A Memory Tour of Huntsville (2)

This post is the second one describing a "memory tour" of Huntsville that my younger brother Richard and I took in July 2018. The first part is here. 

While living in Huntsville we attended Lakewood United Methodist Church on Mastin Lake Road, which is still active although smaller. The UMC listing gives the congregation size as 68 people, and the only service on Sunday is at 9 a.m.

Davis Hills Middle School

3221 Mastin Lake Road NW

The school was called Davis Hills Junior High when I attended. In March 2014 I wrote a blog post with photos about two of my activities there. You can see them here. 

Another set of doors I walked through many times, as did younger brother Richard. 

There is still a field across the street from the school. 

Davis Hills Middle School closed in 2016. At that time there were about 350 students in grades 6-8. The building is now used by one of Huntsville City Schools' academies. 

Younger brother Richard began his high school career at J.O. Johnson High School, which opened in 1972. Mom and Dad moved to southeast Huntsville, and he finished high school at the original Grissom. Johnson closed in 2016; we found the campus surrounded by chain link fencing. This coat seemed an apt symbol of the situation.

The city owns the property and intends to develop it as the Johnson Legacy Complex, a major recreation center. Nearby Jemison High School replaced Johnson.   

Johnson High School

6201 Pueblo Drive NW

I graduated from Lee High School in 1970. The school had opened in 1957 as a junior high school, becoming a full high school for the 1963-64 year. In 2012 a new building opened on the same site; the old one was demolished. Some  photos of the new building are below, as well as a few others. You can also find a lot of history of the school at the Huntsville Rewound site.

Lee High School

2500 Meridian Street N

This large house on Quietdale Drive very close to the high school seemed to be undergoing rehabilitation. 

These two photos come from the Lee yearbook, either 1968 or 1969. No, that's not my hot rod. Wonder if it's still around?

We had "portable" classrooms at Lee even in 1970. 

Source: Lee High School yearbook, 1970

We didn't visit on this trip, but one place always in our memories is Maple Hill Cemetery. Dad is buried in the new section.  

You can read about him in a such blog posts as "Dad and Alabama Archaeology" and "Dad and the USS Errol". 

A Memory Tour of Huntsville (1)

In July 2018 my brother Richard and I did a "memory tour" of Huntsville places we remembered from growing up in the city. These included previous homes, schools and other sites. We drove around for several hours on a Saturday and Sunday. Mom went along on the first day. Details are below and in a second blog post.

Of course, some of the old haunts are gone: El Palacio, The Mall, Heart of Huntsville Mall, Shoney's, A Good Book Store, etc, etc....Well, a LOT of the old haunts are probably gone...You can find information and photos of most of those places at the wonderful rabbit hole, Huntsville Rewound. 

You can read the second post about this tour here.

So, forward to the past...

This house is located at the corner of Lincoln Street and Eustis Avenue, facing Lincoln, in downtown Huntsville. In 1954 when dad got a job as a civilian employee with the U.S. Army at Redstone Arsenal, he moved from Gadsden to Huntsville and boarded in this house for several months until mom and I joined him. 

The house has been nicely restored like so many in this part of the city.

When we moved to Huntsville in 1954, the town was booming. For about a year or so we lived in Redstone Park in Farley, which was a housing project built for use in World War II. In January 1956 the Army purchased the property for $8,911.50 and returned it to military use. We moved into the new development around Cloverdale Drive in 1955.  

We went by the Cloverdale house on Saturday, so mom was along for that portion of the tour. When we stopped in front of the house, a young man in his twenties must have seen us and came out to check on us. We explained we had once lived in the house and were just driving through the old neighborhood. He said his family had been there since 2000 and asked when we lived there. We told him from 1955 until about 1960. His response? "Wow!"

Some time back I did a post on the subscription to children's magazine Jack and Jill that we had while living on Cloverdale. Going through a batch of these I noticed two different address numbers for the house over the years. You can read the details at "Cloverdale Drive, 'Jack & Jill' & Me"

Here I am with dad holding younger brother Richard in the front yard of the Cloverdale Drive house in 1959. The neighborhood has changed a lot from this time when there were only a few shrubs and small trees around the houses. You can see more photos here, and my blog post on the great February 1958 snowfall is here. 

When we lived on Cloverdale Drive I attended Morris Elementary School, which is now Morris P-8. 

On Sunday Richard and I headed out for part two of the tour. We started in our old neighborhood of Lakewood in northwest Huntsville just off Memorial Parkway. 

In the 1960's I went to Cub & Boy Scouts at what was then a Presbyterian church just up the hill from our house. To the right behind the big tree you can see one end of a long building. 

Our house was on Lakeview Drive on the left as you start down the hill. A gentleman was sitting on the porch, so we didn't want to be too intrusive. 

We moved to 4606 Lakeview Drive in 1960; here's what the house looked like about that time. You can see some family photos taken inside the house and one of the back in the early days here. 

Here's the view today down Lakeview Drive just past our old house. I sure don't remember all those trees when we were riding bikes down that hill!

The field of dreams below our old elementary school doesn't seem to have changed much. 

Here are the front entrance and sign for Lakewood Elementary School at 3501 Kenwood Drive NW. Gee, I wonder how many times I went through those doors? Richard did that even more times than I did. I didn't start here until third grade, but he did all of elementary school in this building. You can read a history of the school which opened in September 1959 here. 

When I was in the 5th grade at Lakewood I was one of the "patrol boys" who helped young students on and off buses and out of other vehicles to make sure they made it through the front door. We got to wear helmets and sashes and thought we looked pretty cool.

A perk of this program was the free movies. The downtown Lyric Theatre would let us in for free on Friday after school, so we watched about any movie playing. Oddly, the only one I remember at the moment is the Jack Lemmon and Carol Lynley vehicle, Under the Yum Yum Tree. We probably didn't appreciate much of this "sex comedy" based on a Broadway play. 

Sadly, the Lyric closed in December 1978 and burned in January 1982.   

TO BE CONTINUED

Birmingham Photo of the Day (66): Lakeview Trolley

Today the Lakeview district is a concentration of restaurants and entertainment venues on Birmingham's Southside near UAB. But in the late nineteenth century Lakeview was one of the Magic City's "streetcar suburbs" and developed around Lakeview Park. The 43 acres were home to a large pavilion, a baseball stadium, hotel, a theater, a lake and other amenities. The first football game between Alabama and Auburn was played there in February 1893. 

The image below is a "black and white photograph of the Highland Avenue streetcar near the pavilion at Lakeview Park" according to the cited source below. In his book Yesteray's Birmngham [1975, page 44] Malcolm C. McMillan dates this picture of the electric trolley as 1895. He notes that seven years earlier, before the trolley, Richard Hawes had murdered his wife and two young daughters and dumped the bodies of the wife and one daughter in this lake and the other daughter in East Lake.

In 1903 the Birmingham Country Club was built on the Lakeview Park site. Today the course is known as the Highland Park Golf Course.

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections

The Lake at Lakeview Park ca. late 1880's

Source: Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections