The house(s) and yard where I grew up in Elizabethtown no longer exist. In 1942, Ernest and Maxine Clark bought two lots on Rinaldi (alternately spelled Renaldi) Street from Nobie Thompson.
In 1979, the house that I remember was not destroyed but moved to somewhere near Dublin. This is a fact had no emotional impact on me at the time but which now gives me some sadness.
The yard is now a set of mini warehouses for rent which can be found on Google Earth. I can’t tell you the address. I suppose it had one officially but I never knew it. As far as we were concerned, our address was P.O. Box 61 and the post office was only a couple of long blocks away.
The street was most likely named for a William S. Rinaldi who was a justice of the peace in the mid 1800. Judging by the street given his name, he was a competent if not remarkable public servant.
Like many things concerning my family’s history, there are holes in the information that makes things a little unclear. As you face the property from the street, a house was built on the right lot a few paces from the street. It burned, at least partially, when I was an infant and all that remained from that time on was a set of concrete steps leading nowhere but providing a wonderful jumping off place for youthful energy. There are pictures of us in that house but neither Judy nor I have any memory of it.
Another house was built on the edge of the lot to the left about 20 yards in. This is the house that I remember. Dad built it. I don’t know if this house was in the process of being built when the other burned or started afterwards.
It was a white clapboard house that perpetually looked like it needed painting possibly because it did. The initial structure was basically square and my father added the undamaged rear portion of the burned house to extend the length and provide a rear porch.
Behind the house was a long three line clothesline where my mother spent a good deal of her time over the years. At the left rear corner of the property, Tony Inman and I built a quasi-treehouse from which we would swing Tarzan style over the rear fence and back again.
A straight driveway lead from the street by the side of the house past the pecan, walnut and chinaberry trees into a tin-roofed open shed. The shed was about the size of a garage. While my father was alive we used the shed for cookouts and making vanilla ice cream in a hand-cranked churn on Saturday evenings.
Next to the shed, Dad built a playhouse for Judy and me. The right half of the playhouse was a room complete with door and floor. The windows were screened. The left half was a large sandbox. Sometime in my youth, I dug a tunnel from the sandbox underneath the room and thus escaped from the Germans.
Behind the sandbox and into the right corner of the property there was, for many years, a sizeable garden. Rumor has it that my grandmother told my mother that babies were found in cabbage leaves; a rumor which might help explain my late arrival but there is no truth to the speculation that that was the last year we had a garden.
The right edge of the property had a second straight driveway that lead to the garage where my father would park his Chevrolet. After his death, we stored the leftover lumber brought from his shop on Ice Plant Road. The black Chevrolet then took up rather permanent residence in the shed as none of us could drive it. Judy was a year away from getting her license and my mother never drove in her life.
Those concrete steps I mentioned stood in memorial. Eventually, a mobile home, where my grandmother Steenie was to live, was moved onto the property and attached to the plumbing hook up left by the house that burned. Steenie lived alone essentially because no one could live with her.
What was left behind Steenie’s trailer was a large(ish) playground where I and other the neighborhood kids would play whatever sport was in season year round. In the summer our houses were used for sleeping, eating, using the bathroom and virtually nothing else and sometimes not even the bathroom requirements. And shoes were irrelevant.
There was a large walnut tree beside the driveway near the house which was generous enough to provide a perfect limb for a swing. My father attached a heavy chain loop and fashioned a seat with notches cut on either side to hold its place in the chain. I once built a parachute for myself out of cloth and string. I attached it to myself somehow and tested it by swinging as high as I could and jumping out. Results were not encouraging.
We had a basketball goal whose rim (despite my best efforts) maintained a rakish angle to the right. I spent much of my teenage years negotiating its eccentricities. To this day I tend to see everything just a little tilted.
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