The Builder - Chapter 2

Church & Home


The year 1946 brought several things into our life. The end of the war made it easier to buy things and the economy was improved, also due to the war, so more was available. It also brought a move. Mom & Dad bought a home in northwest Houston with about 2 acres of land. The house wasn’t very big but the plan was to enlarge it. The family joined White Oak Baptist church that year and attended regularly. They needed space for education and before long decided to build a 2 story building. The builder volunteered of course and for several Saturdays a large group of men gathered to raise the walls and put the roof on. Not long after the building was dry, the building crowd dwindled to the point where it was the pastor, the builder and occasionally 1 or 2 others. The work was slow and as I remember the building was never completely finished out. We used it for quite a few years in pretty rough condition. A few months after the church building started, dad decided to start on our house. He about doubled the size and added 3 bedrooms, a new bath, a large kitchen expansion and a big walk-in closet. The preacher and dad would work on the church in the morning and our house in the afternoon. Eventually it was finished. There were windows everywhere and an attic fan drew air in the windows and exhausted it out a vent on the front porch, we had no air conditioner. The house was heated by floor furnaces which hung beneath the house and extended down below the ground surface into small brick lined holes. It never failed that when it was coldest and we needed heat the most it would also rain and the holes would flood and put out the pilot light. That meant someone had to man the manual pump and keep the water pumped out. That pumper was usually me. We eventually solved the problem by stopping the water from flowing under the house. We also built a garage and workshop behind the house. Once the house was finished dad moved his railroad inside in one of the front rooms for a while and we could once again watch the trains run. We lived in this house until 1965, almost 20 years and there are many memories. I probably won’t share them all but in a future chapter I will try to give you a glimpse of growing up in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.