{During Lent 2024, I am writing reflections focusing on the word “room,” and wondering if I can come up with forty views of “room,” “roominess” and even “roomlessness.” We’ll see, huh?}
The home my parents loved the most was that 13 room historic house on South Liberty Avenue, Endicott, NY. And because my most formative years (5th grade through early college) were lived there, I have a footlocker of memories associated with that space. Let me describe my first bedroom.
Well, obviously not my first bedroom, but the first room I had to myself. Kind of. The Liberty Ave. house had been home to three families when Mom and Dad bought it. The Kellams occupied the front rooms, while temporarily playing landlord to tenants who had occupied two small apartments in the rear of the house. Eventually, the renters left, and the still-growing Kellam family spread out into the whole home. And I got my own room. The Kellam girls had upstairs bedrooms (sharing space as I recall), and my two brothers (only 14 months apart in age) shared the very back room of the first floor. Being the oldest of the sibs, I got my own space. Remember that “kind of” up there? Here’s why I wrote that:
The room was mid-house, first floor. And to get to one of the bathrooms, the brothers’ rooms, the laundry room, Mom’s sewing room, and the cellar door…everyone had to go through my room. There was also a door to the side porch. In other words, I had a large room/hallway combination. No privacy, except once everyone went to bed. It was hardly “my own room,” but it had room for my modest bed (a day bed?), some cupboard storage for comic books and “Popular Science” magazines, and a table for the Heathkit shortwave radio Dad built for me.
I also had an AM radio and remember listening to WENE as I went to sleep each night, maybe using primitive (by today’s standards) headphones. Now that I think about it, also relegated to my room was one of those huge console radios, easily four feet high, with a fifteen-inch speaker, and a radio dial that promised AM stations from halfway across the USA. It may not have worked by that time, though earlier it had been my source for “Big Jon and Sparkey,” “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon,” and “Straight Arrow,” the latter being about the only radio “western” that featured a positive image of an “Indian.”
The giant Philco (?), the tiny Channel Master transister radio, and the shortwave carried me beyond my less-than-private room to the wide world. It wouldn’t be much of a leap to link those days in my youth to my radio vocations.
By the way, that shortwave radio put me in good stead with my high school history teacher Mr. Ellis. I happened upon Radio Moscow one night, and I recognized it as a propaganda tool, but my curiosity led me back to it several times. I wrote a report based on my listening to Russian radio for our Current Events course, and Mr. Ellis seemed impressed. Not always, but that time.
As I aged (smiling here), I guess Dad decided a) Jeff needed more privacy, or b) there’d be room for a pool table — so I got a new room. A bathroom. More on that tomorrow!
Peace, Grace, and Jazz! 