Photo-of-the-Week #174 Home #5, John Alden Street, Clifton, New Jersey, June 2013

This is the fifth home my parents owned (and the 7th place that I know of that I lived in since my birth). We moved to this house during the summer of 1960. I was 15 years old and about to begin my sophomore year at Clifton High School. It was a corner lot and had almost no back yard, but ample property on the sides and front of the house.

Now to be more precise, as I recall the actual house, it was, I believe, green (I'm sure I have an old photo of the original house somewhere) and I believe the shutters were black. Also, not only was it not a Tudor styled house, but it did not have a second floor. In fact. of the six homes my parents owned, this is the only home to have been substantially modified from the original. This house is the house directly across the street and, although it has new windows and a few cosmetic treatments to the front of the house, it is essentially the identical house to what ours originally looked like except our garage was on the left side of the house.

There was one room over the garage that was intended to be the master bedroom and had its own bathroom. My father assigned that room to me so I could have my amateur radio station in my room instead of in a separate room in the basement as it was in Home #4 (that my father built especially to be my radio shack). So, next to the window and extending vertically above the roof was my all band vertical antenna. On the left side of the house, covered by tree foliage in this photo is where my 15 meter beam and my 2 meter beam, stacked one over the other, were mounted.

The garage housed my first car for the first three months I owned it, since I couldn't drive it without the drivers license I was about three months away from until I turned 17 and took the necessary driving tests. Once it had tags on it and I had a drivers license my 1956, bronze and cream, Plymouth Savoy, hardtop convertible was prominently parked in front of the house where the gray car is parked in the photo. My father still had my grandmother's 1952 Chevy coupe with the $29.95 Earl Scheib paint job.  It was named "The Ruptured Duck" and usually was parked right behind my car.

As always, my father had a porch added to the back of the house that he finished off and he added an ornamental rock wall in the living room, a beautiful recreation room, laundry room and workshop in the basement. On the right side of the house where you can see some ornamental shrubbery, was the location of our above ground swimming pool that provided many enjoyable summer events, family picnics and gatherings of friends. We lived in this house more years than any other house. I completed my three final years of high school and my first three years of college here, for a total of six years. We were here so long we actually got used to it and began calling it home.