built from scratch.
My father and mother did not buy an Eichler home in an Eichler subdivision, a missed opportunity they speak of wistfully to this day. At the time, the Eichler price, though consciously pegged to aerospace salaries, was a few thousand dollars beyond my father’s bottom-rung pay. And yet the allure of the Eichler illustrates why we saw so little “ranch” in the house we did moveinto in the autumn of 1962. Compared to an Eichler, our house was a quieter shout of Corbusier’s machine-minded optimism, perhaps. But our house, too, was “open plan,” bright and low and streamlined, laid out unsentimentally enough to please any engineer. Most importantly, ours was nothing that could be mistaken for a used house of the past. Ours was a blue sky house, pure and simple.
O ne spring Saturday my father rounded the corner of the cul-de-sac wearing his brown leather flight jacket, his hands at the controls of a machine with knobby tires taller than me and an enormous claw upraised. By then we had inhabited Lot 242 for nearly a year, the seasons had come around, and now had arrived the time for making a backyard lawn. Having taken the measure of the hard clay that Clarendon Manor was built upon, my father had devised a plan. The first step was to break the clay into clumps and so he had rented this tractor, had driven it across town and right into the yard through a portion of fence he had removed. To the delight of me and other children in the neighborhood who gathered round, he pulled us up one at a time onto his lap, the rattling of the beast passing through my father’s blue-jeaned thighs into our own bodies. We rode the machine as it ripped up the earth, and when the frenzy was over we each took turns sitting in the quieted claw.
Next arrived a dump truck full of redwood chips, backing through the same downed section of fence and stopping at the far end of the yard where a knot of us kids stared up in wonder. “Close your eyes!” shouted my father, laughing as the truck bed rose and a sudden wave of sawdust broke over us, leaving us to rub our eyes as we stumbled out of the pile, all of us now laughing, too. The sawdust was mulch to be blended, according to plan, with the now clumped clay. And so my father next spent several hot afternoons hauling wheelbarrow loads of chips about the yard. The next week he showed up with a new machine thatchurned the ground with lots of blades, its roar drawing people young and old to watch my father, his face fierce, his T-shirt soaked with sweat, tame the rototiller. After the rototilling was done, my father slipped over his shoulders a harness of rope and began dragging, back and forth over every inch of ground, a heavy, nailed together collection of boards, a tool, he explained, to level the land. When that was finished, on the next weekend, my father invited all the spectating children to rejoin his rite of spring; we were given a nickel for every coffee can full of stones we collected, my father inspecting the haul can by can before dumping each one out in a plastic trash barrel.
Now it was time for my father to draw elaborate diagrams on engineer’s graph paper, arcs and intersecting lines, the design of a sprinkler system for our lawn-to-be. When he had calculated the optimum configuration, the one requiring the least amount of pipe and providing the most efficient water coverage, he drove to the supply house that had been established by the old families, the store called Orchard Supply, which now boasted an always crowded do-it-yourself lawn department. The next few weekends of spring were taken up with digging trenches and mastering the art of making joints with PVC pipe. On the evening when he got everything to work, there was a short celebration by the family, all of us watching as my father turned knobs and made water spout from the dusty, flayed ground. In days following, now and then, neighbors would drop by to see the performance repeated.
Finally, my
My father and mother did not buy an Eichler home in an Eichler subdivision, a missed opportunity they speak of wistfully to this day. At the time, the Eichler price, though consciously pegged to aerospace salaries, was a few thousand dollars beyond my father’s bottom-rung pay. And yet the allure of the Eichler illustrates why we saw so little “ranch” in the house we did moveinto in the autumn of 1962. Compared to an Eichler, our house was a quieter shout of Corbusier’s machine-minded optimism, perhaps. But our house, too, was “open plan,” bright and low and streamlined, laid out unsentimentally enough to please any engineer. Most importantly, ours was nothing that could be mistaken for a used house of the past. Ours was a blue sky house, pure and simple.
O ne spring Saturday my father rounded the corner of the cul-de-sac wearing his brown leather flight jacket, his hands at the controls of a machine with knobby tires taller than me and an enormous claw upraised. By then we had inhabited Lot 242 for nearly a year, the seasons had come around, and now had arrived the time for making a backyard lawn. Having taken the measure of the hard clay that Clarendon Manor was built upon, my father had devised a plan. The first step was to break the clay into clumps and so he had rented this tractor, had driven it across town and right into the yard through a portion of fence he had removed. To the delight of me and other children in the neighborhood who gathered round, he pulled us up one at a time onto his lap, the rattling of the beast passing through my father’s blue-jeaned thighs into our own bodies. We rode the machine as it ripped up the earth, and when the frenzy was over we each took turns sitting in the quieted claw.
Next arrived a dump truck full of redwood chips, backing through the same downed section of fence and stopping at the far end of the yard where a knot of us kids stared up in wonder. “Close your eyes!” shouted my father, laughing as the truck bed rose and a sudden wave of sawdust broke over us, leaving us to rub our eyes as we stumbled out of the pile, all of us now laughing, too. The sawdust was mulch to be blended, according to plan, with the now clumped clay. And so my father next spent several hot afternoons hauling wheelbarrow loads of chips about the yard. The next week he showed up with a new machine thatchurned the ground with lots of blades, its roar drawing people young and old to watch my father, his face fierce, his T-shirt soaked with sweat, tame the rototiller. After the rototilling was done, my father slipped over his shoulders a harness of rope and began dragging, back and forth over every inch of ground, a heavy, nailed together collection of boards, a tool, he explained, to level the land. When that was finished, on the next weekend, my father invited all the spectating children to rejoin his rite of spring; we were given a nickel for every coffee can full of stones we collected, my father inspecting the haul can by can before dumping each one out in a plastic trash barrel.
Now it was time for my father to draw elaborate diagrams on engineer’s graph paper, arcs and intersecting lines, the design of a sprinkler system for our lawn-to-be. When he had calculated the optimum configuration, the one requiring the least amount of pipe and providing the most efficient water coverage, he drove to the supply house that had been established by the old families, the store called Orchard Supply, which now boasted an always crowded do-it-yourself lawn department. The next few weekends of spring were taken up with digging trenches and mastering the art of making joints with PVC pipe. On the evening when he got everything to work, there was a short celebration by the family, all of us watching as my father turned knobs and made water spout from the dusty, flayed ground. In days following, now and then, neighbors would drop by to see the performance repeated.
Finally, my
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