Santa Barbara, 1963

We lived roughly at the intersection of Margo and Vale Streets.  In general, the neighborhood population was stable -- during the 12 years that that I lived there, only three houses were sold; one (the Coxes) was rented temporarily when the family was transferred.  Two houses held retirees (the Fisks and the Foggs) but the rest had kids.

Who lived where?  Click the image to see!

The house on the corner of Margo and Roberto was unfortunate in its inhabitants and may have been cursed:  it was first tenanted by the abominable Fennerns and then by the Weddels.  Kelvin Fennern seemed destined for jail, but Richard Weddel actually ended up there after being foolish enough to try and persuade a policeman that the large quantity of dope in his posession was "for personal use only" and then to compound the offense by attempting to bribe the cop. Roy believes he will be released next year, providing he gets time off for good behavior.   Most everyone else was normal.

We had absolutely the best back yard and the entire neighborhood knew it.

Every house on the street that had kids also had a swing set, but in most cases, that was it.  Mom and Pop did an amazing job thinking up things that we could use creatively to play with.  For Christmas in 1961, Pop built us a sort of open structure as a “playhouse” that could be accessed with a ladder and which had ropes around it like the deck of a ship.  There was also a sandbox for playing in, but there, like everywhere else in the yard, the prudent kid looked carefully at the sand before doing much with it because the cats liked the area as well as we did and dried cat turds were a common 'find'.

Pop had also gotten a bunch of 1 x 10 boards and fastened cleats on the ends.   Half of them were about three feet long and the other half were twice as long.  He also made some very sturdy kid-sized saw horses.  Using those boards, the saw horses and the army blanket, we transformed the playhouse into a castle, a school and even a ship.

We wrote plays, did "shows" and organized parades. No one in the family was short on fantasy ideas and every one of us liked costumes:

Roy's Chapeau, 1956

I had enough dress-up clothes and other bits and pieces of stuff that I was able to assemble and rent costumes for Halloween to the rest of the neighborhood for fifty cents a night.   I took pictures of the costumes so that my customers could see what was available:

Mexico: Allison, the Dominguez sisters, Joanne and one unknown (center front)	Polynesia (Hawaiian skirt from Pop's bisit to see the atomic explosion on Johnston Atoll): Joanne
Rome: Allison and Leslie	India: Debby and Christy

Joanne agreed to pose as a witch.  

Jack and Jill reported that Baba Yaga flew about in a magical mortar, but that was probably because she was Russian and the flying mortar yet another example of the horrifying Russian lead in aerospace technology.  It was well known that American witches flew on broomsticks, so the idea was to create an image that looked something like this:
 

We tied Mom's broom to the monkey bars and covered up the posts with the army blanket so they'd be invisible.  Joanne scrambled up and balanced sidesaddle on the broom, a position that proved harder to attain than either of us had thought; in the process, her hat got smashed and assumed an odd twist.  While she was trying to straighten it out and pin it back on, I caught Beatle and handed her over. Joanne assumed an austere expression of magical power: 

Somehow, the result didn't seem as compelling I'd hoped, so I saved the photo, but did not use it for advertising.