The beginning
- Jan 9, 2019
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 21, 2025
I grew up in a small town in Arizona. Actually, I was not even in town but living in a cool old two-story house on a cotton farm. It had a screened, wrap-around porch, and a great climbing tree. We still refer to it as the two-story house to this day. There weren't many houses like it around our area at the time. It had been our grandparents home but was not built by them. Ironically perhaps, the nearest neighbors' house was also two story but I can't recall another one at all.
When my Mom and Dad married, they originally lived in Bessemer, Alabama where her family lived.
My grandparents traveled to Alabama for a visit and to offer my dad a job on the farm. Until that time he had worked at many different jobs. One job was a door-to-door salesman selling a string of different products--Bibles, child tenders, and vacuum cleaners among them. For the curious, a child tender was some kind of contraption you put your child in so they wouldn't get into everything. His brother-in-laws went to work for the mines but he didn't want be underground after being on a ship in the Merchant Marines during WWII. Mom said he actually was pretty good at sales. He accepted his parent's' offer and they moved to Arizona with their son Paul Wesley.
They lived in a small house behind the two-story house. It had old wooden floors (not the nice ones), oil paper over the windows instead of glass, and no cooling system. My mom said she would go to my grandmother's and help her with cleaning and chores just to feel the swamp cooler air.
When my dad's two brothers, Lloyd and Warren, built my grandparents a new home to the west of the two-story home, my parents moved into the vacated house. The two brothers would later build my parents a home on land purchased a few miles away. Meanwhile, we loved that house with its "clubhouse" under the stairs, wrap-around porch, climbing tree, and animals out back. We did love when our city cousins visited and thought gathering the eggs was fun. After we moved around 1958 or 1959, the third Tucker family, uncle Harvey and aunt Mel, would occupy the beloved home with their family. Eventually, the land was sold after my grandfather's death in 1970 and the Tucker reign in the two-story home ended.
Your memories of the two story house really come through. You can tell it was a place full of love and the kind of everyday moments that shape a good childhood.
The mention of the swamp cooler especially made me smile. My aunt and uncle had one too. My cousins and I, after running ourselves ragged outside, would pile into the house and stand right in front of it, soaking up that blast of cool air. We were solemnly warned about a relative who supposedly cooled off too fast and died, and promptly told to go back outside. I am pretty sure that story was less about safety and more about clearing the way for the airflow. I was six…
I love old childhood memories. This was great!