another number I’ll never forget is 1240. That is the address of our home on north Lafountain Street in Kokomo, Indiana. I was less than one year old in 1941 when we moved, so it is the first home I remember. Our street was lined with maple trees (green on photo below). They grew on each side of the street in an area between the curb and the sidewalk. Their branches reached to the middle of Lafountain forming a shady canopy the full length of our block. We had almost no front yard, and it took only a couple of strides from the sidewalk to reach the front porch steps. Four or five steps lead up to a covered front porch that ran nearly the width of the house. There was a swing on the right side. It was suspended from the porch ceiling, and produced a slow rhythmic grind when anyone was sitting in it. The front door was in the middle and opened into the living room.

Mom and Dad purchased the house for $1,500. It was the first they ever owned. I don’t know when it was built, but I’d guess it was sometime in the 1920’s. It was one story with a basement. There was an outside entrance to the basement from the back yard. Double doors (yellow) covered its entrance. They were nearly horizontal to the ground when closed, angling slightly up toward the house to shed rain. When the doors were swung open the steps that lay under them were exposed. This type of entrance was common in the those days, but is seldom seen anymore. There was a back door from the kitchen, and a side door from the dining room that opened to an alley that ran beside the house. They sided the house with cedar shingles and stained them gray shortly after we moved there. There was an apricot tree (orange) in the back corner of our yard, but the salient feature was a grape arbor (purple) that covered the walk from the kitchen door to the garage. It was twenty-five feet long and heavy with juicy Concord grapes at the end of every summer. I remember the arbor being filled with neighborhood kids, hanging like monkeys - with one hand full of grapes and holding on with the other. Once we returned from a vacation to find the vines stripped, and the walk stained purple by grape skins spit out by marauding grape eaters.

GO TO: Part 2