After I retired several years ago I began thinking about my life and all the milestones that are fixed in my memory, those special events that are a link to my past history. As I thought more about the neighborhood in which I grew up, I wondered what it might look like now and how it has changed. That got me to look at some old family albums and photos from my childhood. Although the photos focused on a particular person, I looked at the background in the photo to figure out where it was taken and the surroundings.In one photo, I was sitting on the front steps of the house in which I was born. I was eating a fudgicle that probably cost a nickel or less at the corner store. The house was located at 21 Chestnut St. in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was only a few streets away from the ocean looking out to Boston Harbor.
There was no date on the photo but I was about five years old in the photo so it must have been 1948, since I was born in 1943. The steps were made of solid granite and there was a double door in the background. The door was dark wood with a brass kick plate at the bottom. The house was a three-decker wood frame with a basement and attic apartment. It was physically joined to another duplicate apartment building with five apartments on each side or ten altogether. I still remember all the families that lived in each apartment. They were like one big family.
My mind was now flooded with memories all triggered by that one photo. I began thinking about all the activities surrounding those front steps. The double wide steps became a meeting place for all the kids in the neighborhood. We met there each day to play or begin whatever adventure we dreamed up. I remember playing ball against the steps. I remember sitting on the steps on a hot summer night with the other kids from the neighborhood holding a burning citronella punk to keep the mosquitoes away. I remember pitching pennies against the steps. I remember my sister playing jump rope and playing hop scotch on the side walk. I remember riding my first tricycle and later my first bike.
As the seasons changed the snow piled up against the steps and we made snowmen on the sidewalk. We dug tunnels in the mounds of snow piled against the sidewalk and imagined we were Eskimos living in igloos. One year the street was partially cleaned of snow but still had a solid layer of ice on it good enough to skate. The boys all got their hockey skates, stick and puck and we played Hockey on the dead-end street.
As the seasons changed again to spring we played games after dinner using the front steps as the starting point. We played hide and seek and even used flashlights after dark to guide us through the dark alleys and back yards.
Its sure is funny how one picture can bring back so many memories. As I grew older I left the neighborhood to visit my school friends who lived over a few streets and even across the city. The city of Chelsea was only a few miles wide and I walked everywhere. First to grade school a few blocks away and then to high school which was almost a mile away. I went to church a mile away and then to the local YMCA or the football stadium. My world got bigger as I grew older.
Recently I wondered what the neighborhood might look like and discovered that I could use Google Maps to zero in on any street in “Satellite Aerial View Mode” and see a birds-eye view of the street and all the houses along the way. These were actual aerial photos keyed to the street maps. On some streets I could actually move down to street level as if I was driving in a car and look left and right at the front of a house or store or school. Sitting at my home desk and using a computer I was able to virtually fly over any city and then down to street level to take a closer look.
Using Google Maps and the Aerial View I took tons of photos with my computer by using the “Screen Capture Mode” and then saved the picture as a JPEG image. I took photos of all the neighborhoods that I played in , some of my fiends houses, the schools that I attended, the church that I went to, the places that I worked and got my first jobs as a teenager. The house on the right of the photo at the left is 21 Chestnut St. today. It is still an apartment building but has been sided and fixed up. The house is over 100 years old.
Technology has certainly expanded my world view and allowed me to trigger my memory through pictures from the first black and white photos taken with my Kodak Brownie Box Camera to high definition color photos taken with my fancy new computer.
A picture certainly does reveal a thousand words of memory and even more.
