October 4, 1976: The Kennedy Space Center in Florida
	September 20-24, 1976: A Trip to Montreal, Canada
	Return to Index for 1976

In early October, I was schedule for a class at Harris Corporation in Florida, and since I was heading south, and had some time the week before the class, I thought I would work in a trip to Charlotte, to see my Mom, and then a drive up to Elon with her to see my sister and her family.

The class for Harris Corporation would start on a Wednesday, so I flew down to Charlotte the previous Thursday, intending to spend a couple of days with my Mom in Charlotte and then the weekend at my sister's. Although my Mom still has Dad's last car, I rented one at the airport as that was simply more convenient.

The house that I grew up in, and that Mom has occupied since 1951 and through my Dad's death in 1974, is in South Charlotte. The area was developing rapidly when we moved there, and even though we were considered pretty far out of the city back then, development had pushed south quickly, and by this year has extended most of the way to Pineville. The homes on Somerset Drive, while decently kept-up, were showing their age, and many of the neighbors Mom used to have had moved elsewhere.

At right is a small map section of the neighborhood where I lived from 1951 through my departure for Davidson in 1964. Park Road, one of the south side's main north-south arteries, was just a two-lane road with dirt shoulders when we moved here, but now it is a four-lane improved boulevard. Somerset Drive used to be again just an undivided blacktop street, but now it is very much improved.

My sister and I spent countless hours in nearby Freedom Park. It is a large park, with a fairly good-sized pond, and Sugar Creek running alongside it. On the other side of Sugar Creek is the Charlotte Nature Museum (now called "Discovery Place"), again a favorite destination when we were kids. Even better, there was a plot of forest next to it (between it and Princeton Avenue) with some paths through it, rocks you could climb on, and just generally a great place to play (which we also did in the bed of Sugar Creek before, in later years, it got too polluted to be pleasant).

But the streets of Park Road, Princeton Avenue south of us and Lilac Road north of us, and the streets of Somerset, Idlewild, and Forest Park that connected the two were the boundaries of our world for many years. About the only time we were outside those boundaries was to go to school, to go to the Charlotte Swim Club (a cooperative about seven miles from the house), to go shopping or downtown or, in my sister's case, to ride horses at some stables fairly close by.

At right is a picture of the house I grew up in; obviously, it is the one on the left, and in 1976 it looked exactly the same as it does here, although this picture, courtesy of Google Maps Street View, is probably only a couple of years old. So this picture is more than 40 years after my visit today, and a lot has changed between then and now.

At the time of this visit, the driveway you see here was gravel, and we shared it with the Britts, who lived in a small white house, just a little bigger than ours, to the right in this picture. By 1976, the Britt kids, Laura and Tommy, had moved away, and I believe that by this time, Mr. Britt, who was the car racing expert for the Associated Press, had died, and only "Mo" Britt was still in the house. As you can see here, that house is gone, and has been replaced by a totally new house, and they have their own, new driveway on the opposite side. (Mrs. Britt has long since passed away.).

As far as our own house is concerned, I can tell you that on one of the album pages twenty or so years hence, you can come with me as I return to Charlotte and return to this street and, thanks to the courtesy of the house's then owner, return to this very house for a tour. I can tell you that for the next twenty years at least, the layout of the house will remain the same- with only one major change, which was the addition of a new master bedroom suite at the back of the house (room for which required the removal of the old free-standing, one-car garage). But the front of the house, although drastically updated, remained the same. There is still a bedroom where the bay window is, a bath and another small bedroom behind them, a large living room behind the porch, a dining room and very much renovated kitchen behind that, then a den and now an enclosed garden, and then the new master suite. But even that tour is out-of-date, apparently.

I couldn't do this in a paper photo album, but here I can run out to Zillow.com to get sales and other information about my old house, which I have just done. And I will admit I am floored.

First, yet another bedroom and bath have been added somewhere, and I confess I am not sure where (although I can only assume that the house extends even further back, as there is still no second floor). That 2,500 square foot house looks awfully small compared to the much larger ones on each side, but still, the Zillow estimate is almost $900,000!

I can tell you that my Dad bought the house in 1951 for $14,500, and it took him until the late 1960s to pay off the mortgage. You might wonder what the appreciation rate of the house has been. Granted, owners over the years have apparently put a good deal of money into it. Having watched HGTV quite a bit, and thinking about the costs shown on various home-renovation shows, my guess is that the add-ons and renovations have probably cost somewhere between $100K and $150K, given that a good deal of the adding on was done fifteen years ago and earlier. So let's say that you took $14500 and put it in the bank, intending to have $700,000 to buy this house (I have subtracted the renovation costs), what kind of interest rate would you have to get, year in and year out, to have that much now?

Actually, not as high a rate as you might think; a constant rate of 6% would just about do it.

And I think that rate is pretty accurate, as we have two reference points to go by. One is the sale price of some $115K in 1993, and the other is the fact that a year from now, my Mom will sell this house and move elsewhere, and when she does, she will get about $78,000 for it. At 6%, she would have had some $65K in 1977, but at that same rate there would have been over $150K by 1993. But all this is just an interesting exercise, and you don't need me to tell you that their homes have been most people's most successful investment over the years.

Well, to get back to my visit this year, my Mom and I played bridge a couple of times down at her bridge club, and I got to see Mrs. Segrest (who lived up at the top of the street and whose son was one of my frequent playmates growing up).

A couple of days later, my Mom and I drove up to my sister's new house in the country outside Elon, North Carolina, where I got us rooms at a local Ramada Inn. I want to show where, exactly, my sister is, but the difficulty I have is that between my visit this October and the time at which I am writing this online narrative (mid-2019), a lot has changed, physically, in Elon, Burlington, and North Carolina, with the result that the way one gets to my sister's farm today is much different than it was this fall.

Today, to get to my sister's farm, one follows the same route that my Dad and Mom, and now my Mom and I, have followed since my sister moved up to Elon after college. Getting from Charlotte to the vicinity of Elon is a simple matter of getting on Interstate 85 north from Charlotte towards Greensboro, and staying on that highway after it becomes coterminus with Interstate 40 and heads more east to Raleigh.

The exit for Elon College (even that name has changed, as Elon College has become Elon University the town has changed its name officially to simply "Elon") put you on Huffman Mill Road- actually one of the streets which, if you follow it northeast, will take you to Burlington, NC, the larger city just east of Elon.

So just off the exit from the Interstate, you have to double back on Garden Road which actually goes northwest more towards Elon (blue route). It connects to South Williamson Avenue, which you take north, across US Highway 70, through the center of Elon and out to the north, eventually angling off to the northwest.

In the first decade of the 21st century, development south of Elon and Gibsonville led to a huge new shopping area along Interstate 85, and so a new exit was constructed for access to the expressway. At the same time, a bypass was built around Elon, so that so much traffic wouldn't be going right through the center of town and right through the campus. So now, to get to the side of Elon on which my sister lives, you can get off Interstate 85 at that new exit, and take the much-faster bypass around to her side of the college town (green route).

Anyway, once you get to the north side of Elon, my sister's farm is about three miles to the northwest, off Elon-Ossipee Road.

My sister has a really nice farm a quarter mile west of Elon-Ossipee Road. She's been in Burlington since college, and when she married Bob they bought a piece of land and built a house on it. That was in 1972, so they have been here now for going on five years. Their two kids, live at home of course; Ted is 7 and Jennifer ("Jeffie") is 6.

Judy and Bob bought the land and then built a house on it; the only structure they kept when they bought the property was the old red country barn down by the road. That's where the other residents of Greyfield Farms, as Judy has begun to call it, reside; those would be my sister's horses.

There's an aerial view of my sister's property at left, but of course it doesn't show the farm as it looked this year. The biggest change between then and now (as I write this) was the construction of a new, modern, cement-floored barn up near the house, to take the place of the vintage dirt-floored old one. (I visited during its construction years from now, and there will be an album page where you can look at some pictures of it going up.)

I always like visiting my sister and Bob (and the kids, of course), not least because it is a chance for me to get out of my city environment and into a more pastoral one. It's good for the soul. But after all that introduction, let's get to the pictures that I took on this visit to my sister's house.

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At right is a picture of my Mom coming out of the front door of Judy's house onto the porch. At left is a short, 6-picture slideshow of the other pictures we took this weekend. In them you will see the kids, Jennifer and Ted, my sister Judy and her husband Bob, myself (the guy with the beard), and some other residents at the farm (one of whom, it turns out, will play a pivotal role in my niece's becoming a vegetarian later in her life). To go from one picture to the next in the slideshow, just click on the little arrows in the lower corners of each picture.

My Mom and I had a great visit with my sister; it is always a pleasure to see her and her family- which includes cats, dogs, horses, and other "animaux". After a couple of days, Mom and I returned to Charlotte so I could head on down to Florida for my work there.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	October 4, 1976: The Kennedy Space Center in Florida
	September 20-24, 1976: A Trip to Montreal, Canada
	Return to Index for 1976