One thousand dollars bought us more than a parcel of land; it was a down payment toward owning a piece of what has become a special neighborhood. Arnie and I were the youngest of twenty-four families to purchase land from the Fraziers. My mother’s sister and her husband, Opal and Bill Leftwich, had purchased an acre from the Fraziers and told us about it.
We found out about the particulars and decided to purchase an acre. We were about the sixth family to build in Frazier Estates. Married almost four years, Arnie and I had one son, Aaron, and were soon expecting his sibling, April.
We attended a social and informative meeting with prospective home owners and talked about plans for the fledgling community. We met in the living room of George and Delores Howard, who became our next door neighbors.
The Frazier family was well known in the neighborhood I had grown up in; I went to school with some of their grandchildren. They sold produce on Saturday mornings at the East Side Market on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Columbus. We were proud that the Fraziers were offering us an opportunity to do what young White couples took for granted. When Arnie first said that he was going to build our house, I thought he was out of his mind.
There were obstacles and barriers; we were young, our only collateral was Arnie’s 1956 Ford and we had sold that to his sister to pay for the land. Then, there was the construction loan to secure. We’d saved $5000 in cash, had good credit and no outstanding bills. but the loan company in Marysville arrogantly rejected our loan application.
We were forced to go as far as Brookline, Pennsylvania to secure a loan to complete the construction on the Lincoln House we’d chosen to be our home. The Savings and Trust Company charged us 15 % interest when the going rate was 6%. For the $10,500 loan contract, our monthly payment was eighty dollars. Arnie broke out in a sweat because at the time his annual salary was $4300.00.
To keep from paying two rents, we moved into our new house in April, 1962, before it was completed. When the weather turned cold I had to tent April’s bed with a blanket to keep her warm at night, until the furnace we’d ordered through the Montgomery Ward catalog finally arrived.
Our neighbors helped us carry the furnace in and Arnie continued working on the house after he came home from work and on weekends, laying the hard wood floors, installing the kitchen cabinets, spreading cement on our driveway and garage floor. I was finally able to wash dishes in a sink and cook on a stove.
We raised our two children on Frazier Drive. They attended Plain City Elementary and Jonathan Alder High Schools. Aaron and April rode their bikes, played safely with their peers in everyone’s yard, up and down The Drive. They played in the woods, waited together every morning for the school bus to drive them to and from school.
There were family and neighborhood fish fries, pig roasts, and a beautiful wedding in our back yard. For the forty-two years we lived on Frazier Drive, I never locked my doors. We planted delicious vegetables in our gardens, the men in the neighborhood planted flowering crab trees on everyone’s property; they bloomed and beautifully lined Frazier Drive.
During the Korean War, Arnie was with the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany; a tank and heavy equipment mechanic. He was the youngest of twelve children and his family roots were in Chillicothe, Ohio. His family are descendants of Hemsley. We met when I was fourteen and married in 1957. He worked for the Defense Construction Supply Center thirty-seven years. When he retired in 1988, he was Branch Chief of the Catalog Division.
I began working for the Columbus Public Schools after April entered first grade in Plain City and I retired in 1993 as Secretary to the Superintendent. My family moved to Ohio from Georgia and we grew up on the east side of Columbus, graduating from East High School and attending the Ohio State University.
When Aaron and April reached the tenth grade, I transferred them to East High School in Columbus, where I worked. They had been in the band in Plain City and they both were in the East High School marching band and on the In The Know Team of young scholars. The Estis children attended out of state colleges.
Aaron graduated from Harvard University and received a Masters in Public Policy from California Berkeley. He has a consulting corporation The Estis Group and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. April graduated from Northwestern University and earned her Masters degree from Southern University. She is Director of Training at a college in Massachusetts. Both of them tell me that there will never be another place, another experience, like Frazier Drive; they will always remember.
Some years later, my daughter’s bedroom accommodated my widowed, physically fragile mother. One day as I attended to her needs, I looked out the window that used to be April’s room and saw the Plain City school bus go by. It had picked up the Boyd children, who were relatively new Frazier residents, living in Mary Stribling’s former house.
I now paused in reflection, to embrace and enjoy the scenes that were playing out through my window and in my mind. The images of our children running to catch the bus, waiting, boarding it, laughing and care free. The bus originally stopped at the entrance to The Drive and parents had a problem with that; the driver said he could not negotiate the turn around. However, we parents felt there was too much traffic on the highway and too many children. George Howard proved the turn around could be negotiated with our church bus.
I knew the mind’s camera was snapping pictures for someone else’s mind, though oblivious to the photographer, as it once had been with me. And I knew that someday they too will pull from their album in a museum of portraits housed in their gallery of sweet memories; memories of the Frazier Estates experience.
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