Help Solve the Mystery with our Family Home Tour Photos!

Last week I posted an article and birthday party photo of my mom and aunt with Mom's school friend Princess Usha, Dating a Photo of Princess Usha at the Brown Girls' Party. Notes on the back of the photo identified one location for the photo, but Mom remembered living at a different address when she was friends with the Princess. Could we determine the correct house from the photograph?

Letters addressed to family members should have helped narrow the field, but instead they expanded the the possibilities to four houses -- (address and dates of letters)

• 512 E. 20th Street, Santa Ana (7 Oct 1938 - 6 Jun 1939)
• 901 W. 3rd Street, Santa Ana (12 Dec 1939 - 16 Feb 1940)
• 1912 Spurgeon, Santa Ana (6 Dec 1940 - 19 Dec 1940)
• 1315 N. Broadway, Santa Ana (3 Jan 1941 - 17 Jun 1944)

512 E. 20th Street

The houses on 3rd Street and on Spurgeon were no longer standing when we looked for them on our Family Home Tour in June 2010; however we were able to photograph a house of a style similar to the Spurgeon house located across the street from the original address.

1912 North Spurgeon is now an apartment building. This house located across the street looked much the same as their old home, according to Suzanne and Frances.

1315 N. Broadway, big Victorian

After posting the original party photograph I looked through Mom’s photos again and found another picture that had been mounted in her album. This snapshot shows more of the house, including a pillared porch. Details from both photos indicate

• narrow wood siding with waist-high trim board
• a good-sized covered porch supported by Classical columns located on the corner of the house
• steps to the porch from a concrete walkway
• simple wood-framed windows and doors
• a hint of rafter in the upper right-hand corner of the picture indicates a roof gable over the porch or a wrap-around eave from a hip roof
• house situated on a corner lot

Birthday Party for Susie or Frances Brown, ca 1940.

Looking at the photos once more, it seems that

• The style is not Victorian, eliminating the house at 1315 North Broadway.
• The eaves and lot situation of the house at 512 E. 20^th conflict with the party photo house.
• Therefore the house pictured must be either Spurgeon or the missing 3^rd Street house.

Mr. Curator moonlights as a General Contractor and thinks that houses opposite each other on Spurgeon Street could have been mirror opposites. If so, this house would be very similar to the one shown in the party photograph. The 2010 home has obviously been extensively remodeled; it may have had an original wood front porch with columns. The stone siding added to the lower portion may have originally been wood with a trim board. The house also shows a wrap-around eave suggested in the original party photo.

What do you think? Is this the right house, or should we keep looking?

Wordless Wednesday: Family Home Tour Edition, 2

Arline Kinsel Brown in front of the American Legion Hall
Orange, California, ca. 1946

Suzanne Freeman in front of the American Legion Building
Orange, California, 2010

Wordless Wednesday: Family Home Tour Edition ca. 1946, 2010

Lemon Street Court Apartments, Orange, California
Suzanne Brown, ca. 1946

Lemon Street Court Apartments, Orange, California
Suzanne Brown, 2010

Family Home Tour Update, in Which Together We Enjoy a “Happy Crappy Day”

Memory is a strange thing. Recently, my sister and I joined my mother and her sister on a “Family Home Tour” of their old homes in Orange County. For many families, this would involve two or three stops for photos and then adjournment for lunch. Our day was quite different.

Grandfather Brown was a house painter and wallpaper hanger by trade, and found a steady market in exchanging work for housing. For the family of four, this meant frequent moves to a new home, sometimes around the corner or down the block, at other times a bit further away.

Mom made a list of the homes she remembered, numbering them in order from their early years in California until the house that she “was married from.” She was able to name 13 houses.

Her sister, two years older, made a similar list. Auntie named 15 houses.

We knew it would be an interesting day when we started off. It was typical Los Angeles June Gloom, cloudy in the morning with a promise for afternoon sunny skies. As we navigated the freeways from Pasadena to Orange County, Mom casually remarked,

“Well, it sure is a ‘Happy Crappy Day.’ That’s what your Aunt Lucy used to call a day like this, ‘A Happy Crappy Day’ not good for anything except playing cards and drinking.”

I nearly crashed the car. Oh, this was going to be a very interesting day.

The Aunt we would be meeting was the third-grade school teacher Aunt, not to be confused with Aunt Lucy of the “Happy Crappy Day.” Auntie would never be caught playing cards and drinking in the middle of the day; in fact, she might play cards, but iced tea is her drink of choice. She never forgets a birthday or special occasion and she makes me want to be a better Aunt to my nieces and nephews. She is, in one word, “Wonderful.”

We met Auntie and my sister in Santa Ana and spent some minutes working out our route. After determining that we would not be going to their earliest homes in Anaheim, it seemed prudent just to get in the car and hope someone could navigate us to the first address.

After a few rough starts involving wrong turns and misremembered landmarks, my sister quietly deployed her iPhone GPS. The site of the first house is now an apartment building, although modest houses across the street are witness to an earlier neighborhood character.

The fun really started on North Broadway, now a busy commercial avenue. Both Mom and Auntie remembered the house numbers where they lived, and we even had a photograph of one place with the address written in pencil on the back. The problem was that the photo just didn’t look much like the present day structure. We couldn’t figure out how the porch was remodeled to look like it does today.

1424 North Broadway, Santa Ana, CA, ca 1941

1424 North Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 2010

Across the street, however, between the motion of buses and cars we caught a glimpse of the house both sisters remembered fondly. I would remember it too! The grand Victorian is a bit tired, but still the best looking old building on the block.

1315 North Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 2010

From Broadway, we proceeded to Ross, Halesworth, Willard Junior High (now a modern bunker-style school), Santa Ana Bible Church, 17^th Street, and then on to the City of Orange where they lived for nearly six years.

As we attempted to pinpoint each address, it became clear that memory is a very funny thing. Mom remembered the houses by events and people – the Anaheim flood, a visit from step-sister Lucy, boys picking her up for a date.

Auntie, on the other hand, recalled each address by what school she attended and what grade she was in at the time. Often, she even knew the name of her teacher.

When the two sisters didn’t agree on an address, or location, the stories became richer and more colorful as one attempted to “out-remember” the other. I circled some blocks so many times, I am sure the man sitting on his porch reading the paper thought we were checking out the neighborhood for a burglary. My sister was a good sport and jumped out of the car to snap photos when a consensus was finally made.

After twelve stops and nearly as many photos, we were all brain-tired and thought we had done a good day’s work. We managed to find most of the places on both lists, and to come up with some questions for Part 2.

Last stop on the Family Home Tour, lunch at PJ's Abbey in Orange,
California, former First Baptist Church of Orange where
Mom and Auntie attended popular musical programs.

Next, I attempt to reconcile the home lists made my Mom and Auntie with old letters from the Family Archive.

All Photos from the Kinsel Family Papers, privately held by Denise Levenick.