Onetime Home Oozes Memories

 Nothing brings back childhood memories like revisiting old haunts.

  The people who live in the North Boise home where I grew up contacted me recently to say that after 20 years there, they were putting it on the market. Would I be interested in visiting it again before the open house?

  The woman who sent the email took me on a tour of every room. None was without memories.

  Even the entryway. No one in the family ever forgot the night my mother answered the door and watched, horrified, as two of the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells threw a beachball-sized snowball into the house.

  The living room was the scene of countless memorable events. Seeing the fireplace again brought back the times my father had fruitlessly tried to start a fire there. Instead of the cozy fires he’d envisioned for Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve, the result was a room filled with smoke and spirited cursing. As happened with so many minor emergencies, it was Howard who came to the rescue.

  Howard Snyder lived just across the street. A troubleshooter for the power company, he was without a close second as the neighborhood handyman. He could be counted on to fix anything from a broken soap box derby racer to a malfunctioning lawnmower, invariably finishing the job with one of his trademark phrases:  “That’ll stop that foolishness.”

  Howard would make his way through the smoke to the fireplace, work some magic with the chimney damper and in no time the smoke had cleared. My “tour guide” said the chimney flue hadn’t been built correctly so the smoke wasn’t Dad’s fault. He’d have been happy to know that.

  The living room was where I spent countless hours curled up next to the heat register reading Hardy Boys or Tom Swift mystery stories. It was the scene of idyllic childhood Christmases. And the room where my mother sat me down, at age 16, to tell me that she and my father had both previously been married and my sister was actually my half sister. There’s a memory you don’t forget.

  The room that had changed most was the kitchen. The old china closet had been replaced with a newer one, the appliances were in different locations and the “bar” was gone.

  The “bar,” as my mother called it, was a chest-high partition that separated the rest of the kitchen from what she referred to as “the breakfast nook.” The bar had a small shelf for the toaster, which ignited another memory.

  My great grandmother Susie occasionally came to visit from her home in Notus, sometimes staying for a week or more. She had long hair that normally was in a bun. On the morning of the toaster incident however, it was bun-less and reached almost to her waist. She was leaning against the bar, and, unknown to her some of her hair had fallen into the toaster – along with bread that was being toasted. The result was a highly successful blaze.

  Grandma Susie was a jolly old soul. When the fire was extinguished, she sat down and laughed.

  “I’ve lived a long time (she was pushing 90) and have had lots of things happen to me,” she said,  but I never thought I’d catch my hair on fire.”

  Then she laughed some more.

  The largest room in the basement of my onetime home is now a family room. When we lived there, it was a “recreation room.” Recreation rooms, “rec rooms” for short, were popular in those days.

  Its centerpiece was a ping pong table, initially used for ping pong but later for my model railroad. Every boy in the neighborhood had one of those. The two most popular brands were Lionel and American Flyer.

  I was a Lionel kid. Its trains were bigger and heavier. Standing mesmerized in the darkened recreation room, one hand on the transformer controls, the only lights those of the locomotive headlight and the red and green signal lights along the track, is one of my favorite childhood memories.

  All kids do stupid things. Arguably my stupidest was nearly burning one of the neighbor’s garages down. Its owner, a Dr. Paulson, kept a table saw in the garage. Under it was an enormous pile of sawdust. In what can only be described as a temporary lack of sanity, I tossed a lighted match on it.

  The result was instantaneous, and terrifying. In less time than it took a horrified Dr. Paulson to come running with a garden hose, flames were licking the garage walls.

  Luckily, he was able to extinguish them before any real damage was done. His next act was to head to the Woodward residence to tell my father what his birdbrained son had just done. Unable to catch me to administer a spanking, Dad chased me around his Buick in the garage, occasionally delivering a kick in the seat of the pants. To my surprise, one of my chalk drawings still remains on one of the garage walls. 

  One of the rooms in the basement of the old house has been converted to an office. It used be the furnace room. 

  In my teens, I slept in the room next to it, Early one morning, the furnace malfunctioned. I awoke to the sounds of clanking and cursing, followed by my father emerging from the furnace room with a bucket of flaming coal clinkers on the end of a shovel. His contorted face was framed in smoke and illuminated by a fiery red glow. It was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

  Most of the memories about the old house, of course, aren’t fiery. They’re almost uniformly positive. It was a wonderful place, and a wonderful time, to grow up.

  To its most recent owners, thanks for the tour.

  And the memories. 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com