Happy Homes

Yes, I grew up in a place called Happy Homes. I’ve never questioned the name. After all, I was happy.

Between 1947 and 1953, my family lived in this post war “dream world”. Everyone called it Happy Homes. No one I’ve asked seems to remember its real name.

Far from being utopian, it was nonetheless wonderful for its times. The development was created under the GI Bill to give returning veterans a leg up toward reestablishing their lives.

The rent was incredibly low. Our two bedroom apartment rent was $35 a month, which wasn’t much even for those days.

It was essentially subsidized housing, although I don’t think the term was used or even invented back then in 1947.

Anyway, Happy Homes was located east of Dayton, Ohio and adjacent to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. It was made up of renovated army barracks.

Now before you start imaging Stalag 17 or those dreadful grey cement block warehouses for soldiers, let me tell you the powers that planned Happy Homes did a really nice job of creating one and two bedroom apartments that were bright and appealing. Each one had a brand new kitchen and bathroom and a back yard.

Ours was Apartment 3G. Daddy built a picket fence and Mama planted roses. She happily decorated the rooms with  maple furniture and wallpaper in the then popular Early American style. I can’t find any pictures, but I remember it as warm and pretty. My parents took their wedding furniture out of storage and bought a twin bed for me. I had my own room situated in the perfect position for hiding behind a chair to watch TV when I was supposed to be asleep. The trick was to watch I Love Lucy at 9:00 on Mondays but be asleep before Inner Sanctum’s really scary creaking door began at 9:30.

The center of the apartment was a gas fireplace, which heated the whole place. There we could dry wet gloves and slowly roast the chestnuts and pumpkin seeds my father was so fond of.

There were about a hundred families in the development. Everyone was about the same age.  There were parties, kaffe klatches and canasta clubs. Most of the women didn't work, so they got together and had fun. My mom had been stuck living with her mother during the war years, so she loved having a group of ready-made friends.

Daddy was a produce man, which meant our fruits and vegetable were the best. At the end of the day when he drove his big truck home, he would give away a lot of it to our neighbors but kept the best for our family. We had bowls of fruit all the time. Sometimes too much - like rhubarb. Stewed rhubarb, rhubarb pie and even rhubarb cobbler loses its appeal when you eat it every day for weeks.

I was shocked at the price of rhubarb when I grew up and had to buy it myself. I was even more shocked at how much I wanted it.

As for ethnic diversity – well, that was an unknown concept for the residents of Happy Homes, unless you count the Vacciano, the Bova or the Gentile families and two or three war brides from Britain.

I remember that our next door neighbors had reservations about letting their son play with me, that Italian girl.  I do recall my mother making me play with Brucie,  a glum little kid who stole candy whenever he visited. He did prove useful when we needed a boy for our make believe games. I remember playing brides with a veil made from a parachute quite happily until someone said we needed a groom. We commandeered Brucie for that. He had to marry every little girl involved. He got tired and wanted to quit so we changed it to Scheherazade so he could kill each bride by throwing her on the sprinkler. He found it a very satisfying way to spend an afternoon. 

I remember liking and being liked by our neighbors - with the exception of Helen Collins, Brucies’s mother, who seemed to be hanging around our apartment a lot more than I liked. She had a way of spoiling things, like the time I was eating the last piece of watermelon and she asked for a bite. A look from my mother made me say ok, but then she sprinkled salt all over the whole slice, ate one little piece and left me with what I considered a spoiled treat. Maybe her watermelon needed salt but my watermelon did not.

It wasn't that Helen was so bad, it was just that she was so there all the time, sort of taking over and talking non-stop. She also saw herself as playful and cute. She was the only one of that opinion. Although she was Mama’s friend, she sure seemed to like Daddy a lot.

I remember her watering her flowers one afternoon as he returned from work. “Don’t you look hot and sweaty!” she giggled as she aimed her hose at him. My dad laughed but I could tell this really got to him.

A little while later, Helen was sitting on the patio showing off her new permanent waved hair when my dad, now all bathed and refreshed, called me inside to help him.

I followed and watched him fill a pot with water and go to the front porch where he climbed up onto the roof. I was needed to hand the water up to him.

I ran to the other side of the building where Helen was sitting and watched transfixed as Daddy doused her and her new permanent. It was a great moment. It was better than salting her watermelon, which she would have liked anyway.

Everyone at Happy Homes was allotted a garden plot to grown vegetables. The gardens were in a former cornfield, so the yield was usually lots of corn plus whatever else you planted that could tough it out against the corn. The tomato harvest made it worth while. Lots and lots of ripe, delicious tomatoes seemingly for free.

We kids had the surrounding fields to explore, which ended at the fence separating us from the very active air force base. We watched jets take off and heard the sound barrier broken over and over. When there was an air show in the spring we didn't need to go any farther than our back yard to watch the Thunderbirds do their amazing feats.

There were berry bushes all around the perimeter of the field in the summer. We would bring pockets full of back raspberries home to our moms, who would be equally delighted and aghast at the sight of our purple stained clothes. We would be dumped into our respective bathtubs and our clothes taken to the washroom / play area that served twenty families.

That was also the location of the single pubic telephone. You needed a nickel to make a call so the idea was to give all your friends the signal: Two rings, hang up and wait for them to call back.

Most of the other kids went by bus to a nearby public school, but I went to St. Joseph’s parochial school in downtown Dayton, where I learned all about the threat of Communism and how the first thing those fiends would do when Stalin overran the Ohio Valley was hang all the nuns from the trees down by the Miami river.  

For a period of time the Catholics of Happy Homes got together every evening to pray the rosary before dinner. Attendance dwindled rather quickly.  I guess we weren’t worried enough about the Communists and what they would do to the nuns to eat dinner late.

1n the winter of 1950, a blizzard big enough to close all the roads hit. The snow was up to our windowsills.   No one could get in or out of Happy Homes for a week. It was wonderful. No school, no church, no chores, even no food was fun. We cleaned out the little neighborhood grocery store and ate hostess crème filled cup cakes and popcorn for dinner. I loved it. There was so much snow we built not just snowmen but an igloo big enough to climb inside and happily freeze.

Even with the low rent of 35 dollars a month, saving enough for a down payment on a house wasn't easy. At some point, I decided it was my job to get things moving.  I was enchanted with the prospect of finding the perfect house with all the precise specifications needed for us to be the perfect family. I drew house plans and decorated my room over and over.

It became my mission to get hold of the daily newspaper and check out the real estate ads. Sunday papers were the best. When the post war building boom began, there were giant advertisements of beautiful new housing developments.

Whenever I could get both my parents together I would read them my list of possibilities.

“OK.” I would say, “Listen to this one. There bedrooms with a patio and garbage disposal in a new plat near grandma’s house.” That was vetoed for obvious reasons.

“Or how about this old house for less money? We could fix it up!”

 "No, no. " Both Mama and Daddy agreed. They wanted new. New everything.

Our Sundays were taken up with Mass, lunch and visits to model homes.

After what seemed to be to be an eternity, we found a house we fell in love with. Some astute sales person had charmingly decorated the model home in the Early American style my mom loved. It was in a new neighborhood not too near and not too far from either set of in-laws. It was brick and well constructed.  There was a maple kitchen and an entry hall just calling out for a cute little desk.  I swear the amenity that sold us all was the magazine rack in the bathroom. This was modern living at its finest.

We moved out of Happy Homes the day before Eisenhower was inaugurated. Within the next few years most of the original families also moved out to their own bright sparkly new houses. For most people the dream really come true.

I don't know how long the development lasted. It was long gone when I looked for it 20 years ago.

But I do know that permanent friendships were made there. Anytime we ran into someone who lived there, the one thing we could agree on was how darned happy we had been in Happy Homes.