Re: Neighborhood Character

10/20/07 - posted by Paul Judge

On my block kids avidly played football, baseball, and kickball on the hill sloped street in front of our houses. Two doors up from Richie and Bobby Links home was a severely weathered stucco (That’s redundant, it was the Richmond!) house that we went to great lengths to avoid.

The house was foreboding. The grass in front was long dead and the soil upon which it once grew hardened to concrete like consistency. Its few skeletal shrubs made Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree look verdant. The shades and curtains were always drawn. From the street we never saw any light coming from the house during the evening hours. To us kids the place emitted only mystery and potential peril. On Halloween we unanimously avoided ringing the doorbell for we were pretty certain we’d never be heard from again if that door opened.

The occupants were three older people, two women and a man, who seemed ancient to us. They sometimes emerged from their house using the side alleyway door next to the garage. They were dressed always in dark heavy clothing, the women with long dresses and scarves, the man in a suit and fedora; wet or dry, cold or warm, they each wore heavy gray or black coats. When our ears heard them talking it was with a thick foreign tongue. To make things even weirder they always walked on the street pavement never the sidewalk as they went to and from the 38 Geary bus stop down at the corner. Occasionally the man would appear with another man who drove a big black four door late 30’s or ‘40s Chrysler and sometime they and the two women would drive somewhere.

We kids were too scared to talk with these people and speculated that they might be Russian spies. Our parents didn’t weren’t bothered and they prompted us to mind our own business and leave them alone. As we grew up and attended high school and our recreational orbits expanded beyond our block the mystery of that house and its occupants receded from our attention.

It was an even greater mystery and shock that awaited us one day when one of us teens urgently gathered some of us to assemble across the street from that house. The two garage doors of the still unpainted house were swung wide open and from the darkened interior could be seen the front cowling, fenders, and wind screen of an entire racing car up on blocks! There with no one else present in sight. The house was still occupied by the same people we had watched for years. The primer painted machine just sat there posing us with an even greater mystery. Go figure that one out!

A few years later I came to the conclusion that our neighbors were simply émigrés from an Eastern European block nation. Who knows what their life stories were and what they had witnessed and survived but they sure provided us youngsters with a great puzzle to ponder.