Susan Recalls Denfield St and Oak Ridge

I was born in 1953. I really have no memories to share to speak of from those early days. I have one vague memory from Denfield Street. I’m standing on a gate watching people load a moving truck. For years that memory was clear as a bell, and of course it’s fading now. So obviously we were leaving Denfield. My earliest memory after that is from the trip to Oakridge. I believe that was the summer of 1956 because I turned three in Oak Ridge. I remember being in the car, and looking forward to the next motel. I remember David feeding a horse and getting bitten. That horrified me and probably made me afraid of horses the rest of my life. They are so big! I remember Beth falling and splitting open her chin or her tongue in the lobby of a hotel/motel. It was very traumatic in my mind, with blood. I have a vague recall of Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. That also is fading. My picture of the place we lived in Oak Ridge was in a long row of houses on a grassy hill. The hill sloped down to a lower area and then back up to another row of houses. I got my first bee sting in Oak Ridge. I remember Daddy carrying me sobbing up to his and moms bed. They put baking soda and water on my bee sting and asked me what would make me feel better? I asked for a banana, I remember that, and it tasted so good. I also remember fireflies, which I had never seen and seemed completely magical! 

Following on Susan’s remembrance of the housing at Oak Ridge, I found this picture. I recall that we were in a building with two wings–an entry in the middle. It may have been two stories. And I think the center entry was ‘gabled’. Our quarters were to the right as you entered. We had a big sitting room with windows that looked out onto a grassy open area with another similar building across the way. There was a ‘not very big’ tree in the middle of that patch. One night a terrible thunderstorm arose. We all came and sat on Mom’s bed and watched the storm out the window. At one point, lightning hit the tree and blasted it to pieces. We were terrified. Nick? Sue?

Type D housing at Oakridge.

I am very happy to have Susan’s contributions. I am hoping that maybe Nick will chime in as well. We moved from Denfield to Montgomery Dr. in 1955 just before school started–my report card anchors that date. I was five and started First Grade at Cathedral. We went to Oak Ridge, as Susan says, in the summer of ’56. I had to come back early from Tennessee with Gommy on the train because I had to start Second Grade at St. Thomas More. Drove all the way across the country in the green Plymouth station wagon. On the way, as Susan recalls, Beth split some part of her mouth on a barstool in a Boise motel. We also had to get off the road early on one day because there was a tornado in the distance. And I did have my hand bitten by a horse in Kentucky close to the end of our journey; entirely my fault. I curled my hand while feeding him hay.

Halfway through Binder A–A Puzzle

I was able to carve out some time late this afternoon to go back to Binder A, scan some more pictures, and do a small amount of sorting. Some things had definitely gotten out of order in the years since Dad put this together. I was not dismayed–part of the pleasure of doing this work is to find things that are not clear and to try to make them clear without skewing the information in the direction of my own interpretation.

This became clearly apparent around page 17 of the binder. I came to a picture of a group of kids sitting on the floor of the Denfield kitchen. I pulled the picture out (gloves on of course) and scanned it. the date was June 55 and the back of the picture said it was my birthday party. I did think that the girl in the foreground was probably my long lost friend Bobby, and that the boy staring at the camera was probably Herby Ernster or Jimmy Price. However, June 55 would have been a strange time to celebrate my December birthday. The picture also showed a younger Porter child. I am pretty sure it is Susan whose birthday would have been at that time. Looking at the photo stirred my memories. A handful of Dad’s hand-written photo captions were all together between the sleeves. Clearly this material had been organized differently at some point and then had been inadvertently disordered. I could deduce from some of the captions which picture they might belong with. There was a caption referencing “Susan’s birthday party” which led me to believe my suspicion about the one photo. There were also pictures that leaped years ahead of the narrative in the binder. I decided to stop where I was, write this brief commentary, and then come back to it at some future point.

The challenge of sharing Dad’s legacy

David Dodican Porter and Geraldine Isabel Helen Byrne are star-crossed lovers. Happily, their story is not a tragedy. Romance, drama, comedy, mystery, history and every other genre you can imagine was folded into the batter once they met and began their lives together. There were small tragedies as there are in all lives of real people. But viewed over the span of decades, the story is triumph and joy and wonder.

Dad created a lot of binders with immense amounts of content about our family. And of course there is a framework underlying everything. I almost immediately realized that the two Family of Dave and Gerry binders were divided between the older and younger halves of the family. Binder A is full of material largely about David through Brian. Binder B is material about the second half of the family. The front pocket of Binder A has a coversheet all made for a Binder C. I am not sure but Dad may have thought there would be other offspring. Or perhaps he was going to start through the grandchildren.

I have been puzzling how to share in a meaningful way. Binder A has 30 pages, each with two sides. I am estimating each sheet has an average of 5 photos. I don’t think it’s practical for me to pull individual pictures, scan them, replace them, and upload the images. My inclination is to photograph the sleeves with their contents so that they can be paged through. If someone wants a copy of something, I can make that available to them (also no small task–so no requests yet, please). In order to keep the page images from being hard to figure out (as in who’s in the pictures), I can provide an index with what I know or surmise for each page. If I do a page a day, I’d guess that I’d be through Binder A in June sometime. That’s a step from where we are now at least.

Denfield St. 1950-1955

The house on Denfield St was built in early 1950. Dad’s account of Denfield St and many memories starts on page 136 of Going Upstream. He states that he thinks turning the carport into an extra bedroom may have been in 1954 with the prospect of housing four children. I have vague memories of the construction project. The room was heated by an electric wall heater whose coils glowed orange white. I remember being admonished to keep my hands away from it. Other parts of Dad’s narrative about those years dovetails with my own memories. For example, I remember packing picnics and going out on Sunday afternoons to watch planes take off and land at “the airport”. I have always tried to place in my memory whether it was the Hillsboro airport, but in fact it was one of the small dirt strip airports of the time–just blocks from our house. I also remember going to the China Lantern to eat. I liked to get their fried chicken—not so much the Chinese food. I have a picture in my mind of the booths being lit by overhead ‘lanterns’. I don’t have any memory of Dad’s story about people getting glass in their salad. I remember the project to ‘float’ the oil tank out of its hole. Nick and I were very interested in this effort. First Dad dug the hole with the help of friends exposing the tank. And then filled the hole with water so that it floated up as he’d envisioned. The weakness of the plan was that the tank, even floating, was still largely underwater. That made dad’s plan of using ropes to winch it out a major undertaking. I remember that the tank, floating like a mini submarine in its muddy hole in the yard, was there for what seemed a long time. Once it was finally wrested from the hole, the water remained and didn’t drain away. I don’t know if Dad filled the hole or not. Another memory I have that ties to Dad’s narrative is of the empty lot down the street–my recollection says it was at the end of our street. As construction was still going on, big tractors and other construction equipment were often parked there on weekends. Dad recounts going with us and sitting us up on the big machines, and there is a picture in Binder A showing us so seated. My memory, though is that I climbed up on one of the tractors when we were playing. I pushed a button on the console and the machine started to turn over. Which scared the daylights out of me! Dad came running and all turned out well. One other memory of the field is that it was overgrown and we had worn paths through it. While running down the path, a very large black snake slithered across at my feet. That also scared me and I’ve been afraid of snakes in tall grass ever since.

I have many more memories of that time however. Dad’s story about entering the Christmas decorating contest and winning a prize for the colored cellophane and tape ‘stained glass’ Christmas scene makes me wonder if my own fondness for the idea of making ‘stained glass’ windows and holiday decoration started there. Without question, Mom was often doing creative projects in those days. I don’t remember this specifically, but when we were older at Montgomery Drive, she had ‘stained glass’ oil paper windows we could color. We used olive oil and I always remember that smell when I recall those projects. Another of Mom’s creative activities was a ceramics class. I think she took it one night a week at some local place, maybe a school. I remember being puzzled by what it was about until the night she brought home her project —a clown head cookie jar which she’d painted and fired herself. It was quite good and I still can envision cookies in it. Another memory I have must have been very early after moving to Denfield. I was still in a crib–because I see the crib bars in my memory. I was in the back bedroom at the house, which had a wall paper trim above wainscoting. I think the paper was not a pattern on the whole wall but it had figures like fairies or elves and foliage in it. I would not remember any of this except that one morning–with light dancing on the wall through the curtains, I believed the tiny figures were moving on the wall paper. I don’t know if I started to cry or called for mom but I was scared and she came in and soothed me.