Tony's Berendo Memories

I was born in 1952 and we moved away from
Berendo in 1960, so I only remember the Berendo of the late '50s.
     Our next door neighbors on the north were the Sharps, and on the
south the Eldridges, an elderly couple who gave me and my little sister
Juanita dates from a cooler cabinet one of the few times we went inside
their house, and they had a parakeet, or maybe two, that flew around
free in their living room. They had a dicondra lawn that felt great to
roll around on, but we weren't supposed to.
    Across the street were the Swensons, who had a pretty little
blonde-haired daughter named Colleen, whom I had a crush on, off and on.
I remember going down to the corner to get the spelling of "Berendo" off
the street sign to send her a valentine. I was terrified of their boxer,
who was as big as I was and would nearly knock me over when he put his
paws up on my chest and licked my face with his huge tongue. Blech.
     Next door to them were the Cheniers, whose children Josie and Marty
were playmates of ours, along with Steve and Gerald Trudeau who lived in
a new pink stucco house next door to the Cheniers. That was the first
house I ever saw being built, with all the useful scrap materials
involved - my favorite was switch-box slug "coins".
     After them, and I don't remember if there was another house between
or not, were the Murrays, who had a little daughter named Cathy.  My one
memory of her was that at one time she insisted she was a boy, and
beiing baffled that I couldn't think of a way to prove her wrong without
getting into forbidden territory. I also remember going to their house
with my mother and sister every night for what seemed like ages to say
the rosary for someone, their living room full of people kneeling in the
venetian-blind twilight darkness, the seashore rhythm of the praying,
and feeling guilty that something so obviously dead-seriously important
was so utterly boring.
     I remember the Magdalenos lived in the corner house on our side of
the street, and that they were good friends of our family, but since
they didn't have any kids me and Juani's age, I never knew what to do
when we went there. I remember Eddie's (though I must have called him
"Mr. Magdaleno", I remember him as Eddie, since that's what everyone
else called him) garage always seemed to have a car or two in various
states of dismantlement, and men and older boys (including my brothers
sometimes) around and on and under whatever car was being worked on. It
seems to me I never saw a car that was worked on running, or one that
was running being worked on.
     The little store around the corner was called Pearson's in my time,
though my mom would also refer to it as Baxter's or Newsome's and I knew
she meant that little store. Though I must have gotten a lot of candy
there, I especially remember Twinkies, which I think were a new thing
about then, (maybe they were just new to me)  and we didn't get them too
often. It had the smell that I now always associate with "mom & pop"
stores, a combination of produce and machinery smells, that modern
convenience stores never have.

- Tony Dumas