The End of an Era

Linda with her Dad/Rene and Tom

In the summer of 1967, my father came home for the weekend in the weeks after purchasing a Chevy dealership in Sherburn MN. We were living on the 8100 block of Vincent Avenue in Bloomington, MN. We lived in a somewhat new ranch home in a neighborhood a stone's throw from the “all-new” Target store on Penn Ave and I-494. Mom really liked the neighborhood and the neighbors and was hoping Dad would find a house similar to what we were leaving. On that weekend, he came home and said “Rene…I found the perfect house. It’s got a walk-out basement!”. Not until she saw it after he purchased the home did she find out that the walk-out basement was really a wood cellar door that went down to a dirt-floor basement.

So began the beginning of a 55-year “era” of the big blue house (now tan) on Park St in Sherburn. The memories that emanate from that house are too many to review here…may need a book to properly record all that someday. But as the family was at the home today doing the final cleaning and preparation for listing the home for sale (with little help from me), a true friend who was there in the early years stopped by for a tour of reminiscence. Linda “Baird” Schwager was, I believe, our first babysitter in the late 60s. She grew up across the street and two houses down. My image of Linda, which she doesn’t appreciate, is all of us sitting on the front porch and her sitting on her boyfriend Al’s lap. Why I remember…