Month: June 2012

El Paso, Texas. I lived in El Paso as a child from 1959 through 1965.  Most of my first memories are from there. We lived on the outskirts of town in an area called Loma Terrace. We lived on Loma Terrace Drive, went to Loma Terrace Elementary School and even swam at the Loma Terrace Pool. Within a block of our house was the desert. It was always a big adventure every time we took off into the desert. In those days, you could pretty much go where-ever you wanted during the day, as long as you were home for dinner.

This is a picture of the house we lived in, along with our station wagon, Cecil! We always named our cars. This one was after the show “Beanie and Cecil”, where Cecil was a dragon. Our favorite show. That’s my Dad and my sisters standing outside. The house always seemed huge to me. There were 3 bedrooms. My mom worked at the time, sending shock waves through the neighborhood! We had a live-in maid from Mexico that stayed with us during the week and then returned back home on weekends. Her name was Maria. She had her own room at our house…there were five kids, my parents and Maria. We three girls shared the master bedroom. I remember that my mom hung a fish net with shells in the master bathroom, as decoration, that just scared us girls silly. We would never use that bathroom at night. We would wake up one of our parents to take us to the bathroom across the hall! My two brothers shared a room, Maria had her own room and my parents slept out on the fold-out couch in the living room! What an arrangement. The backyard had a patio that my dad made using mexican tiles. It was beautiful. There were also 7 trees in back. One for each of us…we used to say. There was also an alley that ran behind the houses. Another great place to play.

My dad worked for an oil company and one thing about oil companies is that they transfer their employees around about every 5 years. So off we moved to Denver Colorado. Never thought I would see this house again. But when I was older and driving from Houston to San Francisco, my younger sister and I stopped off in El Paso. What an eye opener it was…  We hardly recognized the place and it seemed so tiny. The desert was now subdivisions. The neighborhood was run down. We were both so disappointed. Almost wished we hadn’t stopped. But one thing it did was make the long drive onward much more enjoyable as we reminisced about our memories of how things used to be in our little part of El Paso.