Redvelvet's Underground...

As a little girl growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we lived in a house on West Main Street for awhile in the late 1960's. Every morning when I looked out the front door, I saw a statue of two little boys and their dogs looking back at me. The statue had plaques on each side with a picture of a covered bridge and lists of names I was too young to read, but as a second grader, I could read the words, "Let's go swimming," that were engraved across the front.

We moved away after a couple of years, and the statue became a distant memory until many years later, when, while browsing the web one day, I ran across some photos and immediately knew what they were: there was the familiar monument from my childhood. That old house and five others are long gone, along with the old Clifford's Coal Yard that lined the alley behind our house; but the statue remains, rekindling my memories of playing around the statue and in the neighborhood surrounding it.

Each morning on my way to Washington Elementary School, I remember walking past Carole Lombard's childhood home which can be seen on the corner of the street behind the One Way sign in the first photograph. The Fort Wayne School of Art was a few streets over on my route to school. When my cousins and I would walk by on our way home, the "Hippies" at the school would ask if they could draw us sometimes. 

I'm sure that old Victorian neighborhood has changed in the past forty years, but I have many fond and not so fond memories of those days, such as the afternoon my six-year-old neighbor, Joey, lied to his mom, telling her my little brother, Jay, had fallen off the concrete banisters of the bridge and into the murky, rushing waters of the St. Mary's River. His mom had called the police, television crews, and a rescue team to the scene before they found out my little brother was taking a nap in his bed. But that's another story altogether . . .