Warning: I remember this house a lot better than the two previous houses. Forgive me for all the picky details; I am just a detail loving person! Besides, I want to remember it as well as I do now, and if I don't write it all down I'll forget when I get old and senile. So feel free to skim if you get bored!
We moved to my third childhood home in the fall of 1973 when I was 5 years old. My memories at this age are not extremely clear, but I do remember a few things about this move. For one thing, it was my first time riding on an airplane. The climate in Houston is quite different from the other two places I'd lived up to that point and my first impression of Houston was that it was very green and that there were lots of trees. Oh, and it rained. A lot!
I remember being quite anxious to see our new house. We drove by it once (possibly the day we arrived in Texas; I'm not sure) but it was pouring rain so we didn't get out of the car. Then we went by again sometime in the next few days. We couldn't go inside, but I remember walking around the back and looking in the kitchen (breakfast area) windows to try to see as much as we could. I don't remember how long we stayed in the hotel before we actually moved into the house, but it probably was only a few days. The outside of the house (as you can see in the picture below) was brown brick.
Pew Family Children, December 1973
In front of our house at 318 Bayou View Dr., Seabrook, TX 77586
Back Row: Curtis, Erick & Hans
Front Row: Ben, Tim, Shellie, Amy & Annette
This picture was taken just a few months after we moved to Houston. I actually remember the photo shoot because there was a cat wandering around our yard and Ben (almost 2 year old) was so fascinated by the cat that all he wanted to do was follow it around. It took forever to get a decent shot because he kept walking away right when my dad took the picture. (You can see he's already on his way out in the picture above!)
Anyway, in this picture we are standing in front of the part of the house where the master bedroom was located. It had a cathedral ceiling and there were windows just under the peak of the roofline. In the picture below, we were standing in front of the part of the house where the living room was located. The living room had three sets of tall skinny windows in front; you can see some of them in the picture.
Pew Family Fall 1976
(This picture was probably taken shortly before Curtis left on his mission.)
Back Row: Hans, Curtis, Erick
Middle Row: Shellie, Mom, Dad
Front Row: Tim, Ben, Annette, Amy
The front door (and foyer) was located in between the living room and the master bedroom. There was a curved path leading from the driveway to the front door. Actually, I should say "doors" since there was a double door, but only one of them opened (the other was just for looks!) There was a small square foyer just inside the front door with entrances to the living room (to the left), family room (straight ahead) and hallway that led to the master bedroom (right). There were folding doors for each of these entrances, but we left them open almost all the time. I remember they were there, though, because my dad shut himself in the foyer once with all the doors closed so he could try out my new hula hoop (received for my 8th birthday) without anyone watching (and ridiculing) him. Plus, a few times my older siblings had gatherings with friends that I was not allowed to attend so the doors were shut those times too. (And I didn't like it!) Those doors had slats and if you stood right up against them you could just barely see through them but not well enough to get a good view. Not very helpful for little kids trying to spy on their older brothers. :(
Here's a picture that was taken in the living room:
Christmas 1976 (I think)
Annette, Shellie, Tim, Ben and Amy enjoying presents (oh, and Pierre too!)
One set of narrow double windows is visible in the wall on the left of the picture.
The family room had a built in bookcase on the right wall, a pass through from the kitchen on the left wall, and a sliding glass door which led out to the back porch on the back wall. There were also lots of windows on the back wall so there was a great view of the back yard.
Ben in the family room on one of his birthdays (probably 1976 or 1977)
Windows are behind him (covered with curtains) and the edge of the built in bookcases can just be seen on the far right of the picture, next to the cabinet television. (Isn't that a great television, by the way?!) The stairs were right behind the television.
The kitchen was to the left of the family room. When you walked into the kitchen from the family room, you actually walked into a breakfast nook area (that extended to the right) with lots more windows with back yard views. The kitchen part was to your left. The kitchen had carpet--yellow carpet. I'm sure my mom hated it! If you kept walking straight ahead through the breakfast area, there was a small short hallway with a door to the garage at the end. On the left was a small bathroom and on the right was the laundry room. If you turned left into the kitchen after walking into the breakfast area and kept going straight ahead through the kitchen, you would come to a door (I think it was a pocket door) that led to the living room.
The hallway that led off the right side of the foyer was L shaped. There was a closet on the right and after that was the door to the master bedroom. Straight ahead (at the end of the short part of the "L") was a door to a bathroom. This bathroom was sort of a "jack and jill" bath, because another door on the right wall of the bathroom connected to the master bedroom. (The youngest members of our family remember getting in big trouble once for going through the bathroom to get into the master bedroom when the bedroom door was locked...shortly before Christmas. Hmmm....! I still maintain my innocence--I was so dense that it never even crossed my mind that I shouldn't be doing that!) There was a small dressing area between the master bath and the main master bedroom area that had a big mirror, a counter and (I think) a sink where my mom would have us sit when she combed our hair and put it in ponytails (or braids) in the mornings. There was a wall with closets that ran along one side of this area, which separated it from the rest of the master bedroom. The wall didn't go all the way up to the cathedral ceiling, though.
Back to the hallway, if you turned the corner of the "L" and headed down the hallway (after the bathroom) there was another small room on the right that we used for food storage. The hallway ended in a room that I think was supposed to be a recreation room. It had a linoleum floor and there was a sliding glass door leading out to the porch on the left wall. This room was also open on the left side to the bottom of the stairs and to the family room. (One step led up to a small landing. On the other side of the landing another step led down into the family room. If you turned left from the landing (instead of going straight forward and down into the family room) you would go up the stairs to the second floor.) This room was where Curtis and Hans slept, but my mom had a desk in there and I remember playing in there too sometimes--we had a few toys in there like Tim's air hockey table.
Ben, Tim, and Amy (1977)
That was the downstairs level of the house. Upstairs, there were four bedrooms and a bathroom. The stairs intersected a long hallway that ran from one end of the house to the other. The bathroom was at one end of the hallway (to the left of the stairwell) and the room that Amy & I shared was at the other end of the hallway. There were three other bedrooms. One bedroom was to the left of the stairwell (tucked in between the bathroom and the stairwell)--that one was Erick's. (At least that's how I remember it. Maybe that room was Curtis's at first and Erick moved in after Curtis went to college.) The other two bedrooms were to the right of the stairwell. The first one was shared by Tim & Ben and the next one was Shellie's room. All of the bedrooms (including mine) extended over the back side of the house, with windows looking out on the backyard. That meant that all of the bedroom doorways were on one side of the hallway. On the opposite side of the hallway there were one or two doors, but they led into attic space and they were kept locked most of the time. There were no windows in the attic areas, so the house looked like a one story house from the front.
The room that Amy and I shared was quite large. We had a large closet across the front end of our room (to the left of the door) but most of the room was to the right of the door. The wall opposite from the closet was the wall with the window. The window was high enough that I had to stand on something to really look out. The windows in the bedrooms were cut into the back slope of the roof so each one had a small flat area right outside the windowsill. We were absolutely not allowed to climb out the window onto this flat area. (I know Hans disobeyed this rule at least once--I'll have to tell that story later!) I loved that window, though--we had a great view of the many trees in the backyard and I loved watching the birds in the trees. It was sort of like living in a tree house. We moved the furniture around once or twice while we lived there. At one point, we were sleeping in a double bed that was against the back wall (opposite from the door) and at another point we had twin beds located on the window wall, one on each side of the window. The room was big enough that we also had a small table with four chairs, a toy box, an easle, and plenty of room on the floor to spread out our toys. I'm pretty sure the carpet was a soft green color (not my favorite). Sometime during the time that we lived there, my mom made my sister and I matching bedspreads--the fabric was a pattern that looked like patchwork blocks with rickrack in between. The different "squares" were solid pink and green, as well as polka dot, striped and floral prints in pink, green, and yellow. She covered the top of the table and two bedside lamps with the same fabrics, and made a fabric covered frame to go around the window.
I think the layout of this house was pretty nice--great for entertaining downstairs and kind of a "kid haven" upstairs. Tim, Ben, Amy and I used to pull toys out of our rooms and all play together in that long hallway. It was very fun, but not so fun later when I was making the trek to the bathroom in the middle of the night down that long, dark, cluttered hallway. Then it became a deadly obstacle course! I remember Shellie complaining bitterly that we did not clean up after ourselves.
As I mentioned before, we had a lot of trees in our backyard, and when I say a lot, I really do mean it! I think we counted them once and there were close to 100. Being in the back yard felt like being in the woods. The left side of the yard had fewer trees and there was grass growing there, but most of the yard was dirt (like a forest floor). There was a clearing in the middle of the yard large enough for our swing set and (later) a jungle gym. A large tree in the back left corner of the yard had a round orange tree swing hanging in it--the kind with a rope in the middle of the circular seat. One time I was out there by myself swinging on that swing and I somehow managed to get the skirt of my dress twisted up in the rope. I was stuck and couldn't get loose; my mom finally came looking for me and rescued me. There were two other trees near the back of the yard (behind the swingset clearing) that had a metal bar between them. It was too high up for me to reach, though. We had so much fun in that backyard (at least until fall when we had to help rake and bag all those leaves--that was torture).
We had trees in the front yard too, but not as many. It seems like all those trees had things that fell off of them--little spikey balls or little hard shell-like pods. We were forever stepping on things that hurt our feet, at least at certain times of the year.
There were only two things I remember not liking about this house. The first is that my parents' bedroom was so far away from mine. I'm sure they enjoyed the privacy, but I was a wimpy kid who was pretty much scared of everything and I had a lot of bad dreams. So if I woke up in the middle of the night terrified from a bad dream and in need of parental comfort, I had to make a long frightening trip down the long hallway, down the stairs, past a lot of creepy windows in the family room, into the foyer right by the front door (another scary spot) and down the hall to (finally!) my parents' room. I'm not sure why I didn't just stay in bed.
The other thing I didn't like was the cockroaches. (Although they were not unique to this particular house. They were pretty much unavoidable in the Houston area, no matter what house you lived in. They just came with the territory.) The cockroaches in that part of the country were fairly large (an inch or two long) with wings--they could fly! They were so disgusting, and I was terrified of them. It still gives me the "willies" just thinking about them!
Now a few quick (I hope) observations about our neighborhood. We lived in a great established neighborhood with lots of mature trees. The houses all looked different--not like the "cookie cutter" housing developments you see these days. I became quite familiar with an extended area of our neighborhood because I rode my bike to school from first grade on. The suburb we lived in was called El Lago, and we did live fairly close to a lake. (There were lots of lakes, creeks, and so forth in the area where we lived. One time I saw a crab crawling down the street.) The streets in our neighborhood had great names like Pebble Brook, Willow Vista, Shadow Creek, Hickory Ridge, and Lakeshore Drive. I knew kids from school that lived on most of these streets, but we mostly stayed on our own street and played with the kids there. I remember that there was a small park on one of the streets several blocks away. We lived just a few miles from the NASA space center; we drove by it often on our trips to church or to the store. The elementary school I attended while we lived here was named after Ed White, an astronaut who died in a fire during a launch test. I remember one of the neighborhood kids pointing out a certain house near mine where "an astronaut used to live". As I mentioned before, it rained a lot and a few times the streets flooded. I remember at least one time the streets filled up with enough water that our neighbors across the street were able to row their canoe down the street. Thankfully, our house didn't flood, though.
We lived in Houston for about 3 1/2 years. I have really fond memories of our house and of the time we spent in this area.
