In the last installment of this series, Steve had started to college at IUPUI. He majored in English and History, and minored in Political Science. Steve had a couple of part-time jobs, including carpet cleaner and night watchman. I was working full-time at Lee Wards Craft Store, as a display artist. Then I took over the class program and had 10 crafters teaching 50 different classes a month.
A neighbor of Steve’s mother had a little Pekingese dog that she was getting too elderly to care for. She had a big “Beware of Dog” sign on her door, but this was the tiniest (7 lbs.), quietest little dog I’ve ever seen. She never barked. Her name was Tina Trixie and we adopted her. Trixie’s only problem was she was never properly potty trained. Even if you let her out a dozen times a day to do her business, she would still have accidents. The previous owner had let her potty on the basement floor, where she could easily wash it down the floor drain. Her poos were tiny. We did our best to train her, but she was too old to teach a new trick. One night, our daughter was sick and I scooped her up in my arms as she threw up inside my flannel gown. Then I jumped back and stepped in one of Trixie’s tiny presents, which squished through my toes. After getting the baby settled, I had to go down to the freezing cold bathroom to clean up. What a miserable memory!
Steve worked nights, went to school, and stayed home during the day with our daughter Mary Beth, while I kept working at Lee Wards. With him working so late at night, I had to keep Mary Beth up late, so she’d sleep in during the morning, allowing him to sleep in too. She got to know Johnny Carson well and remembers seeing Gilda Radner live on Saturday Night Live. It made her a night owl to this day.
After 3 years renting the half-double, the landlord decided to sell, because the steps were a challenge for him. The new owner was his realtor, who sold him a ranch-style house in the suburbs. The new owner was going to raise the rent with no improvements. We decided it would be better to just buy a little starter house because a mortgage would be cheaper than rent.
At the time, there was a program in Indy where you could buy a distressed house owned by the city for $1, if you qualified. Potential buyers got to pick several houses they’d be willing to fix up and then there was a lottery drawing. The buyers were given a list of improvements needed and had to agree to live there 10 years before they would get the deed. Unfortunately, we didn’t qualify because our income was too low — for a $1 house! You see, you had to make a certain amount of income to be able to afford to do the improvements.
We started looking, and for what we could afford, the houses were in pretty bad shape. Both of our parents had bought houses in the late 60s/early 70s and they both paid around $16,000. In 1978, prices hadn’t gone up too much yet. I remember a house for $20,000 that you could see the sky right through the hole in the roof! The realtor who bought the double we were leaving said he had a house we might consider in Irvington. Back then, Irvington was just an old neighborhood, not the high priced, desirable place it is today. The house was on south Hawthorne. The owner’s wife had divorced him and left him only a broken-down sofa, metal kitchen table with a couple chairs, and a bed. It looked dreadful. The living room had filthy sculptured olive green carpet and heavy drapes — it was very dark in there. The dining room wallpaper was so old you couldn’t tell what color it was supposed to be. The kitchen had 3 kinds of cabinets: original with no doors, metal cabinets in an island from the 50s, and some wooden ones from the 60s around the sink. The house was built in 1915. The upstairs bathroom had originally had a claw foot tub, which the owner had replaced with a fiberglass tub and surround that were a foot from the wall on both ends. Two-by-fours held up the fiberglass panels and it went right over a window. There were a couple huge holes in the plaster walls where you could see the lath underneath. The house had asbestos siding, but the porch was original clapboard and the paint had worn away. I just sat on the porch swing shaking my head NO. The price was $16,500 (better than we had seen) and we could assume his $12,000 VA loan, if we could come up with the difference. We had a family friend Rudy, who could do anything — mechanic, home improvement (you know the type), so we had him take a look. He said it’s ugly, but very well built. So we borrowed some money from both parents (that we paid back slowly) and had a little ourselves and came up with $2,700 to assume his mortgage and he accepted. He wanted out and after paying off his ex and the back payments, he cleared $50. We felt sorry for him, but the house was a mess.
The one thing we did like about the house were the huge closets (attic rooms) under all four eaves on the second floor (11 ft. long x 5 ft. wide with windows, plastered walls and lights). Even downstairs we had a hall closet, that had been a pass thru to the kitchen, that was 7 ft deep with refrigerator on the end facing the kitchen. Also, we had built-ins in the dining and living rooms. There were 3 bedrooms, living, dining, kitchen, den and 1 1/2 baths.
We moved in July of 1978. We borrowed my dad and a friend’s pickup trucks to move. I remember my grandmother’s metal wardrobe falling off the back of the truck at Washington and Emerson (it survived). Remember from the last story, the box springs that we had to break down and reassemble? Well, my sister and I did it again and I think Steve and I slept on that for another 10 years! We gave the house a good cleaning with help from Steve’s mom, who was a “mistress of clean.”
I grew up in an old house (1880s), so I was used to stripping wallpaper, plastering, hanging wallpaper (first papering job was when I was 12), and painting. I stripped the wallpaper off the living room walls (3 layers on the ceiling). The dining room had only one layer (I swear it was put on when the house was built). We had the carpet cleaned and it still looked terrible, so we called a of couple neighbors, grabbed a crowbar, and ripped up the carpet. We found beautiful hardwood floors underneath! I plastered more holes in walls than you can imagine. We wanted to replace the claw foot tub and soon after, while driving down Washington St., a guy was pulling one out onto his lawn. I had Steve stop the car, I jumped out, and he sold it to me for $50. He even delivered it to our garage! Steve had a friend who could do plumbing and they carried it in (all 300 hundred pounds of it) and I thought they would never get past the upstairs landing.
Steve and I painted the house ourselves, one side a year (starting with the front) blue with white trim. Steve climbed up on the roof to paint the dormers. (If you can imagine?) He was strong, skinny and too young to realize the risk. While painting, Steve ran into a wasp nest and he kept swatting and painting. We kept Mary Beth in the house behind the screen door until that evening, but when we opened the door, one flew in and stung her on the neck!
Our house was a fixer upper and still is. Steve was not handy with tools and neither was his father. My dad knew just enough to be dangerous. Steve and I did replace a ceiling in the den ourselves with sheets of particle board. Little by little we have made improvements.
Our new house did not have a fenced in yard, so we had to tie our little dog Trixie up by the back door, when she needed to go out. During that first winter after a big snow, she was tied outside and worked her way loose. She hopped thru the snow drifts to the alley, where a neighbor saw her get picked up by a guy walking down the alley. Our neighbor told the man who she belonged to and the man said he would take her around to the front of the house to give her to us, but he didn’t. Our daughter was heartbroken and prayed Trixie would pee on his floor, so he would bring her back.
Steve had another part-time job at Wasson’s at Eastgate Mall. His supervisor, who became a lifelong friend (Bruce Fletcher), was moving to the Boston area where his parents lived and could help him and his wife, while he finished college. He invited us to visit that summer and we went, even though I was 4 months pregnant. We had never been to the East Coast and Steve loved history, so we did all the historical things. We visited Lexington & Concord (where “the shot heard round the world” occurred, beginning the Revolutionary War), the Old North Church (build 1723 – oldest in America), Plymouth Rock, and John Quincy Adams’ house. We went to Salem and toured “The House of Seven Gables” (that inspired the book by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer our street is named after). We toured a mansion called a “Castle” in Newport, Rhode Island. We headed home after a wonderful trip.
Part 5: Tragedy on the trip home
