Going Home

Holy smokes, Mike Happy's article on Christmas Eve was heart warming.....a few homes on Doebel lit up and a little festivity.....sad the Harper and Van Dyke area was not the same....my old area only a mile or so down Van Dyke is like a deserted island in the pacific ocean....last time I looked I could not find one single business except for a gas station open around H and VD.....all of VD, Harper, Townsend, Miller, Georgia, the old streets were boarded up and abandoned......it seemed eerie to me....it was like visiting a planet in outer space and seeing nothing but sand and rocks....whatever life is left there surely is trying to get out....I would not walk those streets unless I had a six car police escort. Eddie's and Paul's bar on the corner of Carrie and Miller flattened and nothing but a lot there now...how many times did I pick up my dad a little "looped" from those two places in the 60s.....
The old boarded up Eastown theatre looks like a building you would see from Lebanon on a tv screen now....word was back in the 90s local riff raff tried to burn it down on devil's night but it was built so good back in the 30s it would not burn!!!!
I remember there was a little veranda on the top of the Eastown building where the camera man would stand out on during a film and you could see all over Harper and Vandyke from that perch.....it rotted and fell down many moons ago....
There may be more life on mars than at Lodge playfield on Georgia and Van Dyke....so many years ago they flooded two ice rinks there during the winter and we played hockey there until the ice melted in the spring....after skating it was down to Cunninghams on Harper and VD for a hamburger, fries, and a hot fudge sunday....then we would stand at the magazine rack for an hour and read all the magazines and put them back down...that was so long ago they had Playboy on the racks!!!!
Then if the weather cooperated a little bit during the winter all my baseball buddies who just loved the game would venture over to Cooper elementary and we would play BB in 35-40 degree weather just like it was the summer...some of the neighbors would look out at us and thought we were nuts playing BB during such cold. Returning home from Vietnam in Sept 1967 I saw as many for sale signs on H and VD as you are seeing now from the housing recession and all the foreclosures. It was stunning....
It was as they say "the beginning of the end".....so sad.....Mike Brachakowski********

Did you take the picture attached to your web article "Oh, little star"? If so, how did you get the image(fast shutter speed or small appeture, or both?

No, it's just some clip art.

Christmas in the old neighborhood.Maybe it's because I was a youngster then, and we only "got" gifts.Guess it helped being the Oldest Grandkid ,and still one of 5 grandkids then. 9 aunts and uncles on 1 side alone! As time went on that grew to 13 aunts and uncles, so , gifts increased for a short time anyways untill a heck of a lot more grandkids came to be.
Remember the winter Snowstorms back then? Seems like there was a lot more snow than nowdays.I can remember playing in 4-5ft snowdrifts along the Airport fence along French Rd. I can remember Bumper hitching on cars going to school(Yes, the streets weren't plowed back then either!). Throwing snowballs at cars on French Rd untill one drove by with passenger window down and I nailed the driver, who just happened to be in an undercover cop car.I think I ran the fastest I ever did in my life then.
Any body remember Pollywog Paradise as it was called back then? It was a place between the East and West Railroad tracks behind Forestlawn Cemetary where we would do our Frogs, Butterflies,Crayfish catching.