The temperatures around here have been warming up the last few weeks – we’re regularly in the 50s and sometimes low 60s. Before everything starts blooming, I’ve been working my way around the property getting some basic clean up done. Our property is on a gentle hillside, and it slopes from the front to the back. The house is pretty much smack in the middle and fill was placed around the back of the house to create a nice flat area around around the house and then it drops down to the lower portion, where there is another flat area. My grandfather used to assiduously mow every inch of the property, but when he became too old to mow and Grandma hired mowers, she decided she didn’t want to pay them to mow the lower portion. So, she let it overgrow and when asked, would tell you she was enjoying her “meadow.” It looks like this:

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When my Grandparents built this house, starting in 1958, the neighborhood was only a few years old. My grandfather had worked for IBM in Endicott (at locations around the Binghamton area) for several years. In 1956, IBM announced they would be building a large facility in nearby Owego to house their Federal contract work. This of course began a mad stampede of development in the sleepy Owego area, where about 30,000 people lived. By 1980, the population would be 50,000, where it has remained. My grandparents and their family were one of the people who came and built a new house.

Everyone around here gets the Owego Pennysaver Press – a quasi-news entity that mostly exists as a vehicle for getting ads and coupons to everyone. The picture below is an ad that appeared in the Pennysaver, probably very early 1960, advertising the neighborhood. A few things about the picture: No trees. The subdivision was created from farmland on a hillside. Our house is fairly small, but in the upper left portion. There are only two houses on the street: ours and the first house where our road begins (the white two-story a bit to our house’s right.) The developer has two neighborhoods: Ours is Ridgewood, which was fancier. On another hill nearby (right behind the IBM plant) is Lincolnshire. Today this plant is Lockheed Martin, and still employs about 3,000 people.

It feels awesome to be so progressive.

So, you may wonder what the picture at the top of the blog with the old truck in it is about. Through some deductive reasoning, you probably (correctly) assumed that it is a shot of the house being built. One of the cool things about owning a house that comes through your family (and was built by them) is that you usually get a lot of historical documents and reference materials. I have a whole collection of pictures starting from when the foundations were poured forward – I even have the plans. I’ll post more on those another time. The picture has a handwritten date of October 19th, 1958 from my Grandfather on the back. Coincidentally, I posses the camera this was taken with – a Voigtlander Bessa 6×9 that takes 120 medium-format film and shoots amazingly beautiful pictures. Here is the uncropped shot: