List Lady Here. A progress report, thoughts on building a book, and new information about the arrangement of Wilsonia streets for you:
This cabin on Park Street/Lane/Road/Avenue (just kidding on the last one!) is an architectural design repeated throughout Wilsonia. There were 5 cabins like this. Now there are 4, and one has been remodeled so isn’t immediately recognizable as the same design. Do you know which cabins these are?
- All the drawings are finished for June. Yes, you read that right. This is so I can do all of July’s drawings in June. What’s going on here? July is going to be extraordinarily busy for this California artist. If I don’t draw ahead, I’ll fall behind.
- I found someone who calls himself The Book Designer. He is a book designer. (Duh.) He helps people self-publish their books. (If they pay him.) I feel greatly reassured that when the time comes to make some difficult decisions such as cover design, typestyles, and finding a printer, The Book Designer will be my new best friend.
- Has anyone else besides me noticed all the streets in Wilsonia that begin with “L” are going east and west? This is confusing at times. When I think of all those L streets, I’m flipping through my mental Rolodex, reciting Laurel, Lily, LeConte, Lupine, Lilac. . . sometimes they are alphabetical, sometimes they are random. But I just figured out that they ARE alphabetically arranged in Wilsonia, beginning in the southern end of the community! There’s an AHA! moment!
I recognize the cabin you just finished on Park Road because it was built by the same people who built our first cabin. (That cabin burned down in in 1963 or 64 and my parents immediately rebuilt but used a different house plan) The first enduring plan which was used by so many early Wilsonians was the brain child of two men, Jim Erwin and Jeff Ware. I think Jim was the one who lived in that first house on Park Road.
My father and two other families from Tulare bought lots in the same area around Grant and Whitney Streets in the mid ’30s, contacted Jim and Jeff and they subsequently built three cabins with the same design during the same time period. I have the original plan framed on the wall up there along with the original information about materials that would be needed. Our cabin on the corner of Grant and Whitney was the largest. There were four rooms: A living room and dining room/ kitchen combination on the bottom floor and two bedrooms, one quite a bit smaller than the other on the second floor. There was no inside plumbing so everybody had an outhouse and a hand pump.
The house directly across the street on the meadow side, owned by Carl and Esther Hampson, was smaller and the third cabin, owned by Joe and Edna Allen, was the smallest. For years they were known as the three bears. The Allen cabin is the only one still standing. It was purchased and remodeled at least twice by Dottie Jamison and her husband, whose name I don’t recall.
There were about a dozen of us children in that part of Wilsonia at any given time in those summers. Those were the days of no air conditioning in the valley. There also were no organized sports like Little League so many valley parents moved the mothers and children up to the mountains for the summer and the fathers, like mine, made a Friday afternoon pilgrimage to the cabins usually loaded with groceries and whatever else wasn’t available at the Wilsonia store, returning to work in the valley late on Sunday evenings.
The days were filled with some chores, but mostly play or hiking or trips to other park areas or games. What a carefree childhood I had!!
I am so proud of you for keeping your schedule going!!!
Love,
Pat
Pat, thank you so much for sharing the information about your cabin and the neighboring ones. I didn’t know that yours was the other one in that classic design. And thank you for being proud of me . . . it gets lonely out here in Pencil Land. 😎