The above picture is the present day modest three bedroom, one bath(no shower)
house I was
raised in. It also has a basement, an unusual fixture for
California. The basement was the result of a request of my Mom from Montana,
where
finished
basements were the norm. This house was built
entirely by my stepfather after arriving in California in approximately
1946.
The garage and shop to the left of the house was added by him sometime
in 53 or 54. A large barn was also added by him that was built
entirely out of
salvaged lumber. That barn is history but everything else is
still a monument to his craftsmanship. The windmill was added by
the present owner, "Bud Hoppe."
A little barn history as a kid. There was a bunch of left over
salvaged lumber after building the barn and while
my step father was too busy to notice, I built a "fort" up in the roof
area of the barn, accessible only by climbing the inside barn wall up
to
it. It was quite spacious and afforded a birds eye view of the
area in front of the barn. My sister Bonnie and her friend
Joanne, liked it so much that they camped out in it but only for one
night. My step father was a little ticked when he figured out
where all the missing lumber went but looked the other way and let my
"fort" stand. You can still see the original barn to the right of our house, in the following photo.
This is what our
house looked like originally in the 1950s. My brother Don, thinks it
was 1956 specifically. This area was part of
the low lying Sacramento River delta area and was on occasion prone to
flooding. My mother took this picture and on the back of it
wrote, "I was standing in water up to my knees when I took this
picture." The "prone to flooding" was stemmed
considerably by the building of the Folsom Dam on the American River.
The first year this dam was finished, Folsom Lake was filled in one
season. It was suppose to take five or more years. It
filled up so fast that engineers were speculating whether it would hold
the water back or not and they were thinking of purposely releasing
water to protect the dam from failing, even though it would cause flooding and damage down stream from the dam.
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The
dog on the front porch is "Toby", a good old ranch dog.
Mom
enjoyed growing Cali Lilies and you can see a bunch of them under the kitchen window. Based on this, I am guessing this picture was
taken in late March or early April. This was the time of year
when the snow melt from the Sierra's would swell the many sloughs past
their meager banks and onto our farm land.
This last picture has nothing to do with Franklin or
Point
Pleasant. It has only to do with my mother.
In June of
1961, I
joined the Air Force for a four year hitch. About six months
later, my mother and step father invested in a Cafe/Fishing Sport Shop,
located
in New Hope Landing. The original cafe my Mom and my step father ran, was downstairs in the
pictured building and to the right, a little below the sign "Wimpy's." The attached building on the
left (with the
restaurant sign) was added at some later unknown date.
New Hope Landing is just two miles east of
Walnut Grove and on the Mokelumne River.
This was suppose to be
the "Get Rich" venture for my Mom and my step father. It ended up
being the place where my Mom passed away about three years after
starting the business.
She passed away right after Thanksgiving in
1964. This after
being bed
ridden for only a couple of days
with what was probably a severe bronchitis attack. Apparently,
she had an
aneurysm in her chest and bleed out and died before anybody even noticed she was in
trouble. At the time, my step father was about 100 yards away
running the restaurant.
When my step father finally got a break, he came back
to the trailer house they were
living in to
check on her. It was already too late. There was nothing to
indicate earlier, that she would need extraordinary help or was in fact
going to die.
Some things change and some things
remain the same. I still miss
my Mom. That's a good thing, isn't it?
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