Move to Idylwood

In approximately 1951 mom and dad bought the house at 5065 Idylwood on the north side of Beaumont.

This photo of the Idylwood house is probably 59-60 vintage, after the addition that Dad added.

The left side of the front of the house was the result of an expansion my dad did in ’58 or so. He added a couple of feet to half of the front of the house and to the left side. Amazing that he did this himself with the help of a few friends and his brother-in-law, Gordon Thomas.

Note the sand in the front yard. Dad was always leveling the lot by ordering a load of sand and filling in the low spots. I played in every sand pile until it was distributed. I also learned to use a shovel, wheel barrow and garden rake to do the leveling. Note the TV antenna with the motor to rotate the receiving elements. We received (a loose interpretation) only three channels in the bulk of the 50’s - one from Houston, one from Galveston and one from Lake Charles. Thus the antenna rotor to point the receiving elements of the antenna toward the broadcast towers. Perhaps by the time of this photo there were three local stations, dramatically ‘desnowing’ the pictures. I do not recall the concrete driveway - that was a really late addition. Most of the time we lived there the driveway was oyster shell. The basketball backboard and hoop was my dad’s futile attempt to stimulate my latent jock genes…never happened. The ’56 Dodge Texan in the driveway was not air conditioned, but it really traveled a lot of miles. I learned to drive in this car - at age 14! Astounding. The most amazing trip was the round trip to Los Angeles in the Summer of ’57 with my grandparents. Hot does not do justice to how we felt for most of the trip.

Another clue to the date of the photo is the absence of my bicycle from view. My bike was my workhorse as I delivered the Enterprise in the morning and the Journal in the afternoons. It typically lived adjacent to the front door. However, by ‘60 I was a licensed driver and riding a bike was way too plebeian. Between the house and the garage was the ‘breezeway’. A neat place that we used in several different ways. We ate there off and on. There was a ‘day bed’ there at one point where I relaxed between bouts of chasing the mower around the yard. I recall using my chemistry set in the breezeway. Behind the house was the ‘woods’ - a great place to play, shoot bb guns, build forts, pick dewberries, kill snakes and execute general mischief. There were no fences between the neighboring houses, so the extended backyard was a communal play area for the passel of kids living along the street. We lived near the Thomas family most of my growing up years. First in the same house and then nearby. They bought a house when I was about 5 years old – 5105 Idylwood. We were living there when my brother, Terry Gene, was born on 7 June, 1952 – I always remember his birthday as one day past D-day.

The house was on blocks and probably 1200 square feet. It had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room and a kitchen with a breezeway to the single car garage. The driveway was shell and the garage floor was dirt. Above the centrally located bathroom was an attic fan. The way an attic fan works is that it sucks air from the living space and blows it into the attic where it exits through vents in the gables. The air comes into the living space via the windows. That air is blown out of the attic helps somewhat with cooling, but wow, Beaumont summers with endless 95 degF temperatures were brutal. The total house airflow is a zero sum game. If I opened my window to get a little more air, my added air would be subtracted proportionally from every other window. As a result my dad was a window gap Nazi. We could not open our windows even a millimeter more than about 2 inches without bringing down the wrath of the window gap Nazi on our heads. So the rules in this house included not being outside in the ‘heat of the day’, noon ‘til 2. Mostly, after lunch I would lie in my bed with my 2” window opening to get a cooling breeze and read or doze. Not too bad, really.

This photo shows the house in 2009 - updated a bit. It has somewhat declined since then.

This is a 2009 photo of the Thomas house at 5105. By this time the huge front porch has been closed in so the house doesn’t look the same. I know Linda and I rode tricycles on that front porch and we sat out there during rainstorms to enjoy the sounds of the rain.