My Redacted Life: Chapter 39 (Cont._2)

We engaged a real estate professional to help find a house. He insisted on our spending more. We insisted on buying what we could afford. Knowing little about the market in Little Rock, we passed up a couple of deals that would have been quite lucrative as time passed. The fact of buying on the GI Bill limited our choices to a small degree. Some sellers opted not to face the additional paperwork. We held hands and observed in awe like a couple of kids in a candy store. The agent fed our excitement.

We settled for a housee in what might now be called “mid-town.” It was one of those “spaghetti subdivisions” with lots of crooked streets and dead ends. Ours fronted on a collector street, though, and provided a more or less clear shot through town, albeit much too far to walk to work. The street was called “Evergreen” and it was a primary artery in a subdivision known as “Leawood,” or “Leawood Heights.”

Churches sat to the immediate East, and diagonally across the street, so we felt secure from unforeseen developments. Or so we thought. Stay tuned.

We began the paperwork and immediately encountered a loan officer that had a bur in his saddle about veterans. That wasn’t unusual in those days. He seemed to resent the fact that we could purchase a nice home without amassing a large down payment like respectable couples. We ignored him. He threw a few stumbling blocks our way, but I had expert advice from those in the office who had been through a home purchase. We swept him out of the way without bother.

The folks at work, by the way, seemed happy for us. We were settling in to become settled members of the community. The house seemed large to us, although by later standards it would be termed tiny. We had no neighbors directly across the street. We met the two ladies who lived next door, along with a large Doberman named “Man.” We discovered later that the name implied that it was the only one, man that is, that they needed. They treated us graciously and life verged on the sublime.

Now, if we only had furniture to fill an eleven-hundred square foot home. We also needed to calm my father, who thought it highly ostentatious to purchase such a mansion. Only millionaires and other deadbeats, he assured me, would live in a home costing $20,000. Were we crazy?

Yeah, at that time pretty much crazy, but just purely wonderful.

That's what I thought anyway.