Home Again Visit Continued

There is one thing that is true about my Dad and that is no matter how little money he has he will always be rich and generous. This is not always the case for someone who grew up at the edge of the depression in not the wealthiest of circumstances. On our trip to revisit the places of his childhood I learned a lot more about how my Dad got to be this way.

When I was a child I knew my father’s father as a smart, thrifty man who loved to invest in the stock market and was revered as an upstanding citizen. As my Dad drove me around Winston-Salem yesterday we passed by the beautiful art deco Reynolds building. “There used to be a stock broker’s office in the mezzanine and Grandad would go in and sit and watch the ticker tape,” my Dad explained to me.

I can remember that even when his hearing was going and his eye sight was practically gone my Grandad could somehow miraculously hear Wall Street Week in Review on TV and read the mice type on the stock pages of the news paper. Investing was his passion and something he was good at. As much as that was a strong memory of my Grandad it was juxtaposed with his extreme thriftiness. He kept a log of everything he owned that used a battery and tracked how long he used each battery and what kind of life he got out of them- this included car, tractor, flashlight even hearing aid batteries – everything.

On our tour we went by the first house my Dad lived in where his parent’s rented the upstairs of a nice house in a fine neighborhood. Then we drove out to Lockland Ave. to see the first house my Grand parents bought. I had been there once as a four or five year old, but have not seen it in fifty years. My Dad explained that it had been a one-bedroom house that his father added another one onto before they moved in. My Dad had then dug out the basement to make another room when he was ten.

From what we could see from the street not much had been done to improve it in the last 50 years. The only thing that was possibly better was there was a newer house across the street that replaced the legendary two greyhound busses put together with the middle cut out making in essence the first mobile home.

I would not call the house a dump until my father told me about the street it was on. He said that even though the houses on the street ended just a little ways past his house, the road, which was a two-lane fine cement road continued about another mile along. A cement paved street was very unusual especially when my Dad showed me which streets had been nothing but oiled dirt roads. The reason Lockland Ave was that way is that it was the route that every garbage truck in the city had to take to the incinerator and dump. As if that was not bad enough my Dad said that the sewage treatment plant was also down that way.

My Grandmother had grown up in a fine house in Charlottesville designed by Thomas Jefferson where her father was the President of the Bank of Charlottesville. I am sure her father never came to see this house on Lockland Ave. My Dad said his mother always said that Grandad only got away with living in that house because he had sons and not daughters. The bottom line is that my Grandad was good at turning his stock money into more money and thought a house was not his best investment. I think that growing up in that house really spurred my father on to work hard and be successful and not live like that. I am so glad my Dad had daughters.

We drove around the rest of Winston Salem with my Dad showing me, literally the other side of the tracks and where his fancy friends lived. He said Winston was really a town of the poor and the rich, very little middle class back then. Leaving Winston to be a bigger fish in a bigger pond was what my father was meant to do, but the hard work he did, starting with his morning and afternoon paper routes, working in the RJ Reynolds factory in the summer and Gestner Machinery Company were good foundation to never have to live in a place where every garbage truck in town drives past your house.