Page 60 - People & Places In Time

Growing Up In Exeter
This is where it starts; here at 106 West Palm Street in Exeter, California. I will begin to walk, then run, there will be family and friends, success and disap- pointment, teachers, coaches, classmates, teammates and girlfriends; learning to drive, to fall in love, only to find this will come with broken hearts as well, there will come success along with disappointment, great joy coupled with great loss . . . so now it begins.
106 West Palm Street
Today, as I drive past my first home, it’s clear that there have been changes; still, it remains the house we moved into during my first summer, in 1945. The roof line is different, and the front porch is enclosed into the house. The driveway and Mrs. Carroll’s garage are there, but her house on the corner looks way different. Mrs. Carroll owned the three houses on this corner and as such was our landlady. The other house she owned, facing ‘B’ Street and behind her home is where the Voice family lived; it’s gone. Replaced with a nondescript apartment building that extends clear to the alley, wip- ing out the vacant lot behind these three houses that tied them together, my playground.
The house belonging to the Cofelt family is gone as well, this house was located across Palm from us and faced ‘B’ street, across from my grandparents. The house as I recall sat four or five feet off the ground, with a broad set of wood steps to a covered front porch the width of the house. With its un-painted, board and bat siding, I imagined that it could have been dropped on to its lot from an old western movie set. With little landscape, mostly patches of grass and dirt and a small barn at the alley that served as a garage, this house I know was one of the oldest houses in town; it should have been preserved. Now the whole southwest corner of Palm and ‘B’ streets and nearly to Pine is replaced with more apartments; several of Exeter’s oldest homes along ‘B’ Street with their covered porches were demol- ished to make way. Abe Taub’s beautiful home at the corner of Main and ‘B’ survived longer than the others but in time it has been replaced by one more Mexican restaurant . . . and so, we progress.
As for who might have lived in our old home
through succeeding years, or who may own these homes today, none have offered the care my dad had put into our house. So many of the neighborhoods that I remember fondly have been allowed to deteriorate.
This all prompts me to comment as dis- appointed as it leaves me, I can’t make people care; perhaps they just don’t know how.
During the ten years we lived in the Palm Street house my father was continuously building new or repairing something old that broke, all the time work- ing tirelessly in the yard. The lattice covered and brick paved patio he built, is where so many birthday parties and weekend barbeques were had. There was the brick incinerator with its steel door, placed in the back corner of our lot; I offer this because it was so different from any I’ve ever seen, and of course, beautifully made.
Then as I mentioned earlier, there was a large patch of dirt behind the three houses that Dad eventu- ally leveled, then planted in grass. This rescued dirt lot lay just outside the picket fence enclosing our back
yard that dad had also built. I could go out a gate in the fence to just beyond our driveway for access to a space all my own, except for moms’ clothesline. This secluded yard was at once a football field, where I had built crude goal posts, a baseball diamond, even a racetrack . . . whatever I needed this plot of grass to become.
Bert and Velma Voice
Through our rear gate and across the grass field was a well warn path to the back yard of the Voice home. Bert and Velma Voice lived here and were close friends with Mom and Dad. Each family pretty much came and went between the other’s back door as if
their own. Velma was one of the finest artists I have ever know. Her porcelain work was without a doubt better than any I’ve seen in museums around the world; she would eventually quit because the work was so physi- cally and mentally taxing. Bert worked for the Bank of America, as he advanced within the company his job would take the family to Tulare, Visalia then Arvin and ultimately to San Francisco; it was a successful career.
I know that my dad and Burt didn’t invent the barbeque, but they sure did a lot of it between our
Visalia Municipal Hospital in the 1940’s
houses. First using a hole in the ground, which they covered with a steel oven shelf as a grill. What my Dad eventually did build, was a barbeque not unlike the Webber barbeques of today. I’ve kept and maintained his creation and continue to use it nearly seventy years later.
Sadly, this path existed for only a few years and is long since erased, but their friendship lasted far be- yond a dirt path, it lasted their lifetimes. When Bert did retire from Bank of America in San Francisco, they built a beautiful home in Fresno that I visited from time to time when I was also living in Fresno. Also, on occasion I took friends to their home and the first thing I would show them was Velma’s porcelain work displayed in glass cases, all were as suitably impressed as me.
There was one last opportunity for Mom and Velma to meet, this happened a few years following the death of both my father and Bert. I drove my mother up to Fresno and met Velma for lunch at Estrada’s Mexican
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