And how long did you stay there?
A (single wide) trailer bought used and moved next to my grandparent’s house from when I was born until I was 4. I was the first-born child and my parents were both new teachers of extremely modest means at the time so that was the best solution. It was powder blue and decked out in a very worn late 1960’s interior with the tackiest period decor you can imagine but I loved it and it was all I knew at the time. My parents were long-haired Southern hippies and had some wild parties there that they didn’t anticipate I would still remember to this day. My grandparent’s house was very nice and I could toddle over to it and hang out as soon as I could walk so it wasn’t like we were living in a trailer park.
We built our real house on a huge chunk of land in the woods a couple of miles down the road before I even started kindergarten. I loved that house more than anything but I still have a soft spot in my heart for that old trailer.
It was a red house in Evanston until I was 4.
When I was born we lived in an old apartment building that no longer exists. We moved from there before I was a year old, but I remember the stairway going up to our apartment. And I very much remember the botanical garden across the street, which is still there, though I haven’t been back.
I lived in the house my parents bought not too long after they got married; they had been there close to 20 years by the time I arrived. I lived there for nearly 26 years, until I got married.
When I was born in 1948, my parents were renting a room from a woman who lived in a big old house. I think we lived there less than a year. My father was in the Air Force and we proceeded to move all over the country for the next 15 or so years. When my dad retired from the service in 1964, we moved back to the city where I was born.
In 1981 I moved to an apartment across the street from that first house-- the area was now a historic district. One day I walked across the street (where two lawyers now lived and were rehabbing the house) with a handful of my baby pics taken in and around the house and said, “Want to see some pictures of your house in 1948?” Hehe. They were pretty tickled.
BTW, that very first landlady, God rest her soul, saved my 6-month old life when I was choking on a little piece of cardboard and my newly minted parents didn’t know what to do.
I’m not sure where, but I know I had my own womb.
It was a farm house on a dairy farm.
The kind of dairy farm that today would be called artisanal, range grazed, naturally bred dairy farm.
My childhood home had been owned by my great-great-grandparents. My great-grandfather, after losing his wife, was greatly disinclined to labor, and the house became a wreck. When my grandfather moved back to the country he rebuilt it. When I was a child it still had a dirt floor in the cellar, wood-burning stoves, and a functioning outhouse. Hand-hewned beams in the living room. My parents made regular improvements. (My father sold the outhouse to a neighbor who wanted something quaint.) My wife pronounced she would never live in it, so we sold it when I inherited it after my parents’ deaths.
It kind of depends on what one would call “home.” I was born in Brooklyn in 1927, and have no record of where I lived in the first three years.
However, I do have a record of the places I lived (all apartments) from age three to 18 when went tn the army. We lived in 32 different places. I lived at one time or another in all the Boroughs of NYC except Staten Island, in MA, CT, NY, VT. When I was five, my mother (my parents were divorced by then) and I got on a Greyhound bus and went from VT to CA. There I lived in L.A. Long Beach and Victorville, then back east. All this was during the Greaat Depression, and mom was trying to the best she could.
After getting out of the Army in 1947, went to college in VT, then back to CA and from then on I lived all over and don’t have a record. During the Korean War I was stationed in Japan where I married a lovely Japanese woman. We did rent a house, and that was the first time i actually lived in a house, so does that count? We lived there for two years, then we went back to VT where I got a job on a newspaper, but lived in a little apartment. Then got a job with the State and moved to another partment again.
I worked two jobs for nine months and saved enough to make a down payment on a house. It was a 150-year house on four acres, and we bought it for $5700, which was cheap even then. We lived there for 12 years and completely renovated it ourselves.
So, as far as i am concerned, that was the first real home I ever had, and I was 24 by then.
We then moved to get a higher paid job. We bought five other houses since then, and now I hope to God I never have to move again.
Rental house on Manu-Mele Street in Kailua, Hawaii. We moved when my dad got orders to Parris Island, SC a little less than 3 years later (1969).
We moved out of our first house before I was old enough to remember it. I do remember.my second, a two-bedroom cottage.
First was married student housing at Syracuse University. I guess we lived there for a year or so but I don’t remember it. I do remember the next apartment, and the shared farmhouse in Schaghticoke, NY. When I was three or so we bought our first house.
An apartment somewhere in Cleveland 1964-66–somewhat less than 2 years, since I know we moved to the house I grew up in before my second birthday. We lived there until I was 17.
A little two-bedroom stucco-sided house. Still remember the address (137 Third Street) and a house remains there to this day, albeit not the same house. Lived there until I was 8, and it is still ‘home’ to me.
For the first year and a half of my life I lived with my parents in a little apartment in Inglewood, California. In 1965 we moved to a three bedroom house that they bought where I lived until I left for college. It’s the first place I remember.
A summer cottage built by my grandfather in the 1940’s on the beach on Lake Michigan, it was converted into a year round home soon after, and my parents moved into it after marrying, and it was my first home, 1957-1964. After my folks moved us out of it when my dad got promoted and transferred, it became my grandparent’s vacation/retirement home. I continued to spend vacations and summers in it.
After Grandma passed away in 1980 it became my parents’ weekend and vacation home. When my dad tarted his retirement planning in 1983, they lifted the house up and moved it 1/4 mile west, to the top of a high bluff on our farm, overlooking the old house site, woods, and the Lake. Then they lived in the old house as they built a larger home on the spot of the original house.
Eventually my wife and I and our daughter moved in to the old place once the new house was done, living there in 1986-87. It was rather jarring to be inside my childhood home, where the interior was the same, but the view from the windows was completely different.
We moved out in 1987 when I got a different job. The old house got rented out.
By 1995 my parents had died, so we moved up into the new house on the Lake, and I took over ownership of it and our old house too. It’s still there on its different spot, rented out to the same gent who moved in back in 1987. I go in once in a while to do odd jobs. It’s a real blast from the past.
The first place was in Gander, Newfoundland, where my father was posted in the early 50s, in a WW2 barracks block left over from when the airport was a major base on the North Atlantic air transport network, and converted to apartments post war. We lived there from shortly after I was born to when I was two, and the only memory I have is of sitting with a friend on the stairs up to the second floor where our apartment was.
Our second place was a rented house, also in Gander, where most of my memories are of the outside and surroundings. There was an old Ford in the backyard that Dad used for spare parts for our car, which made a great place to play Mounties and such for me and my friends. The “deep” (over MY head) ditches along the road were great for sailing homemade boats, especially in spring when the snowmelt produced a fast current. We could chase boats the length of the road, only occasionally risking soakers when we had to wade into the water to free a boat from where it had gotten stuck in one of the culverts under a driveway.
My grandparents house, Danville VA., with my mother from July 1944-late 1945. My dad was in the Pacific at the time. Then to the Pickett Homes in Arlington VA. until late 1947. They were WWII temp housing and sucked, but I was so young I didn’t care. Parents bough house in 1947 in Arlington, lived there for 56 years, two kids still live there.
An tenement apartment that was a craphole even by the standards of the day but we managed to improve our lot shortly after I was born. Not by a lot but better.