The Working Years, by Dick Votaw
(part 6)
(part 5) (part 4) (part 3) (part 2) (part 1)
During the year, because of our growing family, we bought a larger house at 8539 Davista Dr. in Whittier that had 3 rooms that could be used as bedrooms with a nursery off the master bedroom. This was to be the new baby’s room and Peggy had her bedroom and Dave had a room in the garage. We used the third bedroom as a den.
This photo of our house was taken on Thanksgiving Day, 1960 – see the paper turkey in the window.
Here’s the same house, as it looked when I visited Whittier in 2015.
The screened porch under construction, in 1962. The dog was named “Patsy” – a traditional name for dogs in Votaw history. She was part boxer, and we loved her, but there was an unfortunate incident with a neighbor child and we didn’t get to keep her after that.
This photo, taken on John’s first birthday, shows one result of the remodel – that wall behind the couch. The wall wasn’t there before. To be honest, I don’t know why it was built. There had been a brick fireplace (never used in my memory) immediately to the right of those built-in bookshelves.
In the back yard of our house on Davista Dr., Sue enjoys a drink of water from the hose.
This film clip was shot in the back yard of our house on Davista, by the garage. My parents, who were sometimes too optimistic about what I might be able to do, got me some roller skates. This experiment did not last very long!
John’s birth brought about some major changes at our Davista house. We had it remodeled, putting a wall down the middle of the living room, and added a screened porch in the back. A room behind the garage was cleaned up, carpeted, and wallboard hung to create a bedroom for me (but no bathroom!) and my old bedroom (which in 1957 had been the “den”) became John’s room. Or Sue’s. I can’t really remember – I was no longer in the house! I was out in back with the orange trees. Actually I kind of liked it. The “wallpaper” in my new bedroom was actually recycled newspaper – kind of an interesting look.
The screened porch was a great idea – we spent a lot of time out there over the next few years before we moved again in 1967. The best thing about the screened porch was the ping pong table. I played ping pong there with my dad and with kids who lived nearby. I had very little natural athletic ability, and couldn’t participate in school sports, so it was great to be able to play something. We used that ping pong table for family dinners and for kids’ birthday parties too – it was a terrific resource.
The years 1955-59 were important ones in our family’s history. Peggy was born in January 1955, and Sue in October 1957. Two of our family members passed away during these years: Unc (Frank Jessup), from lung cancer, and Bert Martin (Doree’s older brother) from a burglar’s gunshot in Korea. Grandpa (Herb Martin) had a heart attack; as a result he retired from his dental practice and he and Annie (Mary Martin) moved from Pomona to Costa Mesa. Aunt (Tirzah Jessup) moved from Indiana to Whittier, and our family moved from Hornby Ave. to Davista Dr., still in East Whittier. 1957 was a particularly tough year for my mother. She lost her brother, she had to move to a new house, and she gave birth to an underweight newborn (Sue) who had to stay in the hospital for extra days.
As a preschooler, I was unaware of most of what was going on, of course. I started kindergarten in September of 1957, a month before my fifth birthday, at Mulberry Elementary School, but after our move in the middle of the school year I had to go to a new kindergarten class at a school called “Ocean View”. The name was completely misleading; there was no ocean nearby, nor could we see one. This bothered me, as I recall.
Dad wrote about the move in his autobiography, but I remember some things differently. The house on Hornby was just a two-bedroom house, but Sue’s birth necessitated at least three bedrooms. The house on Davista was just right for us. Going down the hallway left from the entrance you would pass a bedroom on the left (Peggy’s) and then you’d arrive at my parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall. If you walked through my parents’ bedroom you’d arrive at a small room that they used as a nursery for baby Sue.
I remember that to start with, they put both Peggy and I in that first bedroom, but that obviously wasn’t going to work, so I was moved to a small bedroom in the opposite corner of the house, past the dining room and kitchen. I think originally this had been a den, where we had our first TV set, but it became my bedroom until John was born.
The property was quite large by today’s standards. There was a big front yard, and the driveway went past the house on the right to the garage which took up one corner of the back yard. We had a patio in the back (later to become a screened porch), then a big lawn area with a flowering tree in the middle of it. This was fenced in the back, and beyond the fence we had fruit trees – a peach tree on the left and five or six orange trees on the right.
Davista Drive was a good location because it was close to two schools. Ocean View was two blocks away to the west, and East Whittier Junior High School was two blocks away to the east. So we all walked to school for grades K-8. We lived in that house from 1957-1967.
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