Celebrating Our 30-Year Old Tract Home
I’m often gently teased for getting too excited about anniversaries; I AM guilty of marking the passage of time for the weirdest things. I love people’s birthdays, but I also love the anniversaries of everyday things, like the day I started doing The Morning Show on KUIC (11/1/99), the last time I had short hair (about five years ago) and the week my wife Meg and I bought our current house (the last week of January, 1998). This year marks 21 trips around the sun since we’ve “owned” our current home (the bank actually owns it, after several strategic re-fi’s), and I thought our house deserves some props for all it’s been through with us. It’s a modest, 1800 sq ft two-story house on a quarter-acre corner lot, built in 1989 by the Dunsmuir Company. The house is pictured here about 9 months after we moved in, around Christmas of ‘98, with our 5 year old daughter Nicole atop the ‘66 Mustang Fastback I wish I’d never sold. We Young’s are actually the third owners; the second owner was an absentee fellow in the Merchant Marines who allowed friends to “crash” at the house for extended periods of time (the surrounding neighbors were really excited to have us buy the house and rid the neighborhood of the “crash-pad”). The house was uninhabitable when we bought it, due to the damage caused by the “crashers” over the years. It took over two months to correct the many structural and safety problems in the house before we actually moved in (on March 1st, 1998), and since then the place has undergone several fairly major transformations. Crazy paint jobs, increases in the quality of furniture, three cats, several dogs, new windows/doors/roof/air conditioner/etc. Our youngest kid Brett was brought home from the hospital to this house. All three of our kids learned to drive by launching off the driveway, and all three left for their first school dances out of that front door (which still needs to be replaced). The house is a fairly common collection of wood, stucco and wiring, but the memories that are tied up in it are anything but common…thanks for 21 mostly great years!
John Young
