STRATTON AVENUE

Listening to some music I hear The Street Where You Live… and then I think about “my” street and growing up on…Stratton Avenue.

After the war that I was too young to remember there was a massive housing shortage and returning veterans had priority over others when it came to renting a home.  Our lease on a  Millville Manufacturing “company home” where I lived with my grandparents was up and we were forced to find another place.  But instead my grandfather declared that this would never happen again to us - he was going to build a home!  After my grandmother recovered from this announcement she had said, “Herb...do you know how to build a home?”  “I’ll learn was his reply!” (Now at this time I was only 4 years old so I really only knew this from grandmother Ethel who told me this family legend many times over as I grew up)

And so, we moved and on a cold night I do remember packed our stuff in a borrow truck and drove across town to my uncle Francis home (pop’s brother squeezed us in his modest south Millville house  - I do vaguely remember this.  Especially all of us sleeping together in an unfinished and chilly attic)  Pop bought a small lot for $50 dollars on the next street (actually a narrow graveled lane) called Stratton Avenue and in the early spring he began to build what would be my small home a decade with the help of his four brothers who lived with a few blocks of each other.

Now something that would never happen today - happen!  Pop started to build a homw without a plan.  Each of his brother brought first hand knowledge to the job - one was a mason and another a carpenter and pop was an auto mechanic and pooling their “hands-on” working person knowledge they built a home.  Four guys who had not graduate from high school.  These were kids of the great depression.. Pop had  only gone to school until the fourth grade when he had to go to work to help support his big family.

The beginning was a one-room large “shed” from a farm he got for the price of moving it from a farmer he knew.  It remains a mystery how he moved it from miles away - it just appeared one day.  This old building became the first room - the bedroom.  And week by week, rooms were added with lumber salvaged from many sources.  Few of the materials were actually bought I learned.  This was definitely a “community project” that was taking place all over our small town. Pop worked a full day maintaining trucks at a factory and then worked late every night by the light of a swinging light bulb on an extension cord and many hours each weekend - he was an incredibly strong and tireless worker - forged by a life of labor that most today no longer have to endure.

By summer we moved into our cottage - one bedroom,bathroom with no fixtures; a living room and the most important Nanny’s kitchen. The interior was bare studs and pop knew he had to finish the walls before the winter.  Piece by piece he did.  He had bought a used refrigerator and gas range.  I slept with my mom in what was to become the “front bedroom”.  My grandparents slept in the “living room” and we had an “outhouse” which I would soon dread on those long and cold winter nights!  Our front door was a cardboard box...and so forth.  Nanny said, “We will make do for awhile!”  And we did - this rambling hand me down hodgepodge became a warm and loving  home.  Pop had achieved a bonafide Herculean task.

As the years passed and I started at an elementary school a few blocks away the house grew.  Two bedrooms were added. Our road was oiled and no more dust.  Homes were being built around us.  Stratton avenue got “city water” after it was being paved.  Rural pinelands called South Millville had finally become part of the “city”.  It was now the “50’s” and the hardships of a war had turned from fear and rationing to joy, long awaited luxuries  and hope for a bright future.  Peace had finally come for us all.

And for me the song Nanny hummed made a lot more sense then and much more now…

“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there

Which seek through the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere

Home, sweet home, there’s no place like home

Home, sweet home, there’s no place like home...

...An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain

Oh give me my lowly-thatched cottage again

The birds singing gaily that came at my call

Give me them and that peace of mind, dearer than all

Home, sweet home, there’s no place like home”