Cox's Greenhouse

I began the first grade of school in a one-room-schoolhouse when I was four years and seven weeks old.  Obviously this made me younger, by about two years, than all of my grade peers.  So it was when I started attending a new school for the ninth grade I was 13 years old.  It was a new village, new friends, and all new older than I students in my high school classes.

I was having second thoughts about entering this new element.  My older brother Ron mentioned I should look up a person he knew that was close to my age in the grade lower than my own.  I did that at my first opportunity.  His name was Dean Cox, and we soon became fast friends.  His parents owned and operated a greenhouse a couple of miles from my dairy farm home, but I had never heard of him, his parents, or the greenhouse.  The next summer, which was 1951, I spent nearly every Sunday afternoon at his home.  Although my family was not a church-going group, his mother was a Wesleyan Methodist who attended church every Sunday morning without fail dragging Dean and his two sisters along.

Dean’s parents lived in an older modest home, but it was quite comfortable, and they seemed happy with it for the first several years I was such a regular visitor.  Then when I was a senior in high school Dean’s father began building them a new home across the driveway from their older home.  The new home was completed about 1955 when I, at the age of 17, joined the United States Navy.  I asked Dean to join with me, but he didn’t think he wanted to go that route.  Less than a month later he also joined the Navy.  Things were never the same though as when we were in our early teens growing up in this environment.

The driveway went up the hill between these two homes, with the original on the left that is now caving in, while the new one, built in 1955 yet remains in good condition, but showing its 60 years of age.