Some memories of our basement in the house on Greene St
The stairs to the basement were in the kitchen behind a door
next to the dryer. The rec room was at the bottom of the stairs. It had a nice
wooden floor, wood paneled walls, groovy blue lights along the wall just below
the ceiling, a couple of couches, a table for board games and a small but
adequate record player. A nice place to hang out except there was never a TV
down there and in a way that was a good thing. It was a place to escape the
never turned off TV set in the living room. For many years our
great-grandparents also lived in the house so this was also a place to get away
from the family stuff of six kids, two parents and the elders. I don’t have any
pictures of the basement and I wish I did but I can recreate those spaces from
memory. It’s been almost 53 years since I was there but I remember it like it
was yesterday.
As teenagers we often had our friends over to our house and
everyone loved to hangout in our basement. Our parents actually liked us to
bring our friends home. They always entertained and they encouraged us to have
people over too. It was also a way for them to get to know our friends which
seemed to be important to both of them. Sometimes I went down there by myself
just to read on the couch and have some quiet time.
We had lots of parties in that rec room and I developed my
mix making skills with stacks of carefully selected and ordered 45’s placed on
the turntable. There certainly was plenty of dancing going on down there under
the blue lights. It was finger poppin’ time and we would dance the boogaloo to Motown
and other soul music, garage rock and British Invasion songs with a little Frank
Zappa thrown in to mix things up. Did those line dances too. I had a large
collection of records by the time we moved from there in 1968 and they got
plenty of use on that dance floor. There was a window high on one wall then
opened into the side alley next to the house which we used to bring booze into
the rec room parties.
There were other rooms in the basement. The room in the back
of the house was the train room where Dad kept all his model railroading stuff
including stacks of magazines on model railroading he’d been collecting since
he was a teenager. I really liked going through them. He had boxes of old
trains and railroad cars, tracks, transformers and related equipment. The old
trains were in kits that needed to be assembled and were not at all like the
trains that I saw sold in stores at the time.
The room also held the wood framework that provided the
platform for the train setup. There wasn’t much built yet but some track was
laid and there were other areas where you could see the outline of a town.
There were places in the layout where there would be a hole that was designed
as a lake next to the town where he could come up from under the platform and
work on sections that would otherwise have been out of reach. He loved talking
about the design and his plans and we were often down there just looking and
then we would tell me his vision. He was
always happy then and I think he really looked forward to retiring some day
with his trains.
However, at that time most of the room was the platform
waiting for the model railroading wonderland. Dad often took me and Tom to see
traveling model railroading displays when they came to town and we certainly
knew what he had in mind for our basement. We moved in 1968 and the railroad
platform and all the equipment was packed up and taken to the new house. The
new basement had the stacks of wood, the boxes of trains and stacks of
magazines but sadly, it didn’t happen as he planned and he never got to work
again on his beloved trains.
One of the other things about that train room in our
basement was the large number of gallon wine bottles filled with water stored
under the train platform along the wall. There were at least twenty bottles,
probably more but they never made the move to Harleysville. They had been
collected there in the basement as part of a plan by our parents to deal with a
possible aftermath of a nuclear war which of course was a common fear in the
late 1950’s and early 1960’s. We didn’t have a bomb shelter but they probably felt
they needed to do something so we had these bottles of water just in case. Lots
of people in the neighborhood had some bomb shelter things going on in their
basements. A sign of the times.
There were two other rooms in the basement towards the front
of the house. The first one was very small, had lots of shelves and was used
for storage. I seemed to be the one always sent down there to find something
for our Mom so I got to know about everything on those shelves. The other room
next to the rec room was as large as that room but contained the gas furnace.
There was also the remains of a coal bin and Dad’s rather extensive workbench
area, tool box and tool collection. Dad was a machinist and handyman who could
fix anything around the house. I was always fascinated sitting beside him as he
worked on something. We never had a repair man around the house except to fix
the television set. Everything else he did himself including constantly fixing
the washer and dryer. He had all his tools in that basement room. When I was
sixteen and began working as a machinist’s helper he took me to Sears to buy my
own tool box full of essential tools. I still have that same tool box in my own
basement today.
However, the best thing about that room was the bathroom it
contained. It was actually very nice and functional with a door and a window
into the alley. There was only one other toilet in the house so having this one
was essential for this large family of ten people. Dad later expanded the bathroom
and added a shower stall which greatly helped with all the fighting over the
bathroom upstairs.
I almost exclusively used the basement shower through my
teenage years. We also studied a lot on those couches and worked on papers at
that table particularly while in high school. Tom often had friends over to
study together down there and Betsy would also have girlfriends over to hangout
down there. We played games at the table and had a carrom board setup which was
a two sided game board that included a kind of miniature pool table plus lots
of other games on it. The whole family used that basement space for all kinds
of activities, well except for our mom who didn’t venture down there too often.
I certainly spent a lot of time down in that basement on Greene Street and
although I don’t have any pictures I do have some vivid memories.
And here are a couple of pictures of a carrom board.
