Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Who Were Your Neighbors?

In this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun exercise, Randy Seaver is asking people to remember back to probably many years ago:

1) Think about who your neighbors were when you were a child.  Where did you live?  Who lived next door or across the street?  

2)  Tell us a story about one or more of your neighbors.  If you want to keep them anonymous, just use first names.   Do some research if you need to recall names and years.

3)  Share your story in your own blog post (but leave a comment on this post so we can find it), in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.

For me this is an amusing question, because my family moved so many times when I was young (by the time I was 21 I had lived in 21 different places), I don't remember details about that many of the locations, much less the neighbors.  But I do remember a family who lived across the street from us when we lived in Pomona, California.

We lived at 434 Randy Street from about 1970 to March 1971.  Across the street and on the corner — now the intersection with Barjud Street, but that doesn't sound familiar at all, so it might not have been the name when we lived there 45 years ago — was the Lamey family.  I remember the parents' names:  Bill and Juanita Lamey.  I recall they had children, who might have been about our ages (8, 7, and 6 in 1971), but have no clue how many or what their names were.

The Lameys had a swimming pool, which made their house a popular place to hang out.  One day while we were over there playing in and around the pool, I stepped on a bee that was on the ground.  I don't know if it was alive or dead when I stepped on it, but I do remember it hurt like hell.  I still don't like buzzy things.

I also recall that sometimes we would go to church with the Lameys.  I think we went at least once on Easter Sunday.  No real idea what denomination it was — Episcopalian kind of rings a bell?  I don't think that my mother, who was Jewish, went with us, and I'm sure that my father didn't.

Another neighbor I remember something about was when my family lived in Australia.  The last home we had there was on Bunnerong Road, Pagewood (a Sydney suburb), New South Wales.  This would have been late 1972 to early 1973.  I don't know the street address (my brother might, because he went back and visited there several years later), but the house was on a flag lot behind the bulidings actually facing on the street.  Right in front of our house, possibly in the same building, was a sausage factory.  Next to it was a TAB office, which is the legalized betting authority in Australia.  Our neighbors to one side were an Indian family.  That was how our family was introduced to Indian food, something I have loved ever since.

Well, that wasn't too bad!  And I didn't have to do any research to come up with it.  Of course, if I did some research, I might find out the Lameys' address and the names of the Indian neighbors . . . .

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Addendum, February 24:  I asked my brother if he remembered the street address in Pagewood.  As I expected, he did.  We lived at 309 Bunnerong Road, which now, looking at Google Maps, appears to be gone.  It used to extend back to what is labeled Wild Lane.  My brother visited in 1998.  Apparently sometime between then and now the house was torn down, probably for more "modern" development.