Down the Rabbit Hole - the fun version.
Jan. 30th, 2014 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susandennisIt all started when, this morning, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mckavian wrote about a restaurant. It had a fun name. I wasn't doing anything so I googled it. Turns out it was on a street in Oklahoma City that sounded familiar. So I went to the map. Yep, it was down the street from where my extended family lived and the teensy bit that's left still does.
I found my cousin's house. He lives in the house that my uncle built when I was 5 and my cousin was 10. They tore down the house that was on the lot and built this one from scratch. They lived in a camping trailer on the lot while it was being built. I spent many a wonderful hour in that house. My aunt was my father's sister and she was amazing. She had long fingernails that were always polished with frosted nail polish and she loved to comb and play with my hair which was fine by me. One Summer she gave me a permanent wave. My mother nearly had a coronary because it meant way more work for her until it grew out. Still makes me smile. (Zillow says it is 850 sq ft and while not for sale is worth $82,000.)
Anyway, my cousin is/was an electrician. He may have retired by now. He's not very communicative. I'm the only one in the family he talks to and we only talk when I call him which is about once a decade. He did send me a letter about 5 years ago asking for my phone number and email address to use because he was making me a trustee of a trust. About a year after that, I got a letter from his lawyer saying the lawyer was resigning the trust to be a judge. I'm not due to call my cousin again for another few years.
Anyway... Down the street and around the corner from my cousin, lived our shared grandparents. I found that easily because I have the luggage tag off my grandfather's typewriter case on my bookshelf.
My other grandparents - my mom's folks - lived a couple of blocks the other way but I couldn't remember exactly where. They moved from there to the retirement home in about 1970 so I don't have their old address.
Happily they have a very unique surname. I googled 'eisenlohr oklahoma' and up popped a census report from 1940. My mom was 17 and my grandma was 43. Wild. There they were. I went back to google and quickly found a page about my uncle - Mom's brother - on an Oklahoma history site. It had the address I was looking for.
When we were little, I remember walking this route back and forth and over and over again every summer when we would visit.
Also the street down the middle there is Western. Just above where the above map snippet is was Crown Heights Baptist Church where my Dad's parents were members and down Western about 5 blocks was Crown Heights Christian Church that my Mom's parents helped found and where Mother and Daddy were married.
Oklahoma City was not a tiny town when I was little and sure isn't today. But I had a little piece carved out north of downtown that was my whole world summer after summer.
What a fun rabbit hole and adventure du jour this all turned out to be!
mckavian wrote about a restaurant. It had a fun name. I wasn't doing anything so I googled it. Turns out it was on a street in Oklahoma City that sounded familiar. So I went to the map. Yep, it was down the street from where my extended family lived and the teensy bit that's left still does.I found my cousin's house. He lives in the house that my uncle built when I was 5 and my cousin was 10. They tore down the house that was on the lot and built this one from scratch. They lived in a camping trailer on the lot while it was being built. I spent many a wonderful hour in that house. My aunt was my father's sister and she was amazing. She had long fingernails that were always polished with frosted nail polish and she loved to comb and play with my hair which was fine by me. One Summer she gave me a permanent wave. My mother nearly had a coronary because it meant way more work for her until it grew out. Still makes me smile. (Zillow says it is 850 sq ft and while not for sale is worth $82,000.)
Anyway, my cousin is/was an electrician. He may have retired by now. He's not very communicative. I'm the only one in the family he talks to and we only talk when I call him which is about once a decade. He did send me a letter about 5 years ago asking for my phone number and email address to use because he was making me a trustee of a trust. About a year after that, I got a letter from his lawyer saying the lawyer was resigning the trust to be a judge. I'm not due to call my cousin again for another few years.
Anyway... Down the street and around the corner from my cousin, lived our shared grandparents. I found that easily because I have the luggage tag off my grandfather's typewriter case on my bookshelf.
My other grandparents - my mom's folks - lived a couple of blocks the other way but I couldn't remember exactly where. They moved from there to the retirement home in about 1970 so I don't have their old address.
Happily they have a very unique surname. I googled 'eisenlohr oklahoma' and up popped a census report from 1940. My mom was 17 and my grandma was 43. Wild. There they were. I went back to google and quickly found a page about my uncle - Mom's brother - on an Oklahoma history site. It had the address I was looking for.
When we were little, I remember walking this route back and forth and over and over again every summer when we would visit.
Also the street down the middle there is Western. Just above where the above map snippet is was Crown Heights Baptist Church where my Dad's parents were members and down Western about 5 blocks was Crown Heights Christian Church that my Mom's parents helped found and where Mother and Daddy were married.
Oklahoma City was not a tiny town when I was little and sure isn't today. But I had a little piece carved out north of downtown that was my whole world summer after summer.
What a fun rabbit hole and adventure du jour this all turned out to be!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 12:03 am (UTC)Still nice to remember where you grew up.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 12:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 02:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 10:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-01-31 10:14 pm (UTC)Break from unpacking? Your entry this morning just exhausted me. Your mean time from 'oops we need to move' to 'ahhh company comping to new house' just boggles my mind. I can't wait to see the pictures.