Out in Places Like Wyoming, 1933 Custer

The House on Custer Street

My father designed and built the house at 1933 Custer Street near mid-century, and we moved in when I was an infant. We had lived in a house north of the University of Wyoming when my parents returned to Laramie with my oldest brother Jay after the War. He was war baby, born in 1944 while my father was serving in the Army. John, Jerry and I were all born in Laramie, which means we must have moved to that first, smaller house before John arrived in 1947.

As I understand the sequence, my father was somewhere in the process of designing and building a bigger house for the property on Custer Street, when I showed up 13 months later, hard on the heels of my older brother.

Custer Street was a new development when my parents decided to build there; most of the houses  in that neighborhood were built between 1945 and 1955. I may be a bit off for any
particular house here and there, but a quick look at the street now certainly suggests they are of the same vintage.

During our years in that house, ending in June of 1958 when we moved to New Hampshire where my youngest brother, Jonas, was born a Yankee instead of a cowboy, my father worked hard to grow grass, shrubs,and trees. Despite his staking, fertilizing, and watering the new saplings with religious fervor, he was not successful with the trees. Now there are trees everywhere.

At the end of the street to the east, now occupied by a movie theater and other businesses, was the National Guard Armory, a long, low, dark-green wood-frame building with a WWII-vintage cannon on the lawn out front. I could be wrong to think the Armory was wood-frame. It may have been a huge quonset hut of the type used frequently during WWII,  I don't remember that part clearly as we were not generally invited inside.

Outside was a different matter. We used to climb on the display cannon when the Armory was closed up for the day. Beyond were the open plains.


Along the block and across the street were several lots that eventually grew houses. I remember this only because we used the piles of dirt and top-soil left by the foundation diggers as a playground while the houses were going up. Next to us on the east, in a stucco house, lived the Zeiglers, whose youngest son, Freddie, was my friend. To the west, next door, lived the Morgans, with three boys, Newlin, Willy, and Evan, close in age to John, me, and Jerry. Willy, a grade younger, was my best friend. At the end of the block in a house with a loud and frightening Pekinese that would sometimes strut in their front yard lived a couple who ran a photography business. When I was a toddler, they asked my parents if they could photograph me to test a new colorizing process then coming into use.  The resulting portrait has dominated one room after another for the rest of my life, affirming my place -- thank you very much -- in some kind of cosmic family hierarchy.

As I noted in an earlier post, Stefan and I found the house without difficulty when we took our first drive around Laramie on the day we arrived. It was right where memory told me it should be. The layout was as clear in my mind when we first saw it as it had ever been, even though my last view was close to forty years before.

We parked across the street from the house.  What had been a new, developing neighborhood when I was young is now a decidedly middle-aged neighborhood.  And it is not just the big trees. Our old family home seems to have held its own in the aging process, but the street as a whole seemed a bit tired, even in spots untended.Should we take a chance and knock on the door to see if we will be invited in?

The door was answered by a young man in his twenties named Casey, who seemed intrigued by my connection to the house.  I had explained who we were and why we had appeared uninvited.  This house now belongs to his mother, who was still at work.  When his attempts to reach her by phone failed, he invited us in anyway.

If you had asked me to draw a layout for the house before this visit, my diagram would have matched almost exactly. The front door opens into a hallway that runs left toward three bedrooms and bath clustered around a small square inner hall and right toward the living room. Beyond the living room is the dining room, which I remember as being bigger than it turned out to be; and behind the living room, toward the rear of the house is the kitchen, with access from the hall and from the dining room. The rear of the house and the adjacent eating area had windows opening to the back yard, something my mother would have valued.While I may have always been able to summon this layout, I was struck, maybe for the first time, by the logic, coherence, and efficiency of the design.

Casey allowed us to wander into the rooms and take in both the space and the architectural features. Some touches, like the fireplace on the inner wall of the living room, the arched door frames, the matching arched cutout for the door chimes on the wall leading to the kitchen, and the rounded -- essentially arched -- top of the living room walls that break the straight angles after the fashion of crown molding seem to me now both simple and brilliant features. I know from seeing him work on other blueprints -- for our house in Durham, NH, and for the retirement houses he didn't get to build -- that my father would have drafted and redrafted, refining his ideas by adding and removing, including a variety of features to see how they worked, until the plans came together, until he had incorporated things my mother wanted into his vision to form a singular, elegant design.

After we had walked from end to end of the main floor, Casey asked if we wanted to see the basement as well.  My father had built the house with an apartment in the basement to provide rental income. To get there you have to go out the kitchen door into the garage, across the front of the garage and down stairs at the end. There are two rooms at the east end of the basement not part of the apartment; the one toward the front had been a play room when we lived there and is now used for storage; the one toward the back of the house was and is a laundry room. I remember the play room chiefly from a little drama we put on once called, if I remember correctly, "The Peddler's Plot." I played the female lead, a part without line which I brought off by wearing a gold table-runner for hair.  I don't remember much else about it except for an audience of, no-doubt, coerced neighbors.

The apartment has an independent entry from the west end of the house, but it is also accessible through the laundry room.  Being currently vacant, Casey let us walk through it.

                                                                                                    




It is a funny thing.  I had felt OK walking up to the door to introduce myself and to explain my connection to this house at 1933 Custer. I have spent forty years teaching college students, so I can assert myself when I need to.

But once we were inside looking at the layout, the rooms, and unique features, I was shy about venturing too far in.  I should have gone into the kitchen, for example, rather than looking from the entry.  I should have ventured into the bedrooms at the end instead of peeking from the little square hallway. Attached as I am, this house is now someone else's territory. I felt almost as if I were trespassing.

After we left the house Stefan asked me what I thought. But I'm afraid I wasn't very helpful. On a day when we had already seen so much -- Ames Monument, two of my grandparents' churches (one for the first time), my uncle Dean's grave (also for the first time), Vedauwoo, and now the old homestead on Custer Street . . .  Each detail had both corroborated and corrected the memories I have carried around in my head for so many years.

Perhaps I was too full of stimulation.  Memory has kept a lot of things for me, only some of which I can put into words. And it has kept other things -- associations, emotions, -- that lie deep within the passing decades that may yet, over time, continue to bubble up. Then, perhaps, I will find ways to name them, little by little, as I have always done.

Out in Places Like Wyoming, 4d

Vedauwood

A brochure from the Laramie Area Visitor Center notes that Vedauwoo "is a sacred place" to "young Arapaho men [who] travelled the region on vision quests." When we visited Ames Monument in the morning and decided to wait before crossing the road to Vedauwoo, it was easy to imagine spirits on the move.

Snow that had fallen overnight was still blowing on strong northwesterly winds, the sky was forebodingly dark, and rock formations for which Vedauwoo is known appeared treacherous.

On our way back to Laramie from visiting my grandparents' churches in Albin and Golden Prairie, the hills were inhabited by an entirely different set of spirits.

The sun was shining, the overnight snow had disappeared, and the wind for which Wyoming is famous had calmed to a breeze.

 Vedauwoo is as close to I-80 on the north side as the Ames Monument is on the south side. A well aimed arrow shot at the entrance to one would reach the entrance to the other with ease. According to the same brochure I cited earlier, these attractions are no more than 18 miles from Laramie.

My memories of Vedauwoo, I realize, have been shaped more by family stories we have told and retold than by actual memories of doing something there.  We always came to have a picnic, perhaps at the Happy Jack area, which is now comprised of campsites. Mom always made a big production out of picnics -- I can remember her "setting" the picnic table -- but all I remember for food is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cool-aid, and brownies or cookies for desert.

As with any place we had to travel to, I had no idea Vedauwoo was so close to home and so accessible. The ride was always long, often hot, and sometimes contentious -- if we brothers were not at that moment getting along. My memory wants to blame one of them for most of the contention, but my adult mind says leave it alone.

 As kids, once my father had stopped at a likely spot for our picnic, we hit the ground running. We would disappear into the rocks until someone heard Mom calling us back to eat.  It was easy to see the lure of the place, both for the original Arapaho inhabitants and for more recent adventurers.

Both Stefan and I started taking pictures instead of running down the trails, but I left the rock climbing to him. Perhaps on another visit, in warmer weather, I will attempt to reprise the old feelings of exploration.

 The interesting feature of these rock formations is that the rocks appear to have been set in place with a kind random precision. So if you imagine there were spirits involved in the landscape rather than natural forces, it is fairly easy to see the long straight crevasses and cracks as a form of creative play. If only we were big enough.

With other formations, such as these with random cracks and signs of vertical upheavals, it is easy to see the strong power of nature at work as if the whole enterprise were an ancient engineering project. If my father, the civil engineer, were still around, I would like to hear his take on this pile of rocks.  Or on the one below, where a boulder the size of a house seems to have been perched with just enough balance to keep from tumbling down the slope.

 Soon enough the clouds returned and the wind turned sharp again.  We decided to head into Laramie before the afternoon was completely gone to see if we could wangle an invitation to step inside the old homestead, 1933 Custer, leaving this sacred place to visit another.