Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Homes in Which I've Lived

For tonight's edition of Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver has borrowed another meme from Linda Stufflebean, and it's a fun one.  Also surprisingly relevant for me at this moment in time.

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you:

(1)  Read Linda Stufflebean's blog post, "Homes in Which I've Lived", on her Empty Branches on the Family Tree blog.  

(2)  This week, please list the homes in which you have resided (not just visited) from your birth until the present.

(3)  Share your list in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or on Facebook or Google+.  Please provide a link to your list as a comment to this post.

I actually have this list — somewhere in my house.  I don't know where.  It was packed away before my aborted move in 2008.  But it's an actual list of all the places my family lived, with addresses, at least from the time my brother was born (and possibly from when I was born, a year earlier) through to about 1980 or so.  Without it, there's no way I can come up with most of the addresses.  But I have some specifics and lots of vague information.  And it's a much longer list than Randy's.

• When I was born in 1962, my parents lived at 106 Rose Lane, Montebello, California.

• When my brother was born in 1963, I believe we still lived in Montebello, because that's the city he was born in, but it might have been at a different address.

• My sister was born in 1964 in La Puente, California, and I believe that's where we lived.  I do know we lived in La Puente at some point, because that's where we were when my father's first wife and my half-sister lived with us.  It probably was not the same address, but I don't know.

• In 1971, and probably a year or two before that, my family lived at 434 Randy Street, Pomona, California.  That's the last place we lived in the United States before we moved to Australia for two years.  We left in March 1971.

434 Randy Street in 2011

• In Australia we lived in three different places that I can remember:  an apartment in Sydney, a place in Maroubra Junction (don't remember if it was an apartment or a house), and a house at 309 Bunnerong Road, Pagewood.  All of these are in New South Wales.

• When we returned to the United States about March 1973, we stayed for a short while in the Fort Lauderdale area with relatives.

• From south Florida we went up to the Panhandle, where we lived with my grandfather and his wife at 637 Bayshore Drive, Niceville, but not for long.

• After my grandfather's house, we moved to a trailer park in Niceville.  I am pretty sure that was also in 1973.  We lived at two different locations in the park, in two different trailers, so that's two separate residences.

• We left Niceville and Okaloosa County to go to Villa Tasso, a tiny unincorporated place just over the county line in Walton County.  I think that was about 1974.  I know we were living in Villa Tasso in 1975, because that's when Hurricane Eloise hit.  We actually stayed in the same place through to my high school graduation in 1979, which at the time seemed to me to be a minor miracle.

• After graduation, I lived with my grandparents in Las Vegas for two or three months before I started college.  I don't remember the address, but we were behind the Imperial Palace, which apparently was renamed the Quad Casino in 2012 and the Linq in 2014.  And until now I didn't know it was owned by Caesar's.

• Oh, college!  So many places, so few specifics.  I lived in three different dorm rooms during the four years I was an undergraduate.  During each summer I rented a room at a fraternity; in 1980 and 1981 it was the same frat (Phi Kappa Psi, I think, at 642 West 28th Street), and in 1982 it was the Delta Sig house (which doesn't seem to be there anymore; apparently the chapter is inactive).  Altogether college gave me seven different residential addresses.

• In the summer of 1982 I went on a student exchange trip to Bordeaux, France, which had (still has?) a sister city relationship with Los Angeles.  Through a series of misadventures with the student with whom I was paired, I ended up in Paris three weeks earlier than I was supposed to be, needing some way to make money and a place to stay.  I had my own little efficiency apartment three blocks from the Sorbonne.

• My first move after graduating college in 1983 was to a three-story Victorian house at 459 East Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, next to an AME church (now the Walker Temple, but I don't remember if it had that name then).  (And by the time I was 21, I had lived in at least 21 different places.)  The house was great and even had the original carriage house at the rear of the property.  I lived there four years, with four prior-enlisted Navy ROTC housemates.  I had the third-floor attic as my room.  The house was owned by the uncle of one of the ROTCs, who lived there with his partner.  I moved when the uncle and his partner became irrationally negative about women in the house.  Shortly after that, the uncle was unfortunately murdered by his daughter's boyfriend.

• In 1987, after the aforesaid irrationality, I moved to a small second-floor apartment a mile or so away.  I don't remember the address.  I do remember it was an old building, and my apartment still had an original icebox, from when the iceman delivered blocks of ice.

• Soon after moving into the apartment, I decided I didn't like living in an apartment, so I found a four-bedroom bottom-floor half of a duplex on South Catalina Street.  I think the address was 2210 South Catalina, but don't hold me to that.  I lived there until September 1989, after I lost all three housemates in less than a month.

• Next was a big move, 400 miles north, to 1620 Alcatraz Avenue, Berkeley, where I was an unpaid housekeeper/cook/nanny.  I arrived a mere three weeks before the Loma Prieta earthquake.  For various reasons the arrangements did not work out, and I was on the road again.

• In June 1990 I didn't move very far — just down the street, to (I think) 1632B Alcatraz Avenue, where I lived in a cute little mother-in-law unit at the back of the property.  I actually stayed there almost three years, the third longest I had lived anywhere in my life to that point, after Villa Tasso and the Victorian on Adams Boulevard.

• In February 1993 I moved to my present location, 1066 28th Street, Oakland, the first place I owned.  I am still amazed when I realize that I've lived in the same place for more than 24 years.

So, to date I have lived in 27 residences, but another one will be coming soon.  I am in the process of selling my house and moving to the Portland, Oregon area.  Soon my list will have 28 locations.