Do most people have a place they remember as home, more so than any other, which they look back on years later? For my family there is no doubt it was the big Prairie Style house with Tudor features at 5003 Tremont Street in Dallas, Texas. While we lived there only thirteen years from January 1941 to the summer of 1954, it held a unique place in the hearts of the many who were there. Since these were the years from age seven to twenty for me, it is easy to see that those formative years would hold a great influence on my development; yet it seems it also held a similar nostalgia for many others.

To understand the numbers in our household when we moved in that January, it is necessary to recall that 1941 was the tail end of the Great Depression when many family members lived together in close quarters for financial reasons. For years, my dad had managed to crowd many relatives and others in our homes. As a seven year old I recall the excitement as we moved boxes, clothes and furniture into the many rooms while I was told who would live in each one. The dining room became the bedroom for my Aunt Eunice and her friend, Ann for a short time until Eunice and her daughter, Iola, moved to the east bedroom upstairs and my sister, Nita, switched to the former dining room. My cousins, Dale and Vernice, occupied the small upstairs west bedroom. Mrs. Verdie Gunn was in the big double-sized center bedroom upstairs which she later shared with my Aunt Eunice.

Downstairs my grandmother Rosa Caster Bell’s room was the study on the east front and I was in the master bedroom with my parents. That totals ten people but the number varied as some came and went as well as moved about within the house. In the servant quarters in the back lived Mattie who did maid work and Slim who took care of the yard. My brother, Sam, and his wife, Virginia , who never really lived in the house often spent the weekends there but I have no idea where they slept.

Over the years in reminiscences with the many family members, I have found the same fond nostalgia with each of those who lived there for some time. I was surprised when my brother Sam told me he considered it home to him although he never lived there. When I realized this was the house he left from to enter World War II and the place he returned at the war’s end as well as the place his wife Virginia returned from the hospital with their first son, I understood. Over the years I recall sharing many memories of the Tremont house as well with Nita, Virginia, their children, Aunt Eunice, Iola, and Mrs. Gunn. Cousins Dale and Vernice always called it Aunt Nettie’s house. In particular my mother shared with me many memories as she would call to mind her thoughts on life there as the many inhabitants dwindled slowly as the world changed and life took its toll on those she loved until she alone moved away in the hot summer of 1954.

What is it that causes one to choose one place over another in wistful memories into the past? Is it one’s particular age in their childhood, maybe happy times, warmth, security or possibility the events or the times? Frank Lloyd Wright might well say it would be the house itself. Perhaps all of the above would apply and probably in different ways to different people. My family was there for thirteen years, the Schoellkopfs for twenty-five years and Rob and Sharon Smith for thirty two years at this writing.

Hopefully the following story I will try to relate will show what the house meant to my family and others as well as the history of the house that came close to destruction but then was later restored and presented on national television. Chronicling the narrative of the house involves much of the story of Munger Place as well.