This Is The House That Alf Built

This is the House that Alf Built


By far I certainly do not know every house in town, but mine may be the only classic American Foursquare home left in Panama City. My grandparents Alfred D. and Carrie Weller (Mom and Pop to their children and to me) built it for their large family, county records say in 1912, my father always said in 1913 and had a memory of the move. My guess of the two different years is that it was permitted in 1912 and the family moved in sometime in 1913. 

There were four children, son Alfred, Jr., daughters Evalyn and Ruth, and the younger son my father Thomas Carroll Weller, who all his life was called Carroll. My father’s younger sister Marguerite was born in 1917, bringing the family to seven with their five children. 

Standing on this lot before this house was built was the blue house across the way from us at 2215 W. 9th Street. I have a photo of Mom sitting on the wooden steps in the front yard, holding my father, and that older house is in the background. In the picture, Mom is young and so beautiful, and my father is an infant, appears newborn, so it would be 1911. My father’s early memory is of being inside that older house as it was rolled across the road on logs to its present location, and watching the light that was hanging from the ceiling swing back and forth. At that memory of the light, he would have been two years old. 

My own earliest memory is also of a light, the bright light over the operating table in my face as I lay there in Dr. Carmel Roberts' clinic waiting for my tonsils to be taken out. In my memory the light isn’t swinging, it’s humming, mmm, mmmm, mmm, mmm as the ether in the white cloth over my face drones me off to sleep. I also was two years old, but that's another memory, another story, already reported here on this blog at least once!

But my house! It’s the classic American Foursquare that was popular from about 1895 to the 1930s. Sears Roebuck and other companies sold plans for it. Matter of fact, a Sears Roebuck magazine ad from the nineteen-teens, that I copied and printed here on +Time a couple years ago, advertised the house for twenty-five hundred dollars, finished and ready to move in. That ad can be Googled, and my America Foursquare house is listed for sale: the price has gone up, but it’s still a bargain for a classic old home in beautiful condition, with an upstairs screen porch where you can drink morning coffee, look out across St. Andrews Bay at Shell Island, and watch a huge freighter pass by on its way to the Port of Panama City. This is the house that Alf built.


And that’s My Laughing Place, MLP where I have remembered, laughed, rejoiced, grieved and wept, cursed the sky, and given thanks.

TW


Thanks, Missie, for the early email that stirred memories this morning!

"This is the house that Jack built" http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco/literature/mothergoose/rhymes/thisisthehousethatjackbuilt.html