The Story of My Life

I grew up in the most beautiful place on earth. Tates Creek Avenue. Even the name of my street was inspiring. Tates Creek. Who was Tate? Where did the creek get it's name? The street started at Main Street with Dargavel's gas station on one side and Hancock's Market on the other. Hancock's was a tiny little store with Big Red pop, Ale 8, Baby Ruths and candy cigarettes. Mostly we only had nickels and dimes and bought lots of Bazooka Bubblegum, trying to win the prizes. Dave and Mary Hancock always wanted to know how mom was and did she want us to bring some milk or bread home.  

From Hancock's, Tates Creek went down a little hill and around a sharp curve to my house. Probably a quarter of a mile, maybe a half. Maybe a dozen or a few more older homes lined the road. I didn't really know most of those people by name, but you always waved at everyone and they'd ask, "How are ya?" Cheryl lived in the big white house on the left. She moved in when I was 10 or 11 and we quickly became good friends. She taught me to eat peanut butter and mayo sandwiches. I thought her brother Pat was cute. Closer to our house lived the Whites. Mr White had the newest home on the street, with a big front porch. Often, he and his wife often sat on their front porch and visited with friends and family . Next to him was Mr. Cole, who sealcoated his driveway every year and it was shiny. I always asked my dad why didn't we do that, to which he replied something about the cost and effort weren't really worth it. Mrs. Betty Hancock was next. She was a grandma. Her house was right next to ours. In the summer time, she often had her three granddaughters, Johna, Jamie and Jill over. Jill was my age. She was beautiful, fun and adventurous. I always envied her black curly hair. We rode bikes on my driveway a lot and played with our toys. She is the one who told me our house was haunted. Someone had died there by jumping out the upstairs window. I never knew if that was true.

Trees lined all of Tates Creek. Trees and nice neighbors. When the tornado came through in 1974, it uprooted several of the old walnut trees that stood in our front yard. We always felt like we witnessed a miracle with that tornado. My younger brothers were upstairs asleep. Taylor and I were reading in the family room and listening to the radio. The wind was blowing really hard. The tornado went right through our front yard and we didn't even know it until the next morning. We were blessed for sure.

My house, my home, full of my stories. 180 Tates Creek Avenue. Beautiful, big (to us) white house, built in 1920. It sat way back off the road with a large wrap around porch and an old barn. We had a 1/2 acre garden to the side where my dad worked for hours weeding and hoeing and producing more vegetables than a family of 7 could ever use.

Collette, Adam,David and Taylor Collier in front of the "garden".

Behind our house on Sunset, lived the Bedfords and the Moretz Family. While we grew vegetables, they seemed to grow flowers. Both yards were filled with beautiful flowers. The Moretz family had three daughters, Annie, Patty and Sabena. Annie and Patty were teenagers (big girls), but Sabena was my age. We played together often (from about age 4 on) and loved to peek into the big girls' rooms so see what kind of stuff they had. Mrs. Moretz (Ginny) was a wonderful mom who would provide us treats, let us watch School House Rock and monopolize the television on Friday nights for Little House on the Prairie and the Donny and Marie show. One year, they had a neighborhood Halloween party. They decorated their old barn and we bobbed for apples and played some games.


Next to our house was a large empty field with a little creek where we could find crawdads if we looked hard and a pawpaw tree; but mostly it was where we played a million baseball games, all summer long. As we got older, we made up rules. You can't hit over the fence. Only pitch underhand. Taylor and Marshall have to hit left handed. All the boys have to hit left handed. All the neighbor kids would come. Marshall and Brian, Lewis, Abner, Lonnie, Scott. Pam and Cheryl would come too. Sometimes we would play a "real" game against the kids who went to Model (The Hancocks and Bensons). Afterwards, mom always had Koolaid for us. I don't ever remember drinking water.

I don't have a pic of our baseball games, but here's one of basketball in the winter. (about 1980)

The main floor of our home had four rooms: kitchen, dining room, living room, family room (turned bedroom). A little bathroom was off the family room and a large back porch off the kitchen. The washer and dryer, a deep freeze and all the dogs and cats we had resided on the back porch. We never locked the doors because you really couldn't lock them. The locks were for skeleton keys long since lost. We didn't have anything for people to steal anyway. We didn't even have a TV. I think my parent paid $25,000 for that house in 1970.

My family was resourceful, for sure. Mom made all our clothes (as evidenced by the clown pants seen below). Fabric was affordable then. We also grew a large garden. Mom taught Piano and dad was a truck driver. All of our food was homemade. I was always so envious of the kids who brought Wonder Bread sandwiches to school. My sandwiches were always on homemade wheat bread. Pam Hamilton and I would trade a lot. Mom made homemade cookies too. Those were good. And I got better trades with them, trading for the other kids Hostess cupcake, zingers and snowballs. We never had a TV dinner and ate a lot of tuna noodle casserole, spam and fried bologna sandwiches with homemade bread & butter pickles. We rarely ate out. When we did eat out, it was at Long John Silver's or McDonalds and only 2-3 times a year. I remember for my 14th birthday, asking have steak at a restaurant, because I had never tasted steak before.

Me and Taylor with the Rambler Station wagon in the background.

Mrs. Million owned the vacant lot next door and let us play there as long as dad kept it mowed. She lived in a large house next to the lot and then Miss Million across the street, who we rarely saw. Dad said their last names were Million because Mrs. Million married a millionaire and Miss Million was heiress of the millionaire grandparents. (I don't know that that is true either...) We did a lot of work for Mrs. Million. Mowing her lawn and field, weeding, taking her things that dad would buy or mom would bake. I went into her house sometimes. It felt like a rich old ladies' home. She always gave us stale cookies or candy. We always hoped she would put dad in her will, but dad said she really didn't have any money, because when Mr. Million died, his fortune went back to the family trust.  

Easter Sunday, 1971.  Mrs. Millions house and the vacant lot in the back ground, with Stocker Hill to the left.

Miss Million (who we didn't really know at all) donated land behind her house for Million Park. To get to Million Park, you could drive a ways around to Lancaster, or you could cross Tates Creek, climb the gate to the dairy and then walk up the gravel drive until you came to the hole in the fence. Then you crawled through that hole in the chainlink and you were to the baseball diamonds. I'm not sure why we didn't hold our daily baseball and softball games at the park diamonds instead of the field next to our house.

We used to get our milk from the dairy. The farmer or his wife (The Stocker's?) would bring us 3-4 gallons at a time in big gallon sized glass jars. The cream would be thick at top and mom would scrape that off. There were still flecks of cream in our milk, but mom said it was healthier for us. Then the government intervened and our farmer neighbors had to shut down their dairy because they didn't pasteurize their milk. We could get sick or die from drinking it. Who knew? Sad day for the farmers and for our family. Now we had to drink store bought milk mixed with powdered milk to save money.

The dairy cows grazed in the field across the street invite summer, but in the winter, we didn't know where they went. But Stocker Farms boasted the best sledding hill around. We didn't get much snow, but 1 or 2 inches would send the whole neighborhood (Sunset Ave., Westover Ave and all the side streets) out to sled. You climbed to the top of the hill with an old tire tube or a metal runner sled. No one ever had snow clothes or boots. You were lucky if you had gloves. We would wear a pair of jeans and our winter coats and a knitted hat. If we had gloves, they would be knitted also. We would fly down that hill with 2 or 3 people on the sled or tube, everyone jumping off right before the sled hit the creek. Someone always got hurt and someone always went in the creek. After a bit, we'd be soaked through, but we didn't stop until we couldn't feel our toes anymore. The snow rarely lasted more than a couple of days, but we sure used it up!

My street was 12 miles to the river. First you went under the freeway bridge, then past the sewage plant and then Kit Carson Elementary. We didn't go to Kit Carson, because it was a county school and we lived in the city limits. From Kit Carson to the river, it was nothing but country back then. Dad would drive us down to the river when we were young, always stopping at the swinging bridges that went over the creek. Tates Creek go wider, the closer it got to the river. The bridges were fun and a little scary to cross. If I remember right, there were two of them. It never occurred to us that we were on private property or trespassing. Dad told us they had to use those bridges to get from their homes to the road because there were no driving bridges.  

Down at the river was a ferry. A thick wire was strung from bank to bank. The ferry was attached to that to keep it on course. Sometimes dad would pay the ferry to take us across the river. When I was older, my little brother and I rode our bikes to the river. I don't know if my mom ever knew we did that. He was about 8, I was 13.

Dad got my brothers and I paper routes with the Richmond Daily Register when I was about 10 or 11. My route included Norwood, Robinson Terrace and Main Street. We would pick up the papers after school, load them in my bag (I had about 75 customers and I would walk up Tates Creek to Main to start my route. Dad insisted that we never roll and rubber band the papers. Instead, we had to fold them neatly in half and walk them up to the door. If the screen door was unlocked, we had to put them in the screen to protect them from the weather. We collected once a week, every Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. I would knock on each door and my customers would give me money (I'm thinking it was about 40 cents a week.) Later, I got the Easy Peasy route. I delivered about 75 papers to Willis Manor and the surrounding side streets.

Dad made sure we all knew how to work. We delivered papers. We weeded that 1/2 acre garden in the hot sun for what seemed like hours. We mowed our large lawn and most of our neighbors lawns. We mowed grandmas lawn too. We pulled wagons of vegetables behind us when we went on our paper routes, giving them to our customers. I'd often take corn, tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini up to Robinson Terrace and give them away. Those customers were always so grateful. I didn't understand it back then, because I didn't like vegetables, and I hated them even more because they were so much work.

This is the story of my life. Hot summers, work, baseball and softball all summer long. Running free, swimming at Boonesbourough, sunburning bright red the first time out, because after that you didn't get burned any more. Acknowledging everyone you saw, because your were from Kentucky and you were friendly. A head nod, a two finger wave or the whole hand, welcoming a stranger into your life. Weeding that 1/2 acre garden, wishing my dad would let me mow (but he only let my brothers mow, because mowing was man's work. Which, by the way, Dad's idea of mowing was super straight lines and he would always get mad at my brothers because their lines weren't straight enough) canning, canning and more canning. Tomatoes, peaches, jam, more tomatoes, corn, beans, beans, beans. A back porch with a white deep freeze, raspberries and a little stick House on Prairie dad made for me. The old barn with a calendar from 1912. We weren't allowed to climb around in the barn attic, so rarely did so. A house with a dark basement and old wine and beer bottles and pointy lightbulbs in the crawl space. Homemade clothes, homemade bread, homemade cookies and a Rambler Station Wagon, followed by Ford Ecocline Vans. Twenty-five different VW Bugs. My life defined by a street, by a town.

Neighbors, hard work, family, people with stories that intertwine and then leave mine. We were just folks in a little town, brought together by schools and baseball, grocery stores and churches. We knew everyone, and if we didn't know them, we knew somebody they knew. Everyone was family. What a childhood.

(I would be remiss if I didn't mention the names of the some most influential people of my Tates Creek childhood: Pam Hamilton, Cheryl Miller, Gina Elswick, Lisa Marcum, MaryAnn Lowery, Sharon Hancock, Sabena Moretz, Lewis Jones, Marshall Abrams, Brian, James (Jimmy, Tut) Abner. Adults included Dave and Mary Hancock, Mo and Ginny Moretz and Jewell Jones, who would pick up Taylor and I for school in her VW bug. Cheryl's mom was also influential, along with many of my paper route customers who's names I can't remember... except Mrs. Burnam, who owned the gorgeous red mansion on Main Street and always gave me lemonade on collection day. What a place these amazing people hold in my heart. There were so many others, many who I knew from 1st grade on that inspired me, strengthened me, cared about me. So many who I am friends with on Facebook now that continue to inspire me with their love of family and God. What a blessing it was to grow up in Richmond Kentucky.)