CHAPTER 15
Christmas seemed to mean moving time and We moved to another house during Christmas week of 1947. This is not That House pictured left. This is Loch Aerie also known as Glen Loch or The Lockwood mansion. It sits alongside The Lincoln Highway twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. This places it about seven miles east of Downingtown.
Addison Hutton, the architect who designed Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges and Lehigh University, designed this ornate castle of a home. Charles Miller, who had designed Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, landscaped the original grounds. This was at one time the estate of William E. Lockwood, owner of W. E. & E. Dunbar Lockwood. His company manufactured envelopes, tags, boxes and so forth. Mr. Lockwood commissioned its construction in 1865. It was one of the largest estate in Pennsylvania at 684 acres. It was so large four railway stations were within its boundaries.
Our new home was somewhat humbler, standing about a mile or two east of Glen Aerie on what was still once part of the Glen Loch estate. This was The House my father received as part compensation for hauling milk and being a World War II returning veteran.
It was a bit less imposing than Glen Aerie.
Mr. Charles Miller must have overlooked this little patch when he lay out the landscape for Mr. Lockwood.
What I show of That House is all I have to show. I pieced this image together from two separate photographs. It is impossible to obtain a better photograph today. The house and land disappeared beneath a Corporate Campus Parking Lot. Today the Lincoln Highway is almost a continuous series of malls and corporate commons. In 1947 this area was country with little around.
The land the house occupied was then mostly swamp. The marsh began on the east side of our lane just off the Lincoln Highway. This boggy area came almost up to the house, leaving a small front yard as it curved about and around to one side then continued southward to the woods beyond.
To the west of the long driveway from highway to house was a large fenced pasture. Cows roamed about this field in the warmer months of the year, from wench they came I do not know. There was a tiny creek that split the pasture into halves. It ran west to east like a deep scar. Watercress grew in abundance along its banks and the water was full of small crawfish.
We had a bit of a backyard and a vegetable garden my mother planted. My father built a rabbit hutch on stilts to house Snowball, my pet white rabbit. On the other side of the garden the flat country turned into a long sloping hill upon which was a cornfield. There was a fencerow to the west of the cornfield and then another field going up the hill. To the east was forest. The Mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad ran straight through a cutout just over the crest of the hill, which was a fact I didn’t at first.
The driveway came level to our home where it split into a second short lane that curved west to another house a bit further behind ours. Some people came and occupied that house for a month one summer, but I never saw them again
Our house had a split personality. One side was cinder block and
the other stucco. Scaffolding remained standing along the east side of the house. Whoever began stuccoing left off half finished. There were steps and a short porch on the front and a larger porch on the back. The picture here is of the back.
The inside of the house was much nicer than the exterior. There was an eat-in kitchen to the rear and a dining room to the front on the west side. A large living room was on the east side. There was a staircase between dining and living rooms to the upstairs. There were four good-sized bedrooms on the upper floor. My parents had the front bedroom on the east side and I had the rear. The front west bedroom was for storage. The remaining one was my playroom.
There was no one in eyesight to the western horizon. Our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile up Lincoln Highway to the east. There was a line of row houses, perhaps three or four. We knew two of the families there, the Holmes and the Benders. The Holmes has a son, Tommy, who was several years older than me. The Benders had a daughter named Dottie who was also my senior and who in the near future would be my babysitter and in the distant future , as an adult would be a friend of my wife and I. Both of these were a bit too old to be playmates or companions to me in 1947.
The same year we moved to Glenlock I did acquired a babysitter. Not at all sure why. Her name was Alice Downing, the youngest of my Aunt
Clara’s brood, but the closest to my age. She was ten years older, making her 16 at the time. She and I had bonded on visits to my aunts and played 
Cards. She is the last of the so-called Downing girls. she would be close to 90 now.
The Hines Trucking Company was set back a ways from the highway directly across the street from these homes. I suspect Joe Bender (pictured right) may have been the friend who suggested the job to my dad. Mr. Bender was a mechanic for Hines and Dottie’s father.
On the other side of the Autocar company’s Cape Cods was the Church Farm School, which took up acreage on both sides of the highway.
This was a boarding school for boys operated by the Episcopal Church. The farm buildings and land were north of the highway and the dormitories were to the south. Boys my age boarded there, but the school was off-limits to me. The Church School restricted their students to the school grounds and outsiders to the outside.
This house in the swamp was compensation to my father for driving milk tankers for Hines. Supposedly this was because my dad was a returning Vet, but I suspect it was cheaper than paying him more than the $50 a month he received in wages.
In Downingtown I lived on a street full of children my age and directly across from my grade school. Here I lived in virtual isolation from the world. My mother did not drive and my father was gone most of the week. I went to school on a bus. This was a situation that would have a profound effect on my personality and development.
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