Peripatetic adventures, the final chapter

My last entry about my parents' Gypsy lifestyle left us back in Harlem in the first house my parents had ever owned.  One would assume that our travels were over, now that we were homeowners:  That assumption would be wrong.  After a year or two, we sold the place in Harlem and bought a home in Crestview, a subdivision in Kansas City, North.    

This was a cheaply-built pre-fab house surrounded by other houses that looked very much like it, but I was thrilled to live in such a "new" house.  It's probably the first house we ever lived in that wasn't at least seventy-five years old.  Oh yeah, and I didn't have to change schools.  I was still attending North Kansas City High School, from which I graduated in 1962.

This house was near St. Pius X High School, so many of our neighbors were Catholic.  I don't think I had ever known a Catholic before then, and it was interesting to learn that they were no different than anybody else .  I had a lot of opportunities to babysit while we lived there, because those Catholics had a lot of kids!  

We must have been moving up in the world, because just before we bought the Crestview place, my parents bought their first-ever brand new car, a 1958 Chevy.

This picture looks across the road from our house.  

This is where I will end the series about all our moves, because the next move, after I graduated and started working at National Bellas Hess, took my parents to Blue Springs (the factory where my dad worked had been relocated), and me down into the heart of Kansas City, where I lived the second story of a house belonging to some church folks.  It had been converted to an apartment.  Guess what?  The house is still there, not looking too bad considering the neighborhood.  Thanks to Google Earth, I have a picture of it as it looks now.

My bed was at a window looking out at the apartment building on the right, and on hot summer nights when everybody had their windows up, I could hear entire conversations that were going on over there.  

My parents continued to move frequently throughout their lives, but Cliff and I have only moved five times, and once we bought this place in 1975, we stayed.  Oh, there was a two-and-a-half-year period when we rented the house out and lived back at Oak Grove (a long and boring story), but we returned, resolving never to move again.