The Wellons House 1913 E. 8th Street Anderson Indiana

During all of my growing up years, my grandparents lived on East Eighth Street, one house west of Alhambra Drive, in Anderson, Indiana. The house was a common red brick home, of similar construction as our own home out on Alexandria Pike north of Anderson. It had two bedrooms and one very green bathroom. Green as in tiles, bathtub...everything green. There was a living room with a picture window facing the street and a kitchen with a table area, but no dining room. Family always entered the house from the side door within the garage, rather than the front door. At that side entrance, there was a large utility room that doubled as the family entranceway. My grandmother’s washer and dryer were in that utility room as well as her old Singer sewing machine (the kind with a foot pump). There was a one car garage that was always clean and was sometimes used for family parties in the summer and it had room for one car and a big top-loading freezer. To have an extended family dinner, they set up two long wooden folding tables that were made by my grandfather and Uncle Bob. This could be done in the garage in summer or the living room in winter.

As was common back in the day, the house was small and simple, and then improvements were done. However, the basic footprint didn’t change in this case. There wasn’t really room for adding on to either side of the city lot it sat on. There was a long back yard. The first improvement, which I barely remember, was the addition of an aluminum awning and screen room off of the back of the house. The next improvement was the granddaddy of improvements for the 1960’s in the Midwest...a pool in the back half of the back yard! My grandparents sacrificed their garden area for us. I distinctly remember the construction of the pool, which was a rectangular pool with a deep end of about 6 feet and a shallow end of about 3 feet. The pool liner actually covered a sand bottom, so the bottom of the pool was soft to touch, but the weight of the water kept it smooth. Another improvement was the metal window awnings which kept direct sunlight from entering the house. All of the windows except the picture window in the living room and the window on the outside wall of the garage had these awnings. There was also a metal shed in the back yard, constructed from a kit, which housed the mowers, yard tools, gasoline and oil for the mowers and later the pool chemicals. This allowed the small garage to be clear and clean. They also expanded the concrete driveway, which was useful as a play area, although we never put up a basketball goal.

Although you don’t think of them as home improvements, I remember that my grandmother got a new refrigerator when I was little. It was actually much larger and nicer than the one we had at home. She also had a nicer freezer out in the garage. Indiana folks can put freezers in the garage! She had a gas stove, which wasn’t new, but different from our electric stove. I remember learning about the “pilot light”.

I also remember when they got a Lowery organ so that my grandfather could learn how to play when we were teenagers. Uncle Bob was really good at the organ and my mom could play some as they both had piano lessons when they were kids.

The yard was big enough for an “infield game” of baseball, but not big enough to actually hit balls. The two best features, before the pool and maybe even after, were the cherry tree and the grapevine. Both produced edible fruit which could be eaten off the tree and was used for pies and cobblers (cherry) and jelly (grape).

I remember three major improvements in the neighborhood when I was growing up. First, the Highway 109 Bypass, which was a few blocks east of the house, was widened from two to four lanes. It may have been the busiest street or road in Anderson when I grew up as people kept moving out of the city, necessitating a commute to town and to work at Delco-Remy. The second was the building of a new bridge on 8th Street over the White River, named after former president Eisenhower. It seemed so huge at the time and was rumored to have heating elements under the concrete roadway to melt any ice that would ordinarily form on the bridge. This new 8th Street bridge replaced an old iron bridge on 10th Street. The final big improvement was the widening of the section of 8th Street that ran in front of the house. It went from a narrow two lane road to a four lane road with large curbs on both sides, but no sidewalk. It may have been widened as part of a larger plan that involved the new bridge so that growing traffic could get into town. They didn’t anticipate that people wouldn’t be traveling into town much longer as the new Mounds Mall would be built soon on the 109 Bypass. The downtown would die a slow death.

Use Google maps and both the street view (to see the front of the house and the neighboring houses) and the satellite view (to see the back yard and the encroachment of the apartment complex behind the property).

As another example of the frugality of that generation, my grandparents rented out the front bedroom of their house every year to a couple who attended the Church of God convention at nearby Anderson College. Sort of an AirBnB without the second B! Remember that there was only one bathroom in the house! The folks became good friends and they looked forward to meeting each year.

The neighbors to the east were Bob and Lou Canaday and their two sons, Mark and Eric. Lou was not only my mom’s cousin, but she was a double cousin and they looked a little alike. They were also very close growing up, along with Lou’s sister Norma Jean. Lou and Norma Jean’s parents were Paul Wyant and Pansy Wellons Wyant, both siblings of my grandparents!

My grandfather lived there for a couple of years after my grandmother died, but eventually bought a single-wide mobile home in a park in North Anderson. I didn’t know why other than just assuming that he didn’t want to care for something that big. Another possible reason is that an apartment complex was built across the back fence from the property. Jay told me that he was staying overnight with my grandfather on the night that my grandmother died so that my grandfather wouldn’t have to be alone and people from the apartment complex were in the pool in the middle of the night. My grandfather ran them off and they came back later and dumped sand into the pool. It wouldn’t take much of that to make him decide he needed another location.