The Blonde in the house and I were thinking about the many places we have lived, including when we were growing up.
One of the big things that is different relates to housing and the fact that a cluster of houses today has to have a name – the fancier the better. I am not referring to The Villages in this as it is obviously a different animal and essentially what it does is give names to various areas immediately rather than having names given to them at a later date as happened in many cities over the years.
Nope, I am referring to areas where the builder goes in, builds his streets and other necessities and puts up his houses. In order to sell, he needs a catchy name like “Beautiful Acres”. The thing really beautiful about the area is probably the asking price as most of the natural beauty has been replaced by concrete and similar houses. Similar houses we know about as one of the places in which we lived was Levittown, PA. Since all the houses in a section were the same you had to look carefully to make certain that you got in the right driveway – particularly at night. Some folks had problems even in the day.
When The Blonde and I were young, somebody would put in or extend a street and then build some houses. No one ever thought about giving the area a special name. It was just houses on Elm Street in whatever city. That is not the case today. In our last city a builder constructed about twelve homes that came off a street around the corner from us. The name given was “Golden Oaks”. Now before the contractor started the construction, there had been some very tall oak trees, but once the street was in and the houses built there was not one oak tree left standing. All the houses sold though, and I imagine when the residents are directing friends to their homes, they tell them to look for the “Golden Oaks” sign.
The same thing applies to street names. Elm Street or something similar just isn’t “in” anymore. I guess there is really nothing wrong with that. In fact, I like some of the street names that I see as they are pretty neat. However, in some cases the builder should consider what exactly he is doing. In one city in which we lived there was a development that everyone referred to as the Indian Reservation. This was due to the fact that the streets were named after American Indian tribes. Names like Creek or Sioux are probably not too bad, but there are some that can cause a problem especially if you live on them and have to write them down frequently. That may not really be a problem in the future since many educators apparently do not pay much attention to teaching cursive writing. However, when we lived there folks still used cursive a great deal – they even wrote letters by hand and put their return addresses on envelopes by hand – if you can imagine that.
However, if you lived on Narragansett or Wampanoag Street as some people did in the “Indian Reservation” I mentioned above, there were writing and other problems. Those two streets, by the way, intersected and when the poor residents who lived at that intersection gave directions they had to be able to at least pronounce both correctly. It must be remembered that this was part of the good old days and you had to either remember directions carefully or unfold a map and try to find where you were going. Cars were very dumb then and couldn’t tell you how to get anyplace. In addition, you couldn’t get your phone out of the house as the cords were not long enough – unless, perhaps, you had a very small house.
I tell you it is great being part of the “greater generation” and being able to recall all sort of things – even if you wouldn’t want to face some of them anymore!
Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com
