We lived in 5 different houses when I was growing up but the one where we lived the longest [7 years] was a subdivision in West Knoxville called Gulf Park. I saw a meme on Facebook a few minutes ago [see below] and I giggled because if the movie Straight Outta Compton were made about my childhood it would be called Straight Outta 1970's Gulf Park, which really doesn't sound all that interesting - but it actually was.
Gulf Park was not quite the boring white bread suburb one might think.
I had a curious reaction to it the first time we drove through the neighborhood, the day after we left Augusta for the big move. When my father had told me and my brother we were moving to Tennessee, I had lived in Augusta Georgia my entire life. I had no frame of reference for Tennessee except The Beverly Hillbillies. I had never even visited Tennessee.
I pictured us living among hillbillies who didn't wear shoes, smoked corncob pipes, and ate roadkill for dinner.
I think I asked my mother if we would have to wear shoes to school and she just shot me a weird look and said "Of course." (She was too busy worrying about the big move, which included a dog, a cat, and some china, antiques, and art that she feared would not survive ham-handed moving men.)
When we moved in on that snowy day in January 1971 I was confronted with a neighborhood of mostly 2 story houses, wide streets, well-kept lawns, the occasional child on a bicycle - your typical American suburb.
I was disappointed there were no shacks with outhouses, no hound dogs braying at the car, no overall-wearing slack-jawed tow-headed children, and no shotgun toting hillbillies ANYWHERE. [Years later I was to drive back into the wilds of East Tennessee and actually run across a shotgun toting redneck and it was not a pleasant experience but that's another story for another blog.]
Gulf Park looked pretty similar to Kingston, our old neighborhood in Augusta. Just not many mature trees, because it was a newer development.
This was our house
We had a nice split level 2 story house with 4 bedrooms, a daylight basement, and a 2 car garage. The backyard was fenced. We had a deck.
The elementary and middle schools were about a mile away.
I was in the third grade. The kids at school immediately scared me by demanding to know "Why do you talk funny?!" I wanted to say [but I was too shy] I talk NORMAL. Why on earth do Y'ALL talk funny?!?? Eventually, I was the only member of my family to pick up the Knoxville accent which pronounced the long "i" sound as "aah" and other assorted linguistic anomalies. The first time I told my mother I was going to take a "share" [instead of "shower"] she nearly fainted. At age 14 I started studying voice with a coach and he quickly made me so hyper-aware of my accent that I lost much of it. One cannot sing Italian arias with a twangy Tennessee accent without sounding idiotic.
As the years went by, I realized that we were not the only folks in Gulf Park who didn't have East Tennessee accents. There were many families where the daddies worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Union Carbide, The University of Tennessee, or Tennessee Valley Authority, to name just some of the big employers. Not many mommies worked. Many families moved to Knoxville from elsewhere.
We had one Hispanic family in the neighborhood, and one Asian family. There were no black families. There was one Mormon family. There were only maybe 3 black kids in my middle school or high school. I didn't realize until I grew up what an insulated little world I'd inhabited.
Living in the suburbs included plenty of drama, however.
We had a gay couple in the neighborhood. One of the men gave me and my brother a ride home from the pool one day and my brother practically fell out of the car when we got home, he was so wigged out, even though the man had simply been polite and not said or done anything weird.
There was also a scandal involving a local coach who left his wife and married another lady who had had to leave her husband first. That was a big item of gossip for months.
There was a family where the mother was a huge amazon-type lady and her husband was a tiny little man, and one of their kids told a teacher at school something about her mother liked to get nekkid and chase the daddy around the house late at night. I always wondered if that little man had married her willingly?!? They had several kids.
There was a neighbor on our street who had two toddler boys and she would often lock them out of the house for hours at a time while she read fashion magazines and did her nails. I'm not sure why nobody called DFACS, but then again people really didn't do stuff like that back then.
One kid kept teasing me unmercifully on the school bus, in 6th grade, upsetting me terribly, and finally my brother just punched him in the face. Bruce got kicked off the bus but that boy never again said anything mean to me, and my parents didn't fuss at Bruce.
I started babysitting at the age of 11, and I had some adventures.
There was a neighbor who had several little boys, and I babysat there only once because the little hellions tied me to a chair and proceeded to wreak havoc in the house.
One of Dad's colleagues at the bank bought a house in our neighborhood when I was about 14 and I babysat over there every day all day for an entire week that first summer they were there. Longest week of my life. I was totally freaked out because they had a 4 year old son who was a big strapping boy, walking and talking plainly of course, and he wasn't potty trained at all. He would say things like "No, the powder's in the bottom drawer, Dee, don't you know what you're doing?!" [Years later the character of Stewie on Family Guy reminded me a lot of that kid.]
There was a family I babysat for, one little girl, and one night when I got in the car for the daddy to drive me home, he gave me a long passionate kiss on the mouth. I froze in horror. Fortunately he didn't go any further, probably because he remembered I was 15 and my father would have killed him. I never told Dad about the incident (until years later) but needless to say, I never babysat there again.
Within a short walking distance away from our house, there were farms and farmhouses and rolling green pastures. One shy little boy from one of the farming families used to walk down our street peddling vegetables grown on the farm and my mom always bought from him.
As you can see from the clipping below, my parents were out and about a lot. Being a banker in a smallish town always means a lot of socializing and joining the boards of this or that. The social obligations in Knoxville weren't too bad for Mom and Dad though - not like Augusta, where they'd had to go out 2-4 times a week.
All in all, Gulf Park was a great place to grow up, even though everyone wore shoes and there was no moonshine available..
Sure there were dramas. It wasn't always idyllic. However, I remember lots of games of kickball and kick the can, walking home from school on pretty days, having snowball fights and sledding down the big hill on snowy days. On really cold days, we'd get home from school and open the door and Mom would've put chili on the stove, and the smell always seemed very homelike, to me.
I rode my bicycle everywhere. I roller-skated in the street. I went to the neighborhood swimming pool all summer and swam on the swim team for several years.
On July 4th there were always fireworks.
Mayfield Dairy delivered milk and cheese. Charles Chips delivered big cans of potato chips and smaller cans of cookies.
One night I called a local radio station to request a song, and I was told I had won a puppy, which got delivered to the house that night around midnight. His name was Fred. Great dog.
Halloween was a ton of fun because of all the kids, even though I had to quit at age 13. One year we ran out of candy and my mom had us hide Halls Menthol drops in our palms and drop them in the bags.
Like a lot of families, we had a big powerboat, and we spent a lot of weekends on the lake. I could ski at the age of 9, quite well.
When I look back now and think about it, I kind of regret that we left Gulf Park when I was 16, and moved to a house on the lake. We had a lot of good times in that old house on Venice Road.
above, the basement had a "wet bar" which was quite a novelty my 6th grade school photo
