SAINT ALBANS
I grew up in a house in West Virginia in a modest neighborhood. The town I lived in, St Albans, was small – about 10,000 people. There were some fancier neighborhoods in town (my brother, at one point, rented a three-story house in town with his first wife, her brother, and the brother’s wife), but our family neighborhood was smallish houses – mostly one story – near the train tracks.
St Albans sits at the junction of the Coal and Kanawha rivers, and is surrounded by tree-covered hills. Someone that I had a connection with as a child drowned in the Coal river – I’m pretty sure it was a classmate (Willie Hillon?), but it might have been the brother of a classmate. (I just searched online, and Coal River drownings seem common.) Despite having only 10,000 people, St Albans is one of the bigger cities in West Virginia – it is 12th in population in the state, with no city in WV (not even the state capital) having more than 50,000 people.
As the river name suggests, the coal industry is big in West Virginia. I remember seeing coal trains going down the train tracks on the far side of the field behind my house. I also remember hanging around the train tracks – including leaving coins on the tracks to get flattened by the passing trains.
West Virginia is a modest state, and St Albans is a modest town. I remember as a child when Kmart opened in town, and it was a big deal – because we didn’t yet have any real department stores. St Albans has a downtown, but it’s only a couple blocks long, with nothing very exciting.
DREW STREET
But back to my house –
What’s interesting about our house in St Albans was that it was arguably one of the fancier houses on the street – because it had a lot of living space. The people before us had converted the garage into living space, plus added a connecting room between the original house and the converted garage. Our overall square footage was almost double that of nearby houses – which was good, because we were a family of eight. (Having said that, there were other families in town with more kids – 10, 12, 14 – to the point where each of my siblings would have a child from one of these families in their grade at school.)
The converted garage in my childhood house was made into: a laundry room, office area, plus a master bedroom with a bathroom and walk-in closet. The wall that was the garage door was redone to a standard wall, and the overall heating was provided by a wall-mounted radiant heater. It all worked well. The converted garage was big enough to have a pool table, plus a ping-pong table that we would set on top of the pool table. Early on, some of my brothers slept in the converted garage – but when my older siblings moved out, it became my parents’ bedroom.
It was the added connecting room between the original house and garage that was the ‘hub’ of our family interactions – it was our ‘family room’, but we called it the ‘breezeway’. Why? Because it had louvered windows on both ends which allowed good airflow. Each window had 5? 6? horizontal shelves top to bottom, and my mom kept plants on those shelves. The breezeway alone was maybe 150-200 square feet. It had a door on each of the four walls – house, garage, side yard, and patio. My parents added a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on one wall (which also housed an aquarium). This room also had a table made from a telephone cable spool (which my parents made into a usable play/activity table). We spent a lot of time in the breezeway.
One interesting aspect of having more siblings than bedrooms is – I never had my own bedroom growing up – though my sister always did (only girl). When we moved to Chicago, I probably had my own bedroom (don’t exactly remember) – since it was only me, my parents, and my younger brother. I definitely did have my own bedroom starting junior year of college – after we moved to a four-bedroom apartment. And, once I moved to California after college, I had my own bedroom – until I got married 😊. But it is one of those things that you don’t really think about – regardless of which side of the line you are on. If you share a bedroom, that’s what you do. If you have your own, you don’t think about what life would be like if you had to share.
NEIGHBORHOOD
Behind my house was an alley – an unpaved road of pebbles, sand, and dirt. Every so often, the city would have a truck drive down the alley to lay down oil to keep the surface intact. There were a couple of houses on the alley, but I’m not sure what their official addresses were. One of the houses a few hundred feet down the alley had a fat beagle named Ginger that used to wander over and visit us. Once she knocked my younger brother over when he was a toddler. The alley was rough on the feet, and the soles of our feet got quite tough from walking/running on the alley. There was also a truck that would annually spray a cloud of pesticide the length of the alley. Probably not healthy for us, but we didn’t really avoid it when it passed.
Mr Perry’s house was behind us on the alley. I remember one day, someone had written the word ‘shit’ on his garbage bin. I was young at the time, and didn’t know that word. I asked my siblings what the word was, and they said (to keep me naive) that they didn’t know.
Beyond the alley was a field, and beyond the field was a railroad track with slow-moving coal trains of 100+ train cars. We could see the trains from our back windows and backyard. The track was probably 500 feet away, so the noise didn’t disturb us or keep us awake at night.
Our house was also close to our church and associated elementary school – one block away. This made it easy to walk to school and church. St Albans was small enough that later I was also able to walk to/from the junior high and high school.
OVERALL
Looking back, I recognize that the house I grew up in was modest – but it worked well for us (my current SF bay area house is worth ten times more than my childhood house, per real estate websites 🫤). My childhood house was big enough, and it had a convenient location. We all walked to and from school and church – including my grandmother who lived with us for a time, and was able to spend as much time at church as she wanted. I went to college in Illinois, and have spent my career in California. I don’t miss my childhood house, or St Albans – though I do have fond memories of my childhood with my family.