THIS OLD HOUSE

Our parents moved into this house in early 1943. This is where the four darlings of the neighborhood grew up. Naw, I don't believe that either. If anything happened in the neighborhood, we got blamed for it. We didn't do everything we got blamed for but there was more that we got away with. There were four of us, three boys and a girl. The girl was the youngest and I am the oldest. How our parents kept their sanity, I will never know.

There were twelve rooms in the house plus a basement, an attic and a balcony. If we opened some doors, there was a race track downstairs and one upstairs, going from one side of the house to the other. This was in the days of hardwood floors, so the races left some black marks on the floor, which meant red marks on our rears. The hallway to the bathroom was narrow and just the right length for a bowling alley. We started with metal tobacco cans for pins and a baseball for the bowling ball. Somewhere, we got a set of duck pins and used a softball. It wasn't long before the old plaster in the wall started to crumble. Then there was nothing but the lathe strips showing. Dad finally set a mirror at the end of the bowling alley and no one wanted to bust the mirror.

One game I still remember was when we turned out all the lights and tried to sneak around the house. Dad could move everywhere without making a noise. We could walk the same places and make a board squeak or bump a piece of furniture. As quiet as we may have been while sneaking around, Dad would reach out , grab one of us and go "Awrgh" There was more than once that we had to go put on dry pants to continue the game

The back yard was the center of neighborhood activity. We drew lines to mark out a baseball or football field. We held a circus from time to time and charged a nickel to get in. Never did get rich. Dad had to cover the windows at the back of the house when he got tired of replacing broken windows from foul balls. The upstairs windows got covered with heavy wire and the downstairs windows with wood.

Mother lived there until she was the age of 87. She had the place packed. Can you say PACKED? She never threw anything away. We gave away old clothes to Shippensburg University for their fashion archives. The local library and home schooled kids got several loads of books. The rest were sold to six different book dealers. The Newville Historical Society got a lot of material for research and display.

There are still a million stories hiding in the walls of this old house. We may come back for another visit later.