Photo by Madoline Markham.
Roberta Harkins
Roberta Harkins holds her bridal portrait, which was taken in 1948, a year before she moved into her current home in Crestline.
Roberta Harkins vividly remembers Labor Day 1949. It was the day she and her husband moved into their home on Fairmont Avenue in Drive. They had purchased the house for $9,500.
“Back then, every house on this street was like it, with two bedrooms and one bathroom,” she recalled. “The road wasn’t paved, and the mud was awful.”
Her husband, Walter, had just gotten out of the service and was eager to escape their apartment for a house. They bought their home on 100 percent GI loan.
At the time, Canterbury Church hadn’t yet been built, but the A&P grocery store and other businesses had opened shop on Church Street. To the Aliceville, Alabama, natives, it felt like a big city.
Back then, Harkins said, young people with children lived up and down the street, and all the moms stayed home, gathering in their yards to watch the kids play. They convened on Wednesday mornings for a sewing club — only those on the street were invited. Block parties were held at the top of the hill, and Walter would host barbecues in their backyard.
The Harkins never thought they’d stay in their home for nearly 65 years, but after Walter had a heart attack at 34, they decided they no longer cared if they moved to what Roberta calls “higher ground” like many of their neighbors.
Three neighbors — two next door and one across the street — remained for 60 years, but in the past five, they too have gone, and their houses have been bulldozed to make room for more spacious residences. Over the past 20 years, neighbors have come and gone along with a flurry of new construction.
Running estate sales for three decades, Harkins has found that these days people often don’t know their neighbors anymore.
She developed her “addiction” to the sales in the 1970s and has sold everything from cars to fur coats to porcelain to dogs, retrieving items as far away as Greensboro, Alabama, or New Orleans. Once a man put his hat down, and she sold it right away. Another time the police came to break up a fight among her customers, and yet another time she found $20,000 in cash hidden in a mattress.
Harkins was a stickler to prices that experts had advised her to set for stamps, silver and other specialty items.
“I’d burn that before I’d let you have it for $50,” she would tell people.
Harkins’ house still looks much as it did 65 years ago, with the exception of an additional living room and bedroom they built in 1958 after their second child was born. Its rooms are filled with family antiques and estate sale finds from over the years. Since Walter passed away last year, she spends a lot of time alone even with visits from her two granddaughters and other family members.
But each morning, she opens the inside front door, and each morning her neighbor across the street checks to make sure she sees it open. Maybe there is still a glimmer of the neighborly community Harkins remembers on the street after all.
