The House on Bishop Street

In less than a week I will be in Union City and I’ve got a list of the special places I want to see.

First, of course, is my childhood home. I have a photo of it from 1960 and wonder if it has changed much. A friend wanted to know if I would knock on the door and ask to look inside—but I doubt I will.

I have a very clear memory of the interior of that house, which my mother tells me was designed by my father. One of its special features was in my bedroom closet--a secret hiding place. It was a hole in the wall about a foot or two wide at shoulder hight, no doubt a construction error. The downside of this hiding place was that once something went in, it could not be retrieved because it simply fell to the bottom of the space between the walls. Being astute, I realized it was perfect for the most super confidential stuff.

So if you live at 621 Bishop Street you are sitting on treasure trove of late 1950’s teen goodies. But you’ll have to knock down the closet wall to recover them.

Here is how dumb I was--more than once I held and then dropped lit matches into the hole trying to see down to the bottom of it. How crazy was that? Yikes!

I had easy access to matches even as a 10 year old because I possessed an exotic matchbook collection started by my parents from their many travels. It is a wonder I didn’t set the house on fire.

Which reminds me of one of the most traumatic events of my sheltered childhood . . .

My parents were away for a week and my maternal grandparents came from New Jersey to stay with my brother and me. In the middle of the night I awoke to the sight of flashing red lights through my curtains, reflected in the mirror. Standing on my bed to look out the window I could see nothing except the lights—not where they were coming from. Heart pounding and afraid to wake anyone, I tiptoed through the house to get a better look. There I watched in shock and awe to see the house next door burning. The lights were from the fire engines which I now clearly saw. I don’t know why no one else woke up, but I was the only one in our house who witnessed it. I stared out the window for a long time and finally went back to sleep convinced I must have dreamed the whole thing.

But the next morning I saw proof that it had really happened. To my great relief I learned that the elderly neighbors survived. They had escaped by climbing out the bathroom window. This was pretty miraculous considering that window was relatively small and high off the ground, and they were no spring chickens (or so it seemed at the time).

Thankfully, that was the closest I have come to a house fire.