The Longest Stay

Our Place
November 4, 2017

This fall, I've been thinking off and on about how we are now beginning our twenty-first year in our Hudson home. It is the longest we have lived anywhere.

We moved around quite a bit when I was a kid. By the time we moved to Hiram, Ohio, in the late summer of 1956 (I would turn 12 in November), I had already lived in more than a few places:

1609 1/2 E. Broadway (Enid, Okla.) (upstairs from my maternal grandparents)

• a year in Norman, Okla. (while my dad did his residency at OU for his Ph.D.)
• 1709 E. Broadway (back in Enid)
• 4242 W. 13th St. (Amarillo, Tex.)
• 1706 E. Elm Ave. (Enid)

Those moves were occasioned by education and war: My dad served in both WW II and Korea (though he did not go overseas for the latter--just to Amarillo AFB).

We lived in two places in Hiram. When we first arrived, we lived in faculty housing in a little cul-de-sac called Dodge Court. Then we bought a house down Hiram's north hill--11917 Garfield Rd., where we lived during my high school and college years.

But the year I graduated from Hiram College (1966), my parents took jobs at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and I began my teaching years--my bachelor years--living in an apartment in an old house (now razed) in Twinsburg, Ohio, five miles west of Aurora, where I was teaching.

I was there only a year, then tried the next year to live with a teaching colleague (male)--but it didn't work out, so I moved to a place I couldn't afford on Fishcreek Road near the bowling alley on the west side of Kent. The next year I found another apartment back in Aurora--in a house on Chillicothe Road, right near the stoplight near the library. I was there a couple of years, and I was living there in the summer of 1969 when I met Joyce. We swiftly married!

Our first place was 323 College Court in Kent (a four-apartment complex). Then we moved to a rental house not far away, 214 S. Willow (recently razed for Kent's Esplanade project), and we bought our first place in the mid-1970s, 114 Forest Drive on the west side of Kent.

We were there until the fall of 1978, when we moved to Lake Forest, Ill., where I'd taken a job at Lake Forest College. We stayed only a year, living in faculty housing--10 Campus Circle. A great house, by the way.

We both then took jobs back in Hudson, Ohio, at Western Reserve Academy (fall of 1979), and we lived for a year in campus housing--306 N. Main. Then we bought a home, 120 Aurora St., right across the street from the school. We were there from 1980-90 (the year our son graduated from WRA and headed off to college).

Joyce's father died that summer of 1990, and her mom, already slipping deeply into Alzheimer's, could no longer live unsupervised. So we moved her to Anna Maria in Aurora (where she had great care), and we bought a house in Aurora, 60 E. Pioneer Tr., an old brick house--one of the oldest in town, just across the street from the library.

I retired from the Aurora Schools in January 1997, and Joyce, who was teaching then at Hiram College, was over in Hudson one day in the late summer and saw a for-sale sign ... in front of the place where we are still living.

But I will get into all of that next time!

To be continued ...