As you know if you read yesterday’s post, and of course shame on you if you didn’t, I traveled to Seattle this past weekend for the Refuse to Abuse 5K at Safeco Field.
The trip included some of the usual Emerald City destinations — Pike Street Market, Space Needle, Ebbets Field Flannels — and also one that’s truly meaningful only if you happened to be part of the Harold and Luverne Lundeberg family: 2562 Sixth Ave. W. in the Queen Anne district.
That’s the address of the house my parents bought when they headed west from Minnesota after World War II, and the final four of their five kids — all but my oldest sister Sandy — were born while the family resided there until moving to Milwaukie in February 1964.
Being only six months old when we left for Oregon, I obviously don’t remember the house from my time there, but it still holds a special place in my heart. Mainly because it was my family’s home, and also because it sort of represents the postwar American dream.
My parents’ generation endured the Depression and then stepped up to save the world when the future of liberty was very much in doubt, seeing more than 400,000 of their fellow Americans die in the process of vanquishing the Axis.
Those who survived the war bore their burdens stoically and used the G.I. Bill to educate themselves and purchase tidy little homes in quiet, well-kept neighborhoods like the one my folks purchased in the region just north of the Seattle Center, site of the 1962 World’s Fair.
I’m really glad that my parents and many of their contemporaries could end up successful and in peaceful locales like the Queen Anne district after enduring so much stress and chaos during the 1930s and ’40s.
Here’s a photo of our house, followed by today’s baseball glove feature:
Catch of the Day, No. 11. Wilson Dick Ellsworth model from the mid-1960s. Great pocket in this glove, which I picked up at PIA Sports in Corvallis for maybe $10 a few years ago.
Last but certainly not least, special thanks to my niece Megan for her hospitality over the weekend. She’s a physician in her second year of a general surgery residency and lives in West Seattle, which is a super cool part of town I’d never visited before, complete with a beach on the Sound.
