I asked my three grown children and my wife to share some of their memories of those times.
Jeff London
I have been thinking lately about the Beacon Square neighborhood in Southfield where our family spent our kids’ early years. I asked my three grown children and my wife to share some of their memories of those times. This was our family’s first house. We moved back to Michigan in July 1979, and we lived there for 12 years until we moved to West Bloomfield in 1991. My daughter Adina was 3½ when we moved in; my son Danny was 11 months old, and my son Jon was born in late 1983.
I thought they would probably share some cute, funny reminiscences about this special neighborhood, and they did. Adina described the connections she still feels with her schoolmates from Leonhard Elementary (Go Leopards!). She recalled our neighborhood pool with a lifeguard who believed in (let us be kind) a tough love approach to teaching kids how to swim. Both Adina and Dan remembered the combination slide/diving board at the pool, and Adina also recalled that fateful day she slipped in the locker room and broke her arm.
Dan recalled riding his Smurf Big Wheel all the way to his friends’ house around the corner and noted how he became a celebrity to his friends after Mr. Krass, the beloved Leonhard gym teacher, moved two doors down from us.
Dino’s pass to the pool
Danny’s pass to the pool
Jon’s pass to the beacon square pool
The older kids recalled bike rides with their dad on the dirt road that led to the video store on 12 Mile and Evergreen and to the local Coney Island, which seemed like a very long ride to their short legs.
Jon, our youngest, recalled the late 1980s, when our neighborhood became integrated. Unlike his older siblings’ experience, he went to school his first years with kids from more varied backgrounds. He recalled how kids from different cultures played together on our block with little awareness of their differences. His friend Ricky was the first to get a Nintendo, and he remembered laughing with Tori when he faked a basketball pass to Jon and yelled out “Can’t touch this!” And we all recalled frequent visits from TC, who almost always seemed to have a smile on his face.
My own memories centered on being outside with all the kids and their friends, games of driveway basketball and fond memories of summer barbecues and summer days spent at the Beacon Square pool. We all recalled the difficult decision we made to move to West Bloomfield. We had to learn to accept that often a family’s neighborhood is not permanent.
I shared our memories with my wife and expected to hear more of the same from her. She recalled her joy in moving back to Michigan to be near both sets of grandparents and extended family. She acknowledged the wonderful years watching our family grow up on Wayland, and our special neighbors, some of whom have become lifelong friends.
But she also recalled how she felt moving back to Michigan with two small children, including our 1-year-old son who still had to jump over some major medical hurdles, including surgery three years later. She recalled the arrival of our youngest child, which obviously added to our joy (and noise level).
And she also reminded me of the onset in the early 1980s of my chronic back problems, which led to nights spent mostly in bed after I returned from work and eventually to two major surgeries and lengthy periods of recovery.
She recalled the day I had to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance and remembered standing at the curb, seven months pregnant with two small children watching their dad being wheeled out on a stretcher.
How could my mind just skip over those painful memories? My son Dan said that he guessed that the happy memories just pushed aside the memory of watching his dad being taken away in an ambulance. That one hit me right in the heart. And suddenly, I found myself much more aware of how hard it was for my wife to hold down the fort and raise our kids during those times with me often out of commission.
She also reminded me of our sharing games of Aggravation with our kids in our bedroom and all the good times in those years in our family’s first real neighborhood.
Our Wayland wonder years were wonderful years. But like all other times, maybe more than most times, they were also filled with challenges and with fears for the future for myself and my family. It took me a few years and the help of a therapist to learn how to deal with my back pain in a more adaptive way.
I have truly been blessed watching my children grow into good people with children and neighborhoods of their own. I was also blessed to be able to continue working into my 70s, something I could not have predicted as a semi-disabled 30-something. Even looking back (with my wife’s help) with a wider lens, I still feel the wonder of those times when my kids were excited about a bike ride with their dad on the dirt road for coneys and a visit to the video store.
Our subsequent neighborhoods helped us raise our kids into college and now provide a beautiful spot for empty nesting. But there is nothing to match your family’s first neighborhood, which, with all its fun, trials and tribulations, was ours to share for just a moment in time.