My parents built their first house in at 3202 Lawndale Ave, Flint, MI in 1954. I was the first of my family born here. When we lived there, it was a dark brown, with grooved cedar shingles. I moved out when I turned 21 in 1975. My family continued for a few more years before my parents sold and moved to the west side of Flint, on Calkins Rd. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good pictures of the house back then. These pictures are from 2025, multiple owners later. We had a large, twin trunk oak tree in the front yard, matching the one to the right of the driveway. We also did NOT have a wheelchair ramp. Things change. I keep my eye on it via Zillow hoping someday it gets listed for sale and has indoor photos.
I shared a front bedroom with my three brothers; the upstairs left window was one of two windows in the room. Jim and Steve shared a bed by the front window. Jack and I shared one on the opposite wall with a window to the north between the two beds. I had about one foot of space between the bed and wall. But I also had the only entirely unobstructed wall in the room. Guess what I had up there? A 4′ map of the moon. Annotated. Craters and lakes all listed. I also had a periodic table above the headboard. My mom fed my nerdism well.
The other visible upstairs window was Julie and Laurie, my older sisters bedroom. It was the smallest bedroom and just fit their bed and a dresser. They shared a puny closet in the corner.
You cannot see it from the front, and there are no windows to it from the north side photo, but my younger sisters shared the back bedroom. A twin bed, a double, and a crib. By the time Marnie outgrew the crib, Julie had moved out and there was some shuffling.
My parents bedroom was over the garage. It was the largest room, but was also essentially unheated. That room got cold! We always kept their door closed, or there would be a draft/breeze down the stairs into the living room. They also had an electric blanket. They had to remember to turn it on in the evening about an hour before bedtime to make the bed bearable in the winter.
Only one car got parked in the garage, and that was on the right side. The left was filled with bikes, wagons, lawn equipment, step ladder, hoses, skates, etc. All the stuff that 10 kids need outside. There was only room in the garage to get in on the left side. We would have to back out and enter the right while standing on he lawn in whatever weather was going on that day. Fortunately, these were the days of station wagons and bench seats. You could slide from one side of the car to the other. Not possible with bucket seats.
We had the Paquins, Millers, Hughes, and Lesniaks to our north (then a Standard gas station, with a bar on the other side of Lawndale). Lesniaks were adjacent to the high voltage powerlines running along Pasadena St, so there was a wide easement strip next to them. They maintained a wonderful strawberry garden there. We would get quarts of strawberries from them all summer long. To our south were Ponsettos, Hafners, Darbys, the nurses, and Noyles.
Our church and catholic school was right across the street. I don’t know how my folks did it, but they paid for all of us to go to St Lukes’s for all our elementary years, and St Michaels and then Luke Powers for high school.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.