The Stairs Going Up – Part One

The Stairs Going Up – Part One

The front door at 828 opens into what our family called the hall. Not a foyer, the hall was a large entrance room that led straight ahead to the kitchen and left to the living room (called “front” room by Mom and Dad). At right were the Stairs Going Up to the second floor. There were eleven steps to a landing with a left turn, then three more to the small second-floor hall that opened to four bedrooms.

The hall downstairs was also our TV room after 1955, when Dad brought home our first set, a snowy[1] thing with a small circular screen. The dimension of the hall was @ 11’ X 15’, and the staircase became stadium-like seating for television viewing, especially for the younger kids or any late-comers. 

The upper part of the stairs, the landing, and especially the three steps around the corner were a kind of never-land, a place where a child’s not-exactly-overt defiance might occur. When one of us was sent to bed earlier than when we wanted to be, the three steps around the corner became a place to monitor what was happening downstairs, whether it was a conversation or a TV show for “mature audiences.” This lasted until the watcher got bored or became fearful of the wrath of our parents—or someone squealed on the transgressor.

There was almost always something happening on these stairs. Upstairs was a place where Mom put us for any misbehavior, quasi-separated from the family going-ons. For me the stairs was a place to crash toy cars by making them fall off a cliff to the hall floor below. Or a place to align my plastic army figures on the higher ground. I also remember some of my younger sibs sliding down the stairs with a blanket to protect their bottoms.

The stairwell was also a passageway for sound. Once, when one of the younger boys was peeing in the toilet upstairs, Dad was talking with a visitor at the front door. To Dad’s chagrin, the bathroom door was open, so Dad tried covering up the offending sound by raising his voice. After the man left, Dad told the pee-er to close the door while using the bathroom because he could hear it and was embarrassed.

The Stairs Going Up served as a kind of passageway between up and downstairs activities, but for me, those upper steps, also evoke sadder memories, for despite the almost-constant hubbub of our large family, I remember standing on those upper-stairs and feeling loneliness and teen-aged angst. (I'm not being snarky or dismissive here.) This will be covered in Part II.

-- Bob

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[1] For you slackers, millennials, and pre-cable TV types who have only seen HD digital TV, “snow” showed up on the screen if the antenna wasn’t properly aligned, your set was too far from the station producing the signal, or Mom used the sewing machine or kitchen mixer.