By Joe Rector
Ball Camp sure doesn’t look like the community in which I grew up. I thought about that as I remembered that Halloween is this weekend. I’ve talked about how the fields where we played and cut cedar Christmas trees are now packed with houses that were slapped up in a couple of days. Even more developments are to begin shortly. Our “not as good as” little community has now become a bedroom community with hundreds of houses that are sold over and over.
On Ball Camp Pike, one old house sits on a large lot. It’s the place where I grew up with my two brothers and Mother and Daddy. When it was first built, blocks that Mother and Daddy made after work were used for the walls. An addition of a new kitchen was constructed when Jim and I were on the way. Somehow, the five of us lived comfortably in that small house.
One feature of the original house was a room in the attic. Half of the space was walled off and used as a storage area, but the other part was a bedroom. At one end of the gable was a walled area with doors; it served as a closet. This room was furnished with bedroom furniture. In the summer, the space was suffocatingly hot, and in the winter it was bone-chillingly cold. For a while, Daddy slept up there when he worked night shifts.
My older brother Dallas claimed the room as his when he became a teenager. He needed his space to play the AM radio loudly. A window in the gable end could be easily raised, so Dallas could sit there to smoke cigarettes and blow the smoke out into the night air.
I don’t think much studying went on up there. Dal spent his time listening to music, entertaining his friends, and being a regular teenager who is finished with family for the time being.
That room had two problems. First, the stairs leading to the room were exceptionally steep. The stair treads weren’t code-compliant, another point that made them difficult to climb. More than one person’s misstep caused them to trip and ride their backsides to the bottom of the steps. Eventually, a bannister was installed, but before long, it pulled from the plaster walls and made the ascents or descents treacherous. When Mother passed, we sold a chiffarobe but had to return the money because we never could figure out how to get the bulky piece around the corner and out of the staircase.
When Jim and I were six, Daddy decided the time had come to heat the house with coal. However, there was no basement. That was no problem for him. He hired some men from Lonsdale and the wood paper mill and brought them to create a basement. These men worked harder than any others I’ve ever seen. They started out digging a section of the crawl space, and little by little, they no longer moved the dirt with five-gallon buckets. Soon, they were bringing out more piles in wheelbarrows. When the basement was completed, it was deep enough to walk without hitting heads on pipes and floor joists. We made bike racing trails on that dirt and raced each other every day. On Christmas Day, we received bikes and rode them in circles in that tiny basement.
I see that house every day now. Another family owns it, and they have taken care of the house and yard without fail. I’m glad to see that house because it brings back good times for an old man.
