The Groovy Pad I Grew Up In

I grew up in Enid, Oklahoma with a single mom, my sister Connie and our Chinese pug named Mister. My mom and dad were divorced when I was around 8 years old. He moved to another state and I never spoke to him again. My mom worked a full time job on the Air Force base and had several side gigs to make sure we always had what we needed. She never purchased her own home until after my sister and I had moved out.

Throughout the 1970s we mainly lived in three rent houses in the same neighborhood. My sister and I were 70s latchkey kids. The first house was directly across the street from my great-grandmother when we were younger. I’m sure it was so she could keep an eye on us after school. The second one was four blocks away but closer to our school as we got older. That’s the house this post is about. Four years later we moved to another rental just three blocks back the other direction.

This is the yellow rent house we lived in from about 1974 to 1978. That would have been from sixth grade through ninth grade covering my entire junior high years. I created dozens of great childhood memories while living in this two story home. It’s where I was living when I met my best friend Stayton. It made me one of the five Broadway boys which all lived on W. Broadway.

This house was located one block west of my elementary school on W. Broadway. Stayton lived one block east of the elementary school. Further east the street was filled with the other kids in our neighborhood gang. I was the furthest away from everyone so we did not spend a huge amount of time at my house as a group.

The house had two stories, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Being the youngest, I don’t remember how I ended up with the entire upstairs to myself but I did. My sister had a regular sized bedroom downstairs next to the main bathroom. The house sat on a pretty busy corner so there were lots of cars driving by on both streets.

The upstairs was large with almost the same square footage as the main floor. There was a creaky set of wooden stairs that took you up into the middle of a large playroom. The stair entrance had a white handrail that went around three sides at the top to keep people from falling in. So you could walk completely around the stairway entrance once upstairs.

The upper floor was divided into a large play area with the stairway towards one side of the room, a bathroom with an old white bathtub, sink and toilet, and a bedroom with a large walk-in closet. My bedroom was on the east side of the house and had a single window in a nook that looked out over the neighborhood towards our elementary school.

There was a large gas heater in the big room that heated the upstairs. For much of the time that we lived there I had a ping pong table setup in that room and that’s primarily what it was used for. I believe there might have also been an old couch up there. From time to time I would invite kids from our sixth grade class over and we’d hang in that room. The upstairs had a wooden floor and I think we had one of those 70s oval rugs in the big room.

My bedroom had an old piece of carpet in it that covered most of the floor. It was a basic square room with that one nook in the corner. When I first moved in I put up a bunk bed and the head of the bed fit perfectly into that nook. I was able to lay in bed and look out the window which I did for hours and hours. I could see my friends riding down the street on their bikes when they came over. In the summer I slept with the window wide open and had a nice breeze on me all night. The upstairs had no air conditioning.

On the south side of the bedroom was a door into a walk-in closet. The closet was in a weird part of the roof so it had a low ceiling that had a thin flat area in the middle with slanted areas on either side. At the end of the closet really low towards the floor were two odd shaped windows that looked like those in the Amityville Horror house. From the outside there was a window on each side of the chimney. I could open the windows and the little screens they had on them.

The bathroom had a tile floor and a small gas heater. All of the fixtures were white and very dated looking. Because there was a bath only I took my showers in the downstairs bathroom but got ready upstairs. Outside of the bathroom was a small space that went to the the north side of the house. There was a window that led onto the roof over the back porch and easy access to the top of the entire house. Standing on back porch area you could look over the garage and see into the backyard.

A couple of times we would take a Wham-O Frisbee on the roof with us. The valley on the roof in front led to an easy slope over my moms art room on the east side. We would sit on the Frisbee at the top of the house and slide down to that valley which would take us to the lower part of the roof. Just as we would get to an edge we would put our feet down and stop ourselves from falling to the ground.

The house had a two car garage with some really bad sliding doors that barely worked. Without a garage door opener my mom rarely parked her car inside. There were a few times that Stayton and I would perform our magic act in that garage and charge neighborhood kids a quarter to watch. I even had a large bird cage in my bedroom and had two turtle doves that we were going to use in the dove pan trick. I never was able to get it to work well enough to use in an actual performance.

I also remember using the garage as my skateboard track going around and around pretending I was playing Rollerball. I could slide both doors to the middle and leave enough space on each side that I could even skateboard out of the garage and use part of the driveway and street. Our house faced south towards W. Broadway but the garage faced east onto N. Johnson. Stayton and I did lots of skateboarding on Johnson and even filmed ourselves with my mom’s 8mm movie camera.

The backyard had an old wooden picket fence around it. In the very back of the yard was a group of trees and bushes that had grown up against the fence. We dug out an area in the bushes and made an in ground fort that was almost camouflaged by the trees. We spent countless hours back there with G.I. Joes, plastic army men, horny toads, turtles and my wrist rocket.

Stayton and I got in a bit of trouble one time shooting little berry looking things at cars as they drove by on Johnson St. We were using my wrist rocket and actually hit someone in their car as they were driving by. Two guys walked up to our fort and asked what we were doing. We sheepishly told them we weren’t doing anything and they told us that we had hit the guy on the passenger side because he had his window down. They weren’t out to get us but wanted to warn us that the next set of characters might not be as easy going.

I had the privilege of getting to mow the lawn. I think at one time we had an electric mower which was high tech for the 70s. Unfortunately it was not battery powered but cord powered so I had to string two long extension cords together just to cover the entire yard. One summer I left the letter T uncut in the backyard for several weeks hoping the Air Force pilots could see it when they flew over. My sister and her friends spent many summer afternoons in the backyard smothered in baby oil sitting in lounge chairs. They even put reflective mirrors around their faces just to bake them even more.

My favorite part of the entire house was my walk-in closet. It was a space that I could let my imagination run wild. One of the first big things I used it for was to build a city surrounding my HO scale train set. My uncle Richard helped me take two wood panels for walls and connect them to make the base. We then ran the train track around the platform and then we built a paper mache mountain with a tunnel going through it. I added tiny gravel, trees, roads, buildings, signs and cars. I can’t believe we never took a photo of our creation.

I then removed the train set and built a miniature amusement park. The main ride I created was a roller coaster made out of Hot Wheels track. I would add multiple racing tracks together to make a huge roller coaster that spanned the entire closet. The roller coaster cars were marbles! I spent so much time playing with marbles. They could be roller coaster cars, cowboys and Indians or just opposing armies. I still have my large collection of vintage marbles kept in a bubble gum machine.

I built marble roller coasters all over my upstairs. The more race car track I could find the longer my coasters would get. A marble dropping in on a track that starts high go can for a very long time. The best part of my coaster was the double lane start using the orange Hot Wheels track that plunged down into the side by side loops! Both tracks started out from a plunge into a loop and then the tracks would merge using some wide black race car track with a really high bank. It was hours of fun.

I pulled some of my best kid pranks while living in that house. It’s where we would unscrew the talking piece to my sisters rotary phone and take out the voice thing so nobody could hear her when they called. We hid under her bed many times eavesdropping in on her conversations with her friends. The top of the stairs was where I peed on Connie with a fake clay ding dong squeezing water out of it with my arm pit. One time we hung out on the roof over the back porch so we could spy on Connie’s party in the backyard.

This was the house I was living in during the Christmas of 1976 when I received my Farrah Fawcett poster! I was 14 years old and unrolled the poster when my mom snapped a photo of me. When I started blogging about the 70s I posted that pic on my website. When Farrah died that photo of a kid unrolling her posted became very famous. It was used on CNN.com and many other websites at the time. It was been included in most Farrah documentaries since her death and is in few books about Farrah. With the popularity of 70s groups on Facebook the photo has also become a popular meme that gets posted somewhere almost weekly.

I was in this house when my moms best friends called to tell me to tell her that Elvis had died. This was where I ate Zingers and watched the Banana Splits after school almost every day. I got my first Kalamazoo electric guitar while living here and ordered 11 vinyl records from Columbia House for only a penny. Stayton and I tried to roll the states largest snowball in the front yard one year for a radio contest. It was huge and didn’t melt for weeks.

And now that it has been well over 40 years since I’ve lived there I can divulge that we spent many weekends throwing eggs and water balloons at cars from the bushes in the front yard as they drove down W. Broadway. Fitzsimmons convenience store was just behind our house across the railroad track and we would buy a dozen eggs each Friday and Saturday night. This was the same store that I stopped at in the mornings to buy 2 cent Jolly Ranchers which I resold at junior high school for a nickle. This was the beginning of my entrepreneurial career.

Many of the guys would spend the night at this house and we would stay up late watching Saturday Night Live, Monte Python and The Goodies. We also recorded hours of ourselves on cassette tape acting goofy making up our own shows. We also used the cassette recorder to tape the Top 40 hits and I would use it to record Dr. Demento songs on Sunday night. There were many nights we would build blanket forts in my bedroom or in the walk-in closet. I would string up C9 Christmas bulbs in the closet to give it an awesome glow and we’d usually have a box fan somewhere in the fort.

1902 W. Broadway wasn’t that special as far as a rental house was concerned but it sure has a million memories that were created within its walls. I think of the good times I had with my family and my friends while growing up there. It’s nice living in town and purposely driving by just so I can take a trip down memory lane.

PODCAST

VIDEO