In My Room

My room was on the second floor on the right.
The double window above the small roof was a nice perch.
dwm photo

If you close your eyes and think back to the room which was home base for most of your childhood and youth, what do you see?

Most of my formative years were spent in this three story house on Forest Park Boulevard. We moved before my third grade year.  Mom and Dad raised my sister there too, not moving away until 1993.

Janesville was an industrial city then, based around the General Motors plant and Parker Pen as the largest private employers.  It still is, but GM and Parker are gone.  They will never be replaced, but the city isn't as reliant on one business.

The third floor was kind of bonus living space.  The top-floor turret (looks like a tower) was my Dad's den where he'd work when he needed a quiet spot.  There is a cedar closet.  A room which served as an extra bedroom and library and the room I got to use for a train set and to hold toys and various collections.

My folks spent a lot of time over the years renovating and improving the place.  When it time to do my bedroom, I asked for a red, white, and blue theme as the Bicentennial was coming up.  Mom found fabric to cover the walls - blue stars on a white background for two walls and white stars on blue for the other two.  The ceiling was white with a new light installed, it had a white globe and red shield around it.

Our family bathroom was on the other side of one wall and an access door to the bathtub's plumbing was in my room.  Dad used that panel to create something I thought was pretty cool.

He took my clock radio apart and installed it so the station control and volume knobs came out of the panel.  The speaker and clock were also flush with the wall.  One of my favorite things at night was traveling up and down the AM radio dial searching for far-off signals.  I listened to games and shows from Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago.

Soon, a 10 gallon fish tank joined the room.  At Christmas a year or two later, I received 5 large pieces of glass - which became another tank, this one 20 gallons.  For a short time, there was a third tank in there as well.  The whir of the air pump was constant and probably helped me sleep.

On the walls were various pictures and a couple of posters.  Most of the posters were upstairs on the angled walls of the third floor. (Where did those go?)

It was my room.  With a very small deck.  Since the statue of limitations are up, it's safe to say that on some warm summer evenings, I'd slip the screen out of the window and sit on the roof ledge.

My good friend next door, Andy, had his room across from mine so we sometimes talked.  Usually though, I just liked looking at the moon or watching people walk past or cars drive by.

The bed was the center of the room, and believe it or not, we have it still.  Back then, the brass bed was painted red, white, and blue to match the room.  Over the years my folks moved it with them (after painting it, of course).  It's painted a sunny yellow now and lives on in our guest room!

One dresser held two of the fish tanks and a short table held the third.  A book case was near the window and a desk was in between my bed and the wall.

At night, the lights over the fish tanks created my own version of reality TV.  Way back then, it was very rare for kids to have a TV in their bedroom; it was becoming popular to have TVs in dorm rooms when I got to college.

The Milwaukee Bucks or Brewers or the Wisconsin Badgers were on my wall radio many, many nights.  I listened and read in bed before falling off to sleep.  When we first moved in, Dad used to read me different stories and chapter books.

I can't remember what color the carpet was, I think it was red.

35 years later, most of my room lives bright with memories.  What was in your room?