When I was a kid growing up in Plymouth, Michigan, we had a house at 615 Fairground Street and our phone number, once we finally got one, was Glenview 3-6034.
The Fultons, who lived next door had GL3-6032. The Maycocks, directly across the street had GL3-6036.
That’s how Michigan Bell did it back then. They assigned you a phone number based on your address.
Sometimes, you could pick up the phone and hear your neighbors talking. We didn’t have we they called a “Party Line,” at least that’s not the way I remember it, but the phone system was just not what it is now.
The house was built in 1929. I know that because it was stamped into one of the posts holding up the roof on the back porch.
The house was owned by my mother’s father, Harry Maynard.
Harry Maynard, my grandfather, loved two things in life more than anything else.
First, Harry loved fishing, and there were lots of places within walking distance of 615 Fairground Street where you catch bass, bluegill, sunfish, perch and all manner of “panfish.” He also loved ice fishing. Just because it’s 10 degrees below zero outside and the lake has a 3-foot sheet of ice over it does not stop a fisherman from his favorite passtime.
Harry had one of the most extensive collections of fishing tackle I have ever seen. Or at least it seemed that way to a 6-year-old boy who adored this man. All of his tackle was already many years old and had probably aided Harry in catching countless panfish and probably even helped sustain him and his family in down times.
The second thing that Harry loved in life was wine.
I’m not talking about Chateau Mounton Rothschild or Domaine de le Romanee-Conti. I’m talking about MD 20-20, Bali Hi and Thunderbird. Harry was not a wine collector, Harry was a wino.
I don’t mean to dishonor the man on the freaking internet but the fact that he was buried, next to his wife Mary, on June 20, 1964 in Riverside Cemetery, Plymouth, Michigan, is directly related to his decades of over indulgence. He lived 60 years.
Mary Maynard, who never took a drink, was buried there on August 6, 1948 at age 38.
When Harry died my mother and father had the house at 615 Fairground Street. We had all been living there for years already. My mother grew up in that house. I grew up in that house.
I have photos of my mother in her high school graduation gown standing in the driveway where I played with little green, plastic soldiers and parked my stingray.
When my mother graduated from Plymouth High School, in the same building that I attended 9th grade, in 1943, she would have been 17 or 18 years old but she already looked much older than that.
My mother looks like she’s 30 in photos I have of her when she was 6. She had the same face from the time she was a small child until the day she died in 1993.
When I dream of her, which is quite often, I see her face, just like it was when she was 17 or 18. Just like it was when she was 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. She has only one face to me. It’s the face in the photo above which was taken when she was 17 or 18. I love this photo of her.
Ester Louise Maynard-Gapen was buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Plymouth, Michigan on November 23, 1993, right next to Harry and Mary Maynard.
She lived 68 years but today, she would have been 82.
And I miss her, a lot.