The Sycamore Street Neighborhood - Part 1

I don’t remember when we moved to East Sycamore Street, but I think of the official date as being that which was written in wet cement by Don and me when the floor of the garage was poured. We etched the words into the top step of the stairwell, “Don & Joe, May 1950“. The stairs descended into the basement at the back of the garage, providing the only access to the house from the garage. The words were still there nearly fifty years later when Mom sold the house in 1996. Like words on a tombstone, they had faded with time, and were barely readable - you had to know where to look.

Don and I changed schools in the fall of 1949, from Riley to Central, but continued to live in the Lafountain Street house for most, if not all, of that school year. I would guess the move happened shortly after we etched our names in cement - probably at the start of summer.

Our new home, located on the east edge of town, sat about a hundred yards past the city limits. A sign there stated “Welcome to Kokomo, Population 38,672”. We were in the country, but just barely. An old orchard lay on our west side. It was sandwiched between our house and the neighbors. The Stock family owned the orchard, and had sold an acre of their shrinking farm to Mom and Dad. They retained four or five acres, most of it unfenced pasture.

The newly constructed U.S. 31 by-pass around Kokomo lay a couple hundred feet to the east. Our driveway ran along the east of the house, passing the side door and porch, before turning into the garage That door was our main entrance; we hardly used the front. To the east, a lone house sat on a small rise overlooking the bypass. Open fields lay between and behind us. We had a panoramic view of the countryside from our porch - at least for a few years.

The Schofield family lived directly across the road. A couple of houses sat between them and the by-pass. The one adjacent to theirs was torn down within a year. I have little memory of it other than it was large with a big front porch - a stately building in its better days. The structure had seemed adequate and so a puzzlement momentarily flitted through my mind as to why a perfectly good house would be sacrificed. I did not waste much time with that conundrum since none of the occupants were our age and thus of no interest to Don and me.Our lot measured eighty feet along Sycamore, and ran north for five hundred feet, nearly to Jefferson, the next street over. The houses on Jefferson sat on normal sized lots that backed up to ours with no indication of boundaries - not a fence in sight. The area stretched toward town for nearly a half-mile, from the by-pass to Calumet Street - one large open field. The land had been pasture with only a few houses dotted along Sycamore, but things started to change shortly after we moved. Dad and Mr. Stock began the sectioning in 1952 when they worked together building a wire farm-fence that ran from Sycamore to the back of our joint properties. The land was partitioned within a few years, new houses appeared on Sycamore, businesses started to spring up along the by-pass. The area changed quite a bit by 1960 and has been completely transformed by now. You wouldn’t recognize it.
GO TO: Part 2, The Stock family