We built our first house - still in Paris, TX

We sold our house on 33rd St. and moved to this small, 2 bedroom house at 2227 Cleveland Ave. while we built a new house at 555 Wilburn, on the street behind our old house. We had to store much of our furniture and buy a stove and space heaters for this house. Ronnie was away in college in Kilgore when we lived here for 7 months. This house was near the East Paris Elem. school playground and James liked to go there and play.
James was attending a sheltered workshop at the Jr. College nearby.

We lived there during the winter and I remember a big ice storm and tree limbs breaking in our yard.


In May, 1975, we moved to our new home we designed. We had a great room with cathedral ceiling in the center of the house and a fireplace. There were 3 bedrooms and 2 baths on the left side and dining room, kitchen with breakfast room, study and sewing room on the right side.

When Ronnie was home in the summer from college, he used the study for his bedroom.  This photo was taken in 1977 and a For Sale sign was in the front yard. Jim got a promotion and transfer to Minneapolis, MN and we were about to move again.

This is a photo of our house taken this summer.









This was the back yard of our new house. There was an alley for us to get to our garage. Our old house was located on the other side of the alley, a couple of houses down. We had a nice cement patio and natural gas grill which we had to leave with the house.

While living here, I returned to college and got my B.S. degree from East Texas State Univ. (now Texas A&M at Commerce) , 40 miles southwest of Paris. It was a long commute every day - but I made it and graduated in May 1976.


Bill graduated from Paris High School in May 1976. Here he is with his Mustang convertible which he bought with money he earned one summer helping roof houses (in extreme Texas heat). He totaled his car one day coming home from his part-time job at a music store, running underneath a big truck when it stopped suddenly in front of him. Later he bought the little red MG in the top photo.

In 1976-77, Ronnie was going to school at Galveston at the A&M Maritime Academy.

We moved to Minneapolis in May 1977, leaving both Ronnie and Bill in school in Texas. They didn't want to leave Texas.

Both graduated from college in Texas and Ron is still living in Texas, at Austin. Bill left Texas when he graduated in 1981 and has not lived there since.

Off to Paris (Texas that is)

We moved to this big, rambling house at 820 33rd St, Paris, TX in 1968 when Jim started to work for the Vassarette Division of Munsingwear. It had a really big yard, with a dry creek dividing the front from the back. Here you see Jim on Bill's motorcycle, getting ready to give James a ride. The boys had a race track in the back yard for their go-cart. They rode their motorcycles in the woods behind our house.

The boys were in elementary school when we moved here. James enjoyed riding his bicycle on the long driveway. You can see our big back yard on the right side of the photo. The boys enjoyed sleeping in the "bunk house" in the back yard when their friends would sleep over. Bill is on the right with a friend. He is holding our Siamese cat named Purry. She never adapted to living at this place and we had to give her a new home. I think the squirrels made her nervous.

We Moved back to Atlanta

In August, 1963, we moved back to Atlanta in order for James to attend the Cerebral Palsy School near Emory University. We bought a brand new brick home with full basement in a new subdivision in Decatur, GA. We had 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, den, living room and kitchen.

The basement had windows on the side and walk-out on the back. It provided a place for storage and for the kids to play ping pong and other indoor activities and for rainy and cold weather play.

This new home also provided a place for us to learn landscaping! We had a big yard with a creek at the back of our property where the boys enjoy playing in the thick woods. They built a tree house over the creek and posted a "no girls allowed" sign on it. They were really upset once after returning from vacation and finding the tree house filled with dolls and other girl stuff! The neighbor girls had been enjoying playing there.

The boys could walk up to the hill to the school. This new house had a one car carport (1963). This was before the 2-car families. By the time we left this home in 1967, all of the homes in the new subdivision had been built and sold. We enjoyed living at 3395 Tulip Drive even though the streets all had flower names. This photo shows the house in Sept 1964, one year after we moved in. Pictured are Carolyn Wilson, my youngest sister and our sons James, Bill and Ronnie.

A visit back to the area in 1987 was interesting. The neighborhood was "trashy" and there were junk cars in the yards, and homes were not kept up. The only bright spot were the trees we planted had grown to be very big. A pine on the left in the front yard (almost out of the photo) was our live Christmas tree in 1964 and we planted it outdoors after Christmas. The 3 hardwood trees in the center of the yard were so small we brought them home in the trunk of our Renault car!

We went back to our former jobs; Jim returned to the Arrow Shirt Co near East Point (southwest of Atlanta) and I went back to work at CDC, part-time.

James, 7 years old, was enrolled in the first special education class in DeKalb Co. and the school was in Tucker, GA, near Stone Mountain. Ronnie was in the 3rd grade at Peachcrest Elem. school.  Bill entered kindergarten at Story Brook Day Care.

Our neighbors, Jack and Dee Fields and their kids on Tulip Drive moved to Dallas a couple of years after we moved to Paris, TX in 1968 and we had fun visiting each other in Texas.

Bremen, GA in West Georgia

In November, 1961, Jim was transferred to the Arrow shirt plant in Bremen, GA, about 60 miles west of Atlanta. We sold our house in Atlanta and bought a small brick house in Bremen. It was smaller than our house in Atlanta but on a much larger lot and no hills. I remember the bedrooms were very small. The kitchen had red brick tile floor and it was easy to clean. We had our first clothes dryer and it was great in the winter. Ronnie was in the first grade and walked home from school which was about a mile away. A big bulldog ran out to the street one day and bit him on the leg. After that he chose a different route to get home.

Soon after we moved to Bremen, we had our one-car garage enclosed to make a den. The carpenter put plaster over the brick wall and told us to let it dry over the week-end and then he would paint it. I had to work that Sat. and Ronnie and his friend Jimmy Winchester played with darts while I was gone to work (Jim was sleeping late) and their sharp tipped darts would miss the paper target they taped to the wall, and there were holes all over the wall when I got home at noon. The carpenter had to come back and put more plaster on the wall. This room made the house seem so much larger. To gain more storage space, we had a small wooden storage building built behind the house. It looked like an "outhouse". We quickly put up a wooden fence and planted tall shrubs by the fence to hide the storage building from the street. We lived there for about 2 years until we decided we needed to go back to Atlanta for James to receive therapy and schooling at the Atlanta Cerebral Center near Emory. Jim went back to Cluett Peabody (Arrow Shirt Co) in East Point, GA and we bought a house in Decatur and moved back in the fall of 1963.

I worked at West Georgia College in Carrollton, as Assistant to the Registrar while we were living in Bremen. We were living in Bremen when my mother died in April 1963. Most of my friends were from Carrollton except people I met at church in Bremen.

Atlanta, GA - Bought our first home

Our first home (that we owned that is). We moved to 1071 Country Lane in NE Atlanta after Jim went to work as an Industrial Enginner for Cluett Peabody (Arrow shirts) in East Point, GA.

This small 3 bedroom house was at the end of a street with woods behind us and a creek. This photo was taken our first winter in 1960. I was working at the Communicable Disease Center nearby but Jim had to drive a long distance across Atlanta to work - and there were no expressways. We enjoyed living here at the bottom of a hill. We had a bad ice storm that winter and our gas furnace didn't work without electricity. I don't remember how we kept warm while the power was off. The house had a basement where we could store things.

What I remember most about this house was the clothes line that was connected on a trolley from the back porch to a tree in the woods. I could stand on the back porch, pin the laundry to the clothes line and pull the line out to the open area over the creek for it to dry. That was so neat. We fenced in the back yard so the boys wouldn't fall down the steep hill. Look close and you can see Ronnie swinging. Ronnie started to kindergarten at Peachtree Baptist church while we were living here. Jim got promoted by Arrow and they sent us to Bremen, GA (about 60 miles west of Atlanta). We sold this house and bought a home in Bremen.

A few years ago when my nephew was looking for a home in this area, he found out that the little houses in this area were very sought after and you had to pay around $150,000 for them. We paid $11,250 for this house in 1960.

Moving on - this time to Chamblee, GA

In September, 1957, we left Kansas and moved into married student housing in Chamblee, GA, just north of Atlanta, so that Jim could go to college at Southern Technical Institute. This photo is of the temporary Navy barracks that was used for the college. Our apartments were about a mile away and looked just like the school buildings. We lived downstairs at 200-F Tech Lawson Apartments. The apartments were very small; kitchen, living room and 2 bedrooms and bath. They were so cold in the winter that our plumbing would freeze. They were also not air conditioned and very hot in the summer. Jim went to school full time and worked in the evenings downtown Atlanta at a bank, and still managed to make good grades. He had to go to Georgia Tech on week-ends to study at the library there. Nobody had computers back then. I worked at the Communicable Disease Center, located next to the school in the old Navy buildings also. We spent two years at this location. Our youngest son Bill was born in July 1958. I stayed home for a month and then went back to work and had a baby sitter who came and stayed with the boys every day while I worked. There were a lot of married students and when they graduated the wives got to go on stage and get a Ph.T. degree (Putting Hubby Through). Our rent, which included utilities, was about $20 a month. My parents would drive from Elba, AL to Atlanta several times while we lived there and bring us food from their freezer. We didn't have much money but we were living among other couples in the same boat so we all were happy and working toward a common goal - to get a degree and get a good job.

Jim graduated in June 1959 and in July 1959 we rented a 3 bedroom house about 2 miles away in a nice neighborhood in Chamblee at 1022 Georgian Terrace. I remember thinking that we were "going up" in the world when we moved to a house. Jim got a job as a Safety Engineer for an insurance company in Atlanta and I kept working. By this time we had 3 boys, under the age of 5. We had fun buying some furniture to furnish the house.

What I remember about this house was the big yard and we had to buy a used lawnmower to keep the grass cut. Our next door neighbor had about 7 or 8 beagle hound dogs and we never heard them except when they howled at night. No wonder people moved in and out of this place! We lived here until the fall of 1960 when we bought our first house and moved to Atlanta, near Emory University and the new Communicable Disease Center where I worked.

A few years ago we were in Chamblee visiting my nephew and we tried to find Tech Lawson Apts. They were torn down and a nice park is located there. Then we went to Georgian Terrace and the small homes have been "recycled" and younger families were buying them and the neighborhood was very nice. DeKalb County airport is now located on the site of the old school campus, which was moved to Marietta in the early 1960s and is now Southern Technical University.

Side note: When we moved to Chamblee, there were no expressways anywhere in the Atlanta metro area. They opened a short segment called Northeast Expressway around 1960 and the next year a big shopping center was built called Lenox Square. It probably had as many as 10 stores, including Rich's Dept. Store. Today that center, located in Buckhead, covers many, many acres and has many, many stores on 3 levels.

The Land of OZ - Living in Kansas

When we were told that we were being sent to Fort Riley, Kansas from Germany, we had no idea what the area looked like. All I knew was how Dorothy described it in The Wizard of Oz; dust and cyclones. And we had lots of both!

We rented this small one bedroom, furnished house at 2120 Elm Lane, Manhattan, KS. We moved there in the summer of 1955 and lived there for 1 year. While living here, our son John Randall was born and when he was one month old, he died of "crib death". He is buried in the Manhattan cemetery. I went to work at Ft. Rucker later and we moved to Junction City, KS to be closer to Fort Riley. Looks like we needed to cut the grass in this photo!


This little frame, 2 bedroom house, was located 702 E. 9th St. in Junction City, KS. We bought just enough furniture to get by because we knew we would be moving to Atlanta, GA a year later when Jim got his discharge from the army in Sept. 1957. Click on the picture to enlarge it and you can see Ronnie and his little red fire truck. It was while we were living here that we heard a tornado passing over our town early one morning. And I thought immediately of Dorothy!
We met another army couple across the street from us from Galivant's Ferry, SC, and we have remained friends since 1957 and visit occasionally.
In 1974, on a vacation trip to Glacier national Park, we spent the night in Manhattan, KS and visited the cemetery for the first time since moving away in 1957. Manhattan is home to Kansas State University and a nice college town. Junction City was close to the army base and more of a military town. While living in Junction City, Jim and Ronnie flew to Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver, Colorado, for Ronnie to have the first of 3 operations on his eyes. The army would only let one parent accompany the child so I was left behind. The office where I worked was located in one of the older buildings on the army base and once was the office of General Custer! The horse stables were still close by. I worked at the Separation Center and typed up Jim's Discharge Papers, DD214, when he was discharged from the army in Sept. 1957. He was released a few months early in order to go to college in Atlanta, GA.

Tomorrow on my blog, we will be living in Chamblee, GA, a suburb of north Atlanta.