Things you've learned about home after you left

[Zeldar]

Over the 50 years since I have been away from Montgomery, Alabama, I have run across all sorts of news about the place and its environs.

None has been more surprising than one I just discovered within the hour.

http://www.auburnastro.org/wetu.htm has details of a meteor crater within a few yards of where I went swimming as a kid. Harrogate Springs it was. Near Wetumpka. See the map.

To think that all this would be something I'd discover on Wikipedia while just bopping around looking for trivia!

Anything like this discovery happened to you about your old stomping grounds?

[Tamex]

I don't know if I would classify this as something I learned about "home", but a mystery about a place I used to pass frequently was cleared up for me this weekend by bopping around Wikipedia.

There's a neighborhood just off of Marshall St. NE in Minneapolis that has always puzzled me. Most of the houses in the area are older...I'm not sure how old, but probably build in the 40's or 50's, if not before. However, this one neighborhood right on the Mississippi River looks like something out of the suburbs, with cul-de-sacs and larger houses built in the 1970's. I've always wondered why this entire neighborhood, which is close to the St. Anthony Main area, one of the oldest parts of the city, looked so new, and what had happened to whatever (if anything) was there before.

Then, Wikipedia told me. The previous houses had been torn down in preparation to build Interstate 335. The project was canceled in 1978, the road was never built, and that neighborhood was built in its place.

[Zeldar]

Yes, Tamex, that's the sort of thing I was hoping others might find fun to discuss. As I was reading your description I had the suspicion it would turn out that the new area was built over a toxic landfill or hazardous chemical spill or maybe even a mass murder site. Your answer makes equally good sense and is much easier to excuse for people building there and then not moving in.

I can't remember exactly where in Alabama it's located, but one of those "bridges to nowhere" like the recent one in Alaska was a major scandal back in the 50's or so. Pure pork for a political favor-granter. Such scandals were a dime a dozen in those days. One candidate for governor even bragged, "Of course I'll steal from the Treasury. Why else would anybody run for office?"

My main point to the thread and OP was to point to the fact that many things tend to make the back pages of the newspapers or, as in this case, appear in college scholarship papers, that escape the notice of readers in distant places where those papers may not be in easy reach.

Something as old as 1997-2002 might have caught my eye sometime in the intervening years, but my best guess is that Tennessee news sources wouldn't have made much of it. If they did, I missed it.

[teela brown]

In my hometown there was a mysterious, mostly hidden large home on a hilltop which had been there for decades. Oddly, it was surrounded by blue-collar small suburban homes, and I suppose it was a holdover from the 1920s, as it was one of those crumbling Norma Desmond-like Italianate mansions.

I moved away from home about 1986. A few years ago, I heard about the Phil Spector murder incident - it was in Alhambra, my hometown. I called my brother and asked where in Alhambra (a rather lower-middle-class town) would someone like Phil Spector live? He said "In that big weird spooky Italian mansion over in the west side of town." Wow! Bizarre. I didn't know that place was actually inhabited, but I suppose if anyone would live there, it would be psycho Phil Spector.

What's happening with his trial, anyway?

[Karyn]

This may sound dumb but once I left I learned that I really had been brought up in slums and lived in poverty by other people's standards. When it's all you really know first hand and all your friends live the same way it seems normal. It wasn't all that bad, just ugly, we never went hungry or had to dress out of free boxes and that's what we thought of as poor. Somehow I doubt that the south Bronx has improved in the 30+ years since I left.

[Black Sunshine]

Probably not what you're looking for, but how freaking flat it is! I grew up in Illinois and always joked about places like Kansas being flat.

Then I moved to Kentucky. The first time I went home was right after harvest time, so all the corn was down. I'd just never noticed the flatness before.

[Zeldar]

Originally Posted by Black Sunshine

Probably not what you're looking for, but how freaking flat it is! I grew up in Illinois and always joked about places like Kansas being flat.

Then I moved to Kentucky. The first time I went home was right after harvest time, so all the corn was down. I'd just never noticed the flatness before.

This reminds me of the last time I was on a plane. 1970. Trip to Chicago in the dead of winter for a week-long class. I was sick with a bad cold and fever the whole trip but that's just something I remember that's beside the point.

The plane left Chicago for home before sundown and as we climbed to flying altitude I first noticed the dome of smog hovering over Chitown and surrounding area, probably 20-30 mile diameter. Blue-gray in color.

Then I began noticing the absolute lack of trees and bushes. Just flat land with some houses and barns and roads and snow-covered fields. It stayed that way all across Illinois and Indiana and looked as flat as an ironing board.

Almost at the state line with Kentucky trees started appearing and hills started cropping up. Within 10 miles of the border it was dark with foliage against the snow. All the way back to Nashville I was so glad to be away from all that flat and barren.

[NinjaChick]

Similar to what's been said, I never realized quite how built-up the Philadelphia area is until I moved out to New Mexico. The difference between the air approach to Albuquerque and Philadelphia is remarkable, especially at night. Coming in to Philly there are lights for miles and miles and miles beneath you; coming into Albuquerque there's so much dark.

[gigi]

My Mom was a really, really good cook.

[Zeldar]

Originally Posted by gigi

My Mom was a really, really good cook.

Mama was okay as a cook, but there were some things she fixed that were so specially hers that I miss not having them her way. My brother is a good cook and his opinion of Mama's cooking is that it was pretty bad, but I guess I don't suffer from being a good cook myself.

I have yet to find a lemon meringue pie to beat hers. And there was just something about her bacon that was special. No grease, crisp. Best BLT's ever.

What I really miss, though, are the yeast dinner rolls my aunt made. And her pecan divinity.

[Fiddle Peghead]

While not specifically about my home, I learned years after leaving my hometown of Radford, VA in 1987 that the most well-known porn star of the late 70's and the 80's, and possibly of all-time, namely Seka, was born there in 1954. And although I can't confirm this, I have it on good authority that the first girl I ever kissed "for real" was her cousin.